Hopper reviews

Hopper has a lot on its plate. And that makes it a pretty painful place to be at times. There isnt a lot of gratitude towards employees. Not a lot of people get promoted and a success is never really acknowledged while a failure is placed solely on you. Management is filled with people in over their heads and dont know how to translate C-suite needs to the rest of their team. Instead we get a lot of unpredictable, changing and ambiguous instructions. And when we try to compensate the best we can it just leads to more blaming. On top of that, they just recently laid off the entire Data Science org ( which is crazy in itself). And requested all PMs be in charge of their own product analysis. That is way too burdensome and we never have time to ask really deep questions that help us with understanding our product. When we dont have the answer to something, management again points their fingers at us for not knowing.

Hopper is into STO (single threaded ownership) in a big way (they lifted this, as well as many "core values" from Amazon). This means that each team is theoretically responsible for a one or more product features which typically translates to some components in the mobile apps (iOS/Android) and one or more micro-services (of which there are dozens). In practice, since there is one code base for iOS and one for Android, you have dozens of separate teams all contributing code with little way of enforcing consistency in the UI or in the code itself. Unit testing is inadequate and consider yourself lucky if you find any actual comments in the code. High level executives have told people that "your opinion doesn't matter - it's only what the customer wants". This is an eyebrow raising concept which reminds one of the old automaker quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Hopper instead makes all decisions based on A/B tests. This is fine for deciding on some aspects of the application, but it doesn't take an A/B test to understand that not all customers want to "tip" Hopper by default when booking an airline flight (quite the dark pattern) or that the hotel pricing display is confusing. There is no central engineering function - everything reports up to the STO leader which means in practice engineering reports to product. This means there is constant pressure to make short-sighted decisions to deliver the next product feature that inevitably mean taking short cuts and piling on more technical debt. At some point a reckoning will come and I'd be cautious about being there when it does. It is especially bad in some teams where the STO leader doesn't have an engineering background and doesn't value unit testing, solid code review practices or general architecture. Regardless of your seniority or experience, you are expected to just pull tickets off the Jira backlog like some sort of short-order cook. Heaven forbid you try and take the long view and advocate for putting in place better architecture, testing frameworks or tools to support your job.