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      Booking.com

      Part of Booking Holdings

      Engaged Employer

      Booking.com reviews

      4.1

      80% would recommend to a friend

      (7,594 total reviews)
      avatar

      Glenn Fogel

      70% approve of CEO

      67% positive business outlook

      Ratings by category

      4.4

      Diversity & inclusion

      4.2

      Work/Life balance

      4.2

      Compensation and benefits

      4.1

      Culture & values

      3.5

      Career opportunities

      3.4

      Senior management

      Booking.com has an employee rating of 4.1 out of 5 stars, based on 7,594 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The Booking.com employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

      Ratings by demographic groups

      Reviews by job title

      8K reviews
      1.0
      Aug 5, 2018

      If you are a Software Engineer, this place is not suitable for you

      Software developer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      - Good relocation and visa support

      Cons

      - Software Developers are second class citizens, they are seen as 'Developers' not 'Engineers'. - No CTO for more than a year, upper management is not addressing the present issues. They are just keep lying and avoiding challenging questions during AMAs. One example is: someone asked the leadership about why the glassdoor rating is so low? They have answered that the company have a good rating (3.1) and the reason it's not great is other departments. But when you filter reviews with keyword 'Developer' you will see the Development rating is 2.4 and actually this department is having the biggest problems. - Mid level management is terrible, you can find out designers/copy writers/hr people there. There was even a presentation from one of those about how to manage people whom you don't understand work of. They don't understand developers and just make life terrible for developers and during performance reviews you will get a random score thanks to these people. - Senior/principal developers are blocking all the innovation and company is stuck with old tech and a terrible set of tools. Propose a new language or start a new project and Perl dinosaurs will come after you and block your project. - There are no code reviews or unit/integration tests. Deployments are manual you have to spent hours and hours to deploy your changes and test everything manually. Development tools and environment is terrible. Mediocre developers are always there to break the development environment by pushing their codes without testing and they get away with this thanks you mid level management. - This company is not a tech company at all, you will see it's struggling around this all the time. The company tries to build new products and fails miserably. The containers infrastructure is being build for more than two years and they keep revamping it before reaching to the usable state. - Failures are justified with 'Learnings' all the time and there is no accountability. - People are very selfish and only think about their own interests because of broken performance evaluation and reward processes. The management is either failing to see this or they are doing the same thing. Product Owners will justify stupid, broken ideas that will keep them alive or help grow their head count. Manager of software developers will take stupid technical decisions even though they are incompetent just for their own good and result will be very bad for the company and developers working under them. Some developers will keep lying and coasting doing minimum work and their team will not get this, it will only frustrate other developers around. - Developer experience is terrible, no good tools/processes and also they install spyware on your computer to track everything you do. - There are also really good people around but they leave for better opportunities, the company is failing to retain the talent it has, only the worst people or people who are waiting to finish their 5 years to get a european passport will stay. - Most of my colleagues were depressed and I have seen lots of people going to a burnout leave. - There is no clear career opportunities, promotions depend on drinking buddies.

      1.0
      Sep 21, 2015

      Booking.NO

      Software developer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      Quite a few talented individuals. Unfortunately, some of them have been blinded by (or promoted) the restrictive technology stack. Some people might enjoy the work-life balance.

      Cons

      Inexperienced management driven by fear, not by idea sharing and a desire to improve. The only ones who have survived are the ones who lowered their heads into the ground and keep their mouths shut to anything the CIO said. Managers only have time for their petty squabble and political power play, overlooking the pressing issues of their employees. Inconsistency and lack of transparency in decision making. The constant secrecy about direction, future projects, promotions, salaries, bonuses. Low salaries for the kind of work we're asking for. Cheap and bureaucratic about every single thing. You can't get a sticker without some big manager having to approving it. Technology is from 10 years ago and the technology "leadership" likes to keep it that way. Any project outside of "perl city" is shut down (literally) unless you're one of the few "special people", lone wolves who are allowed to choose any technology they want.

      2.0
      Jul 10, 2019

      Mediocre engineering culture with severe lack of ownership

      Software developer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      This is a tech review, so I'll focus on that. Booking's scale is big. So if you're into large amounts of data, interesting A/B testing, scalable architectures then Booking has a lot of potential. Be aware though that almost all of this is made a lot less interesting by the mediocre and half-baked approach to almost everything in technology. If you like getting paid for 40 hours but only want to work 32, then Booking is also great. Show up at 10:30? Leave at 17:30? Fine. Happens all the time. If you love Perl, then this is also a great company, because like in Perl there's more than one way to do it. So prepare to see every arcane Perl operator you ever knew, have three chat clients open (because there's more than one way to reach someone), prepare to work on lots of technologies that don't work together well and prepare to see many different management styles / ways to organise teams.

      Cons

      The engineering quality and technology is mediocre. A lot of teams are very business focussed (which is great in principle) in their particular domain but without anyone maintaining any kind of overview. This means that the default strategy is to just cram a feature in the existing code in the fastest way possible. That is, look for the piece of code that needs to change and add an "if (my_cool_feature_enabled) {} else {}" construct. Rinse and repeat until you have Perl functions that span 5000+ lines. No kidding. By that time everybody and their mother have touched that code, so no-one owns it anymore. Meanwhile of course some people have gotten frustrated with the spaghetti Perl code base that is impossible to navigate and is an archeological record of two decades of mostly uninspired hacks and copy pasting code (the latter happens to the extreme). So new technologies have been added. Which ones? Well, it's booking so no-one owns this process. So there's Java which is the only 'official' second language for that matter. But of course the data scientists use Python. And R. And there's Go, which is cool. And Kotlin, because it's also cool. Within the Java world most popular (web) frameworks are being used. And so are all protocols you can think of. Same on the frontend, React, Angular, it's all there in various places. This freedom is nice on the one hand, but it just doesn't work. It also leads to resentment between teams. "Why do they do their own when they could have used Spring boot", "why do they do this in Java when 3 lines of Perl would have been fine". Because no-one takes ownership or dares to make decisions, people do what suits them best. This is very pragmatic, but it leads to loads of islands of different standards and tensions between these islands. Standards not only in technology, but also in quality of people. Pointing this out invariably leads to an explanation along the following lines: "Well, yes but in order to understand this you need to know the context", and then a war story comes to defend the mess. And that's fair enough, but no-one cleans up after themselves.

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