Booking.com reviews

After the CTO(Bank) left, company culture has fallen hard. Incompetent people got promoted(Directors) in management because smart people left the company and there was nobody senior enough to fill the void. Most of the Product owners are incompetent with no real world experience. Management subtly force people without a future to become TLs, to do their dirty work. Most of the engineering teams are led by designers who haven't wrote any code in their life. Nowadays, even copywriters are leading engineering teams :) Flexible hours is a lie as they will literally put your ratings to 4(Partially meets expectations) or 5(Needs immediate improvement), if you're late in just a few standups. Your technical expertise holds no value here. They don't need it and they're very open about it. HR is completely useless and will only support management decisions. Advice to people: Be very very very careful about selecting your Team Lead, it can make all the difference. Some guidelines I used to tackle that: - Shouldn't be a designer/user-researcher/copywriter; won't ever be able to understand your tasks - Should be actively involved in coding (ask his/her teammates about it; not him/her). Check git logs. - Should've more working experience than you (check LinkedIn, if no good companies there it could be a bad sign) - Should've atleast 5 years of corporate experience (don't count freelancing & self entrepreneurship ventures) - If talks too much random without getting on the point, bad sign! - If puts too much stress on communication then engineering, bad sign. - Should've empathy; find out how to judge that. This one's most imp.

The time has past, the company grew and now it is just yet another corporation. Leadership team gives political answers to important questions. Promotion through favouritism (a.k.a. drinking buddies) is there, in plain sight, and no one dares to say anything fearing retaliation and subsequent lost of their Visas. Well, what do you expect when the last two C-level executives were fired due to the same problem. Although, it is much harder to do anything against mid-level management, since the target on their backs is way smaller, even though this is the level that causes the most damage. Good developers, designers and product owners are forced to leave, since they know their market value and can only waste so much. This problem has been brought over and over again through "all hands" like events. But again, empty and vague answers triumphed. For the time being, there are much better places to work for.