Decadent monopoly - Anonymous employee Booking.com Employee Review

As software developer is impossible to get work done, especially in frontend. Coding and software suddenly are least important part of your job here, no idea why are we interviewed you for it in the first place. You are encouraged to “communicate” and “think about customer” every day, which actually translates to “figure out how to make some sense out of this chaos we made here”. That is both in code and organizationally. There is constant pressure from product owners to improve the metrics and little creativity is left for people. Quarter after quarter there is panic in product organization to find ways to improve the metric. Metric, which is deeply broken, misunderstood and manipulated to create image of success. There is very little thinking on the long term product vision or the real customer needs. Development work is repetitive and uninspiring so many people feel low and demotivated. Frontend basically re-implements the same website for years now! Work conditions are crowded and noisy open spaces, impossible to get any concentration for actual work. There are literally hundreds of people working on same web page so chance of error and degree of conflict is high. What about testing? Naah.. that is not agile enough. Tasks are tiny and not challenging, you have to maintain impression of velocity and quality of code is nowhere. There is lot of A/B testing to “measure customer impact” but in fact it also prevents tech teams from making serious damage to the company, which they would, due to general incompetence and lack of inspiration. As these tests can turn bad or don’t make a difference, you can just revert your hard work back. Delete, that is. Basically we “learned a lot” and you could have better stayed at home. People in tech get tired after 6 months of doing many tests each day, and they start to look for a way out. Either promotion or they want to move to different team hoping it is better. It is not. Some people also misunderstand this concept and try to achieve velocity what is expected hoping for high rewards, but chance of burnout is high. As leader and manager it is possible to make progress, but it is not related to your effort or quality of work, it is related to circumstance and politics. If you are working hard you are wasting your time. It very much depends if your department is growing and relationship with your manager. Once you get promoted to lead or manager there is ton of repetitive work, performance calibration, administration and reports. There is actually very little meaningful work to do, unclear goals and limited chance to influence things. You will find your team members troubled and have difficulties and most of the time you will be their counselor helping them to preserve sanity in this organization. You will not have any good answers to give, and will be expected try to persuade your team member he is not seeing things right, and that this is actually a great company, it’s just they need to change. You may beat yourself to deliver on some vague project goal, and it will not be appreciated. Actually you can do exactly nothing, and it will be okay, nobody cares, as long as all the reports are made and placed in correct folders. Decisions are made on the top in the leadership team or in the product organisation, who knows, and you just execute the “vision”. Lot of the management work is to communicate unpopular bad decisions that someone else made, or “clarify” changes you don’t always believe in. All the good news will be shared from the higher level, you will just get the dirt. In recent times HR has recognized these problems and started to take over the core of the management by trying to fix it, by turning everything into a process, it is ridiculous, and as a manager will make your work even less meaningful and relevant. To reach the senior management is game of politics and tenure. If you have joined the company 10 years ago there is high chance you can be in senior leadership or being a principal. It is not related to capacity, education or work ethics. If you have obvious qualities, ethics and potential you will be marginalised and given something to grind in the corner. These people are jealous and sensitive to healthy competition. Leadership is incapable of delivering on promises, even the interesting projects that have actual potential get somehow ruined by incompetence and we have another case of “learning from failure” aka “we learned a lot”. Chance to work on anything interesting or fun is very low. Job satisfaction depends on how well you play the game. For most techy people job is very boring and frustrating running in circles aka “work horses”, which is what you are actually expected to do. Culture wise company suffers from rapid growth and dissolution of ethics. People initially are implicitly made to believe that they can make it and get rich fast as the company notably gives ridiculous high rewards, but in reality you better be in the “club” of the “right” people. Bias towards certain ethnicities and nationalities is high. There are many problems and there is very little real action on those and accountability for making things better. There are some presentations that the company “cares”, such as all hands, fish bowls and etc., but the topics discussed and proposed solutions evaporate from present leaders as soon as the meeting ends. Follow up is not done. The only discussion might be on how to manage the noise and find out the sources. As an employee, you may temporarily feel better after such a meeting, yet to find same topics and discussion repeat in 6 months. In 5 years I have never seen anyone get fired or de-ranked for incompetence, or failing to deliver, but promoted to different project, yes. It seems that there is little capacity to think critically and maintaining status-quo is encouraged. You can benefit a lot if you have talent to explain same things over and over and make it look like progress! People are great once they join everyone is very enthusiastic, until they realise that reality differs from what is served. Disappointment and frustration hit around after 2 years when many people leave, so there is constant churn in tech and general sense of instability. Sense of chaos is made worse by constant re-orgs which don’t change anything other than giving some people chance to take some positions or make someone look better - that is it. There is no measure of success, no accountability, and they never got rolled back even if it was obviously making things worse. Not a single time. What makes this company a lost case is difference between sad reality and how some of higher leaders talk and think. There is no critical judgement or decency, as you will find inflated egos trying to rationalize their narcissism and find approval for it from others. If you are onboard with that you have a great future, you just have to stomach it somehow. Announcements, all hands, and deep dives are meaningless, as it becomes obvious how many layers of manipulation and dodgy logic are smeared on top of some of the carefully crafted propaganda messages. The sane and decent people don’t last long here, now the only question is how each one normal person deals with this reality, and how one should proceed with their unfortunate life.