Pros
Decent competitive salaries. Good life and work balance. Smart, funny and talented colleagues, especially in low/mid level. Free snacks, fruits & barista coffee machines (pre-COVID).
Cons
A bunch of talented people I personally know haven’t been promoted in years. It doesn’t matter if you’re a high performer, the promotion is only possible if you know the right people that can lobby your career progression. Meanwhile, people who do almost nothing but skilled in brown-nosing, organising useless meetings or writing long Confluence documents containing a lot of buzzwords tend to rise to the top. It’s all about the politics and self-advertising at Skyscanner. Full remote working is still not embraced (especially by the Scottish leadership), although everyone has been working from home for the last 6 months. Instead of allowing people to work wherever they want until at least 2021, every town hall starts with ‘We’re expecting our employees to get back to the office next month’. Come on, the world has changed. It’s not 2002 anymore. With Gareth’s and Bryan’s departures, the company has become incredibly corporate. This is reflected in the way we talk and think as a company. Newly appointed senior and principal managers coming from corporate backgrounds don’t care much about the users, but rather how much money we can take out of their pockets. ‘Traveller-first’ company only exists on the paper surface. New CEO Moshe doesn’t have a clear vision and strategy where the company is headed: he’s trying to win at everything but you cannot have too many North stars, there can be only one. As much as you would love it to be so, but ’Be the best at X' doesn't sound like a solid strategy. Over the course of COVID-19, a lot of questions were asked about the runway and possible layoffs, but the answers from execs were extremely generic and vague, and unfortunately, it’s still the case. It feels like they’re all reading from one script rather than give honest, human answers. The redundancies had been expected but the way they were made is questionable at best. The previous CEO Bryan Dove gave his employees a false glimpse of hope that Skyscanner could be ‘saved’ if the majority would switch to work 3 or 4 days per week at pro-rata salary or take unpaid salary (let alone the bonuses). The people who did that felt deceived because a couple of months later they would get an email from Moshe that they’re affected, regardless of how much they have sacrificed for Skyscanner so far. Yes, to find out whether you’re at risk or not, you would sit staring at your inbox and wait for an email that’s written in incredibly complex legal language, so that you wouldn’t sue the company. A great example of how much trust they have for their own employees.
