Pros: Ownership: All about ownership at Agoda. The management have faith in a bottom-up management style. This means as an engineer I still have the trust and belief from management to suggest and work, and live MY ideas. Not only is this OK – it's actively encouraged. I just cannot see a situation at Amazon where I go to Jeff Bezos, "Hey Jeff, let me rewrite your whole taxation engine." At Agoda, that's nearly the reality. Management worked with me on my idea, suggested changes, put me in charge, I chose the team, and... OK, I was a little late, but the project was hugely successful and made us a tonne of money! Really, really satisfying. Technology: Agoda surprised me. I didn't think their technology base was that impressive on joining; I quickly found out this isn't true. Kafka, Cassandra, Vertica, Hadoop – it's all part of the repertoire. In my time at Agoda, not only have I been exposed to a heap of technologies that ordinarily wouldn't come across, but I've done the research and made the suggestions myself. I've learned Java, Scala, Python, R in addition to the tech I already knew. Business: I've always worked in small enterprise companies – basically, they pay well. Agoda is the first big company I've worked for. If big companies are like this, I'm not working for a small company ever again. Agoda has exposed me to the business; I make business decisions. Whether to prioritize issue A or issue B, it's actually up to me. Now, I'm not making choices like buying companies or where to create the next datacenter, but... I can decide that working on the maps will increase conversion and create a whole heap of new features about maps and work on them. I just have never had that level of autonomy at another company. Thailand: Living in Thailand is awesome. I cannot begin to compare it to my life in London. Everything is cheap, everything is accessible, people are wonderful. This, for me, is a major bonus!

Cons: Ordered chaos! Agoda is growing very aggressively and still growing at a high rate. This means that sometimes we're unable to clean up the code as much as we would like. This is kind of frustrating. I do understand it's a function of a successful company, but at the same time, it would be really good to find more time to do some of the clean-up work. Testing I know I shouldn't say this, but Agoda tests so much. Every line of code we have tests for. * Unit tests * Javascript tests * System tests * Database tests * API tests Honestly, I don't enjoy testing. I totally see the value in it, and we have way, way fewer problems than when I first joined. But testing is boring – I want to code more. Communication Downwards Agoda is really big, and I know the bosses try to make sure there are opportunities to talk with senior management. Our CEO, Rob, will fill a movie theatre and let us know what is happening, but it would be much cooler to have this more often and from other people.

Pros: Fast-paced environment, full of tech stack.

Cons: office politics, favouritism, strong deadlines, tickets

Pros: Good environment, but Bangkok's air pollution is becoming a problem.

Cons: A lot of mid-level managers and [those] overheating in tech debt.