Agoda

Thailand and BKK are great. The weather is not cold.

Agoda is a bad place for developers - both junior and seniors, both locals and expats.

The organizational structure in Agoda is so sick, in such a decadent state, that you’re going to suffer badly. You’re hired as a backend or full-stack developer, with lots of promises about an agile and cutting-edge technological environment - but in practice, you’re a code monkey in a third-world sweatshop. Surprise!!

In the last couple of years, the "Product organization" had taken over and drained the "Backend organization" - to the point where developers are actually product slaves. The “Product organization" is basically a clique of micromanagers, acting like an arrogant junta who knows nothing about software development (nothing!) and doesn't really care about technical and architectural debts. In a better company, there would be a positive and productive tension between product and development.

But not in Agoda. You’re going to do nothing substantial other than small, ridiculous features and business experiments, most of which are either failing or copied from competitors. You’re explicitly not required to think, improve, or suggest anything. Don’t step out of the box - and once you did, you’ve been marked. You'll face the consequences in the next yearly bonus, or just get fired because your performance was engineered. Hard to believe, but that's systematic.

Expats and Senior developers are leaving sometimes only after a couple of months, facing the absurdity and the lie. There’s a very high turnover rate among expats, and for a good reason.

Junior local developers are anxiously coming to work here for almost no money because they want to gain experience, but in fact are being ruined in their first year by learning the worst management and technical practices in the market (literally).

And as for the overall working culture - it sometimes tends to be less communicative and collaborative. That’s a culture thing. Everything is OK; everyone just says “Yes” but actually is “Losing Face” on you (Google that). Nobody complains about anything; nobody shares anything. This leads to difficulties in sharing knowledge and working in a productive team. And you know what? If I knew nobody really cares about my personal development, and that the expat sitting next to me doing the same job is getting paid 5 times more - I wouldn't cooperate as well. There is this kind of antagonism and disengagement in the air.

The reviews here look mostly genuine, apart from the 5-star-all-is-awesome reviews written by Agoda HR - ~300 technocrats of the worst kind, that wouldn't embarrass Vogon bureaucracy...

Agoda is in a deep state of decadence. This cannot be solved by hiring more overseas managers or by better KPIs (both American-corporate-BS thinking), but by splitting into multiple teams with 100% autonomous ownership, and by reverse outsourcing. In the meanwhile, I hope more people will continue to spread the word for the benefit of our colleagues: Agoda is a bad working environment.