Pros: - Great work-life balance - Smart and skilled colleagues - Company discount for booking hotels on booking.com - Career opportunities - High salary (pretty high for mid-roles)

Cons: Slow. Legacy (but it's running away). Job is technically complex (maybe it is not a con).

Pros: - Good relocation and visa support

Cons: Software Developers are second-class citizens. They are seen as 'Developers,' not 'Engineers.' There has been no CTO for more than a year. Upper management is not addressing the present issues. They are just continuing to lie and avoid challenging questions during AMAs. One example is when someone asked the leadership about why the Glassdoor rating is so low. They answered that the company has a good rating (3.1) and the reason it's not great is due to other departments. But when you filter reviews with the keyword 'Developer,' you will see the development rating is 2.4. This department is actually having the biggest problems. Mid-level management is terrible. You can find designers, copywriters, and HR people there. There was even a presentation from one of them about how to manage people whose work you don't understand. They don't understand developers and just make life terrible for developers. During performance reviews, you will get a random score thanks to these people. Senior/principal developers are blocking all innovation, and the company is stuck with old tech and a terrible set of tools. Propose a new language or start a new project, and Perl dinosaurs will come after you and block your project. There are no code reviews or unit/integration tests. Deployments are manual. You have to spend hours and hours to deploy your changes and test everything manually. Development tools and the environment are terrible. Mediocre developers are always there to break the development environment by pushing their code without testing, and they get away with this thanks to mid-level management. This company is not a tech company at all. You will see it's struggling around this all the time. The company tries to build new products and fails miserably. The container infrastructure has been being built for more than two years, and they keep revamping it before reaching a usable state. Failures are justified with 'Learnings' all the time, and there is no accountability. People are very selfish and only think about their own interests because of broken performance evaluation and reward processes. The management is either failing to see this, or they are doing the same thing. Product Owners will justify stupid, broken ideas that will keep them alive or help grow their headcount. Managers of software developers will make stupid technical decisions, even though they are incompetent, just for their own good, and the result will be very bad for the company and the developers working under them. Some developers will keep lying and coasting, doing minimum work, and their team will not get this. It will only frustrate other developers around. Developer experience is terrible. There are no good tools or processes, and they also install spyware on your computer to track everything you do. There are also really good people around, but they leave for better opportunities. The company is failing to retain the talent it has. Only the worst people, or people who are waiting to finish their five years to get a European passport, will stay. Most of my colleagues were depressed, and I have seen lots of people going on burnout leave. There are no clear career opportunities. Promotions depend on drinking buddies.

Pros: This is a tech review, so I'll focus on that. Booking's scale is big. So if you're into large amounts of data, interesting A/B testing, or scalable architectures, then Booking has a lot of potential. Be aware though that almost all of this is made a lot less interesting by the mediocre and half-baked approach to almost everything in technology. If you like getting paid for 40 hours but only want to work 32, then Booking is also great. Show up at 10:30? Leave at 17:30? Fine. This happens all the time. If you love Perl, then this is also a great company, because like in Perl, there's more than one way to do it. So prepare to see every arcane Perl operator you ever knew, have three chat clients open (because there's more than one way to reach someone), prepare to work on lots of technologies that don't work together well, and prepare to see many different management styles or ways to organize teams.

Cons: The engineering quality and technology is mediocre. A lot of teams are very business-focused, which is great in principle, within their particular domain but without anyone maintaining any kind of overview. This means that the default strategy is to just cram a feature into the existing code in the fastest way possible. That is, look for the piece of code that needs to change and add an "if (my_cool_feature_enabled) {} else {}" construct. Rinse and repeat until you have Perl functions that span 5000+ lines. No kidding. By that time, everybody and their mother have touched that code, so no one owns it anymore. Meanwhile, of course, some people have gotten frustrated with the spaghetti Perl codebase that is impossible to navigate and is an archeological record of two decades of mostly uninspired hacks and copy-pasting code (the latter happens to the extreme). So, new technologies have been added. Which ones? Well, it's booking, so no one owns this process. So there's Java, which is the only 'official' second language for that matter. But of course, the data scientists use Python. And R. And there's Go, which is cool. And Kotlin, because it's also cool. Within the Java world, most popular (web) frameworks are being used. And so are all protocols you can think of. Same on the frontend: React, Angular, it's all there in various places. This freedom is nice on the one hand, but it just doesn't work. It also leads to resentment between teams. "Why do they do their own when they could have used Spring boot?", "Why do they do this in Java when 3 lines of Perl would have been fine?" Because no one takes ownership or dares to make decisions, people do what suits them best. This is very pragmatic, but it leads to loads of islands of different standards and tensions between these islands. Standards not only in technology but also in quality of people. Pointing this out invariably leads to an explanation along the following lines: "Well, yes, but in order to understand this, you need to know the context," and then a war story comes to defend the mess. And that's fair enough, but no one cleans up after themselves.