Booking.com

At Booking.com, I have met by far the highest percentage of smart people, genuinely willing to help you, wanting to do the right thing, open to hear your feedback and act on it, and also to provide you feedback.

Most managers are open to be challenged; decisions are made based on data/reasons and not on "rank". Great office, great opportunity to meet different people and work in a truly international environment.

The codebase is very bad. I have spent weeks struggling to add some functionality that might have taken me 1-2 days max to implement in clean code or from scratch. We are making progress, but unless you are on a good project with newer tech, the developer experience can be a pain, and growth from a technical point of view can be limited. Also, there is no baseline between teams/departments: from technical, functional, and UX, but most importantly, from a performance evaluation point of view. I have seen people being over-appreciated in some areas who would be really underperformers in other areas and vice versa.

Too much of a lottery, the team or area where you are. It feels unfair. Make sure the performance evaluation and the working standards are more uniform across the entire company. I personally know people who are really impactful and hard-working in one area who are not being appreciated or rewarded. I also know people who are extremely loose and not committed who are appreciated or rewarded in another area, just because the standards are so different. I appreciate that many things are at a manager's discretion, but there should be some specific rules on:

• How much someone can work from home (in a non-COVID scenario) and for what reasons.
• How much extra time people should be putting in to meet deadlines.

We need a culture that feels fair, not only inside a team or department but also cross-company. Otherwise, we will be losing talent.