Booking.com

• Amsterdam.
• Open atmosphere.
• Very good colleagues from very diverse backgrounds.
• Nice offices and events (at least pre-COVID).
• Good compensation.
• Good resources.
• At least in the past and maybe in the future, this was a place where you could come up with an idea, build a business case for it, convince people to invest their time in it with your data, and then make it happen. Recent changes threaten this, but I hope the culture is strong.

Recent changes to make the company top-down really threaten a culture where people felt they could make meaningful contributions. This can also mean that not all decisions are data-driven anymore.

The company has made changes which make it more difficult to switch teams and roles, specifically blocking these changes for a year at a time.

The promotion path is slower than it should be. Recent changes seem to be designed to slow it down, and I have seen good people turned down for promotion for questionable reasons.

The company leadership underfunded the bonus pool for 2019, providing very little incentive to push extra hard.

There is a big clash between the CEO pushing a top-down culture with an American work-life balance culture and a primarily bottom-up Dutch company.

The quality of your work experience can vary drastically from team to team. Some teams have recurring burnout problems and/or terrible managers, others have great work-life balance and/or really fantastic managers. Yet, the company does not have good resources in place to help fix these teams or at least get the employees into a healthier environment.

• Enable your employees to work where they contribute the most. If this means changing teams, roles, or with greater scope via a promotion, you should try to make this process as frictionless as possible.

• Use data to guide your decisions. If a core employee provides data showing an initiative is a bad idea, you should reconsider the initiative. If a core employee finds a better opportunity, you should reprioritize.

• Pay for performance. Strong individual contributions should be recognized at bonus and promotion time.