Booking.com

• Good pay
• Good work-life balance
• People are friendly (but mostly fake, due to 'compliance')

We 'celebrate diversity' by requiring everyone to act the same. Leave your personality and culture at the door before you enter, and assume your corporate-compliant persona.

'Leadership' teams can't decide whether they want to be agile or work water-fallish. One side of the org does one thing, the other side the other.

There's no courage to take on new markets or invent new solutions. They are only trying to milk more and more from the existing stale website.

Too many people are working on the same footprint, across all roles (Product Manager, software engineer, designer, data scientists, team leader, etc.). People are fighting to find and fend off things to do as 'achievements' to get an 'exceeds' performance score.

Performance reviews are completely broken. Absolutely massive amounts of time are taken per manager per report (preparing their 'case', 'defending' the case amongst peers, etc.), and yet, managers are pushing for a forced distribution (even though they will vehemently deny it), leading to some people simply having bad luck and being screwed out of a bonus. It's not fun for the employee, and not fun for the manager that has to deal with this.

Booking.com institutionally applies doublespeak to many things: they speak of 'learnings' when they really mean 'failures and forgettings'.

Not acknowledging organizational weaknesses or institutional problems is core to Booking's current decline. Everyone just needs to march on in the swamp of chaos and overbearing management (teams spend 4 weeks full-time every 6 months setting up 'objectives', which are anyway already fixed from the top).

Booking was fun and promising when times were good, but now that Booking needs to actually start competing with other companies, it becomes clear that the con-man product people are still in charge and results are lacking. And they all try to con their way with upwards graphs, presentations, and other fancy-looking presentations. This goes all the way to the top.

Booking will still be going strong for a number of years, especially since the pandemic is wiping away small competitors. But with the current (lack of) direction, it is slowly fading into a place where you can find MySpace and Nokia.

See above.