Booking.com

Work-life balance is amazing. No work on weekends ever (the place is even closed) and no late-night work.

Very good salary compared to Dutch companies (and Europe in general, especially if you qualify for 30%).

Very good overall package.

Nice locations in the middle of Amsterdam.

People seem nice (and "seem" is the key; watch for the cons part).

Nice cafeteria and good lunch for a very cheap price.

Good benefits (booking hotels, discounts on many things, etc.).

One of the few places where you can learn how to do things at a very large scale.

In short, I will personally pack my bags the moment I get an offer from somewhere else.

One more thing: I am actually neutral when it comes to the CEO, not sure why it's marked as "disapproves CEO".

Well, where should I begin?

• Very outdated technology. Outdated doesn't even describe it. If you work on the backend, for example, if you work long enough at Booking, you may not be hirable anywhere else!

• People are nice as long as you don't do or say something against what they religiously believe (and I am not talking about religion). For example, if you ever get into a discussion about why not use Java more instead of Perl (and Java is surprisingly supposed to be an officially supported language), someone could ask you to pack your bags and leave in public without any shame.

• No one really understands what it takes to get promoted or get higher stocks/bonus. It's very vague, very politically motivated. You can see people with 20+ years of experience who do most of the work and never get promoted, and on the other hand, you can see someone who became a principal just 3 years after getting out of college! So go figure!

• No testing and no code reviews. The company states that we have a "monitoring culture" instead of a testing culture, which is fine, except that a developer wastes half of his productivity on roll-out and chasing crappy errors forever because of that!

• No consistency in anything. You would have products and teams that people are fighting to work for, and other products and teams that people are fighting to escape from!

• The company thrives on the fact that people in there are free to work on whatever they want, but in reality, people who are senior to you can shut you down any time, either directly, or by shaming you enough to quit what you are doing!

Guys, it's not really rocket science! Look at how every other top tech company does it. You can't behave the same way as if you still have a total of 500 employees when you have over 16,000 and expect it to work naturally the same.