Booking.com

It pays very well in Amsterdam, and people still like it and come back because it is a big company and it has structures, silos, and rules. Many things still work because we used to hire great people and value scalability over time.

It has Americanized overtime. Not a Dutch company anymore. Depending on what team you are on, work/life balance is not a thing.

A lot of C-level decisions in the last 3 years (mostly unnecessary) don't sit well with me from a human integrity perspective.

Middle management is a disaster. We have lowered the bar of hiring because "you can't take that long to find the right competent people." Then you end up with managers who are not a fit at all with the company culture and have no idea how to do their jobs. They have a different vision of what their teams should do, when they have never worked with such types of teams.

Instead of sitting down, learning what we do, and who they work with, like "Who are you and how do I make you strive?" what they care about is just making it look like the team is doing things. "Doesn't matter if the work is half done or designed not to last 2 weeks, we will think about this or that later. Just close your tasks in time. Quality is not important."

Then there are the absent PMs. Since we moved from POs (Product Owners) to PMs (Project Managers), no one feels they own anything. "It's the team's fault, they are too slow delivering."

They don't help breaking down tasks. They don't have a proper view of the effort of every project, nor do they have a vision or roadmap. You can't trust them to send them into meetings and say the right things.

Things are still standing because people that have long left or some "dinosaurs," how we call people that have been here for a good amount of years, put together the foundations of certain things. These foundations have kept up the old values of doing the right thing (doesn't matter what) and making good, scalable, and durable products.

So many good people have left or have been let go, mostly because their value was not recognized by their managers. They were "too difficult" because they would point out how shitty a job they were doing.

Burnout is still very high. People don't manage to get leaves because the company doctors, of course, are useless. Booking told them to only do one preventive meeting and redirect them to their managers (which are most of the time the problem and have no intent of getting you fixed). You really have to have severe problems (like suicide) to actually get to talk to a psychologist regularly.

I had to get my own a couple of years ago and spent $12k. The company changed, and I tried again to get help. Same stuff. You can't make the barrier, although you can't sleep, are tired all the time, get triggers with nothing, are always tense and anxious, and can't trust to leave work because your manager would do things behind your back and wouldn't respect decisions you have made.

Also, going to talk to their managers to ask for help is just so political. They assure you everything will be fine, they will talk to them, they agree with you, then nothing changes. Maybe you hear from your manager the right words, but you see that he doesn't believe in them (it's just because he has to say them), and you just feel miserable.

You see these people overworked, tired, that get triggers very easily, disillusioned, cynical, that are a shell compared to who they were before, and that are only left with the choice to leave.

Do not ask employees to put good reviews on Glassdoor to cope with the 3.2 rating reached after the pandemic. Since May 2022, there has been a trend of fake positive reviews in order to reach again a 4.4 status, which was what Booking had 6 years ago without fake or asked reviews.

I've read so many of these advises, and I don't think anyone would actually do anything with them. Merit is not a thing anymore; managers' friends go ahead and are valued more than people who can actually do the job right. Many good people find it very difficult to be seen and valued by their managers, so they leave. Not everyone is replaceable. Putting a band-aid on when you break a leg instead of going to a surgeon and getting it fixed will not make you walk again.