Booking.com

Great growth opportunities for soft skills, product management, networking, etc. Great experimentation culture – you always know when some new feature is successful or not, and these things matter during review. Fantastic office & benefits. A carefully built, welcoming culture of learning, experimentation, mentoring, and growth. I've never seen anything like this :)

Interesting technical challenges given the high load, to an extent. The tech part is not the company's strong suit if you're comparing this to FAANG, but if you're in a team that doesn't actively maintain 20-years-old legacy, it's fine.

1. Not a tech company at its heart. A lot of things that in Google or Facebook or wherever would be done by dedicated DevOps or infrastructure teams are done by product devs with a bunch of bash scripts and cron jobs. This leads to some frustration and some wasted time. If you have ambitions of making a new programming language, developing the coolest in-house cloud in the world, or something equally risky and large-scale, Booking is probably not the right place.

2. Ancient tech stack that is literally older than me. This is improving, but not as fast as you would hope, partly because of point 1: people are focused on improving the product and not necessarily streamlining development. I'm working with a relatively modern tech stack (recent Java), and I try to stay away from the legacy code. If you're interviewing for a job, be sure to ask about the tech stack of your specific team.

Hire DevOps people! The barriers that slow down work cannot be removed by people who also have deadlines on said work.