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Some good, some bad

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Booking.com for 4 years
October 3, 2019
Manchester, England
3.0
RecommendsNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Free cereal.

Free fruit (sometimes; quality and availability can vary).

Some really talented and friendly people.

A very relaxed, light-hearted, and casual atmosphere.

Good tech kit and workstations.

Free beer Fridays monthly.

Good office location right in the city centre.

Cons

Developer pay isn't bad, but it's nowhere near market-leading. They're always "benchmarking," but you will get better elsewhere. More disheartening is the pay relativity between different roles; why be a dev when you can earn more facilitating standups for a living.

Corporate cargo cult agile in full swing. Metrics that should be team-internal only are being used to judge teams across engineering. Of course, this leads to teams doing all kinds of crazy things to manipulate the numbers. Teams will just trash tickets to pretend they have a zero-defect backlog.

An antiquated team & personal objectives system is heavily linked to bonuses or promotions. This only leads to everyone going for the "under-promise, over-deliver" strategy. There's no incentive to set risky/hard-to-achieve goals if failure means financial hurt; it's much wiser to play safe. This contributes to...

Stuff moves at a glacial speed. Whether it's politics, meetings, lack of resources, or just not in the objectives/priorities, things take an age to get done. Everything needs a Jira ticket. If you're looking for a fast-paced environment, this isn't it.

Too many contractors are brought in to work on new feature work while existing devs do maintenance and have little to no involvement in what the future looks like. It doesn't matter if you have years of domain experience; contractors will be brought in to rebuild the system you know inside out.

Quarterly objectives setting leads to an extremely short-term vision and a constant shift in direction. There is a serious lack of long-term thinking.

More and more red tape is being introduced to satisfy an overly-restrictive SOX implementation. You will constantly lose access to the things you need to do the day-to-day job. Welcome to the world of service desk tickets.

Senior management are mostly non-existent apart from quarterly Q&A appearances. Q&A questions are answered with so much denial they sound like they're from a communist state. They struggled to even accept that having a gate as a meeting room door meant the room was too noisy.

High recent turnover of staff.

Advice to Management

Look into the metrics you're using to measure the team's performance. Are they actually measuring how well we deliver quality working software, or just how creative teams are with their Jira numbers?

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