Booking.com

• Good relocation and visa support

Software Developers are second-class citizens. They are seen as 'Developers,' not 'Engineers.'

There has been no CTO for more than a year. Upper management is not addressing the present issues. They are just continuing to lie and avoid challenging questions during AMAs. One example is when someone asked the leadership about why the Glassdoor rating is so low. They answered that the company has a good rating (3.1) and the reason it's not great is due to other departments. But when you filter reviews with the keyword 'Developer,' you will see the development rating is 2.4. This department is actually having the biggest problems.

Mid-level management is terrible. You can find designers, copywriters, and HR people there. There was even a presentation from one of them about how to manage people whose work you don't understand. They don't understand developers and just make life terrible for developers. During performance reviews, you will get a random score thanks to these people.

Senior/principal developers are blocking all innovation, and the company is stuck with old tech and a terrible set of tools. Propose a new language or start a new project, and Perl dinosaurs will come after you and block your project.

There are no code reviews or unit/integration tests. Deployments are manual. You have to spend hours and hours to deploy your changes and test everything manually. Development tools and the environment are terrible. Mediocre developers are always there to break the development environment by pushing their code without testing, and they get away with this thanks to mid-level management.

This company is not a tech company at all. You will see it's struggling around this all the time. The company tries to build new products and fails miserably. The container infrastructure has been being built for more than two years, and they keep revamping it before reaching a usable state.

Failures are justified with 'Learnings' all the time, and there is no accountability.

People are very selfish and only think about their own interests because of broken performance evaluation and reward processes. The management is either failing to see this, or they are doing the same thing. Product Owners will justify stupid, broken ideas that will keep them alive or help grow their headcount. Managers of software developers will make stupid technical decisions, even though they are incompetent, just for their own good, and the result will be very bad for the company and the developers working under them. Some developers will keep lying and coasting, doing minimum work, and their team will not get this. It will only frustrate other developers around.

Developer experience is terrible. There are no good tools or processes, and they also install spyware on your computer to track everything you do.

There are also really good people around, but they leave for better opportunities. The company is failing to retain the talent it has. Only the worst people, or people who are waiting to finish their five years to get a European passport, will stay.

Most of my colleagues were depressed, and I have seen lots of people going on burnout leave.

There are no clear career opportunities. Promotions depend on drinking buddies.

Fire incompetent mid-level management. Accept the fact that Booking is successful because of technology. Technology can keep Booking successful.

Stop cost-cutting on developers; they are the most important asset you have, otherwise you will see them leaving.