Booking.com

I met some knowledgeable people here, and I learned a lot from them.

They pay well as per Dutch standards.

There is a long list of cons, most of them are because of incompetent leadership and middle management.

At some point in the past, they removed all the team leads and came up with this autonomous team concept. After a year or so, they realized that it was a bad move, then they started looking for team leads desperately. So, anyone who said that they wanted to be a team lead became a team lead. They got two days of training and were done.

Here are some of the stories that my colleagues and I experienced firsthand:

• Feedback process is a joke at this company. An example: one of the managers of software development was giving random annual performance scores to the developers because she thought that not all developers can perform well; some have to perform badly as well. So, no matter how hard you worked throughout the year, if your luck is bad, then you will get a bad score. For getting promoted, you need to exceed expectations for one year. Oh, and not to mention that manager is now a director.
• Retaliation is very common in this company. And if you go to HR, then be ready for some more retaliation. HR doesn't do anything, except looking pretty.
• 25-30% of the employees are on burnout or stress leave.
• Promotions are random. They are based on feedback. Your colleagues can write anything about you without any examples, and management just believes it without cross-checking. It is to screw anyone's career here; just write some lies in the feedback, no one is going to check if there is any truth in them.
• Ass-kissing all over the place. If you are good at ass-kissing, then this is the perfect place for you.
• The way they conducted the whole layoff procedure is ridiculous. They just did the bare minimum and left the employees jobless. Booking family is a lie.

Please don't retaliate when people come to you with complaints.

The number of people on burnout leave is very high. You have invested a lot of time and money in Headspace and the B-Well portal, but if you don't fix the root cause (bad management), then things are never going to get better.