Booking.com

Great relocation to Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a beautiful city; living with the Dutch is amazing!

Some developers are smart (they usually don't stick around, sadly).

The way I see it, there are those who work here and love it. There are those who hate it. It depends upon your core values and belief system. If you are an honest, hard-working developer, you won't like it here. If you are incompetent and can BS your way to non-technical managers about your "make-believe" technical difficulties, you'll love it.

I've seen coders who have hardly written 10 lines of code in a quarter, and these people have figured a way to game the system and get promoted.

My team lead manages a team of software developers but does not write a single line of code and never worked as a programmer. Why write clean code when you can slap 2000 lines of Perl and get it done? (About code reviews: if you review code, it's a sure shot way to get kicked out of the team).

Promotions are not done on the basis of who works hard but based on how much you suck up to your bosses. You cannot speak your mind out without the risk of retaliation.

If you read reviews on the internet, you'll hear people say they do monitoring, and that's something Booking does very well. Wrong!!

Some teams don't get enough volume of visitors/users to test edge cases on production. We pray things don't break when we release it.

Mid-management is completely incompetent. If you are thinking of moving from your third-world country, like how I did, please remember there are tons of great European tech companies that would value your engineering practices. Booking isn't one of them. Amsterdam is a great city, but working for Booking.com hurts your career.

Don't let incompetent stoners manage your software developers.