Pros: --Development-- For engineers who are just entering the workforce, TripAdvisor is an awesome place to start a career. The mandate of full-stack development allows engineers to gain crucial experience on many common, though somewhat antiquated, coding frameworks. At TripAdvisor, there are plenty of examples of winning strategies and failing strategies. Observant engineers will learn as much about what not to do in software development as they will about what to do, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experience in both frontend and backend development, along with guidance from talented fellow engineers, will set engineers up well for their next employment jump. --Benefits-- TripAdvisor employees get a $250 once per year personal travel bonus to help compensate a hotel stay or plane ride. The medical package is good for single employees and decent for employees with families. There is free lunch on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. --Culture-- There are a lot of very smart people, engineering and otherwise, who are social, friendly, and inviting of newcomers.

Cons: --Environment -- TripAdvisor prides itself on moving quickly; our motto is "Speed Wins". Sadly, that motto is more often used to justify making poor design decisions to quickly finish small projects than on identifying new trends within the industry and acting on them. As a result, many sections of the codebase are in disrepair. Poor code from previous projects often hinders developers' ability to achieve the goals of their current projects and is frustrating to encounter on a deadline. Upper management is also reluctant to spend money and man-power fixing problems that slow down development. --Compensation-- TripAdvisor is a good place to start a career, but it is not a good place to continue one. Hard work is rarely rewarded, and pay raises are relatively flat. Last year's bonus cycle brought modest pay raises that were about on-par with cost-of-living increases. The realization that new hires are compensated on par with or better than employees who have been around and know the codebase creates morale problems. Many engineers here take this as a signal from management that unseasoned engineers are worth as much as current engineers and that career advancement is limited. --Benefits-- Although the company has offices around the world, engineers are discouraged from visiting them. It isn't that the benefits here are bad; it's that there is nothing that really stands out.

Pros: The perks are great. There is a really good benefits package (medical/dental/etc.), and then a ton of stuff to keep employees happy at the main Newton campus: * Catered lunches * Sodas * Snacks * Foosball * Gaming systems * A kegerator The list goes on. Pretty much everyone I worked with was very bright. The bar to get in is set pretty high, and there is an informal 'no a**holes policy' that is fairly effective (though opinions on this may vary based on your own definition). Their development methodology is better than a lot of larger engineering groups. The company motto 'Speed Wins' continues to be applied to a development group that has grown by a ridiculous amount for the past few years (also a con, see below), and fortunately things are still moving quickly. Work/life balance is good. There are rarely any (as in, I never personally experienced any) crunch-time periods on projects. The CEO knows what he's doing and is leading the company in a good direction.

Cons: If you're a Java developer and enjoy writing code like it's 1997, by all means join the development team! The codebase is a mess. It has grown organically over the last decade or so and is unwieldy and not well architected, therefore harder to understand and maintain. The coverage of the testing frameworks that are in place is nowhere near where it should be, and so very little refactoring happens to improve the situation. Traditional singletons are everywhere. There are methods that are thousands of lines long. It's a jungle. To some extent, there is a "not-invented-here" mindset; bringing in 3rd party code isn't encouraged and must be approved by management. People who are hired are smart and expected to write code that works, but they don't necessarily know how to write clean code that is maintainable, and management doesn't put much value on that either. As mentioned in the 'pros' section, development is still approached like the company is a five-person startup. This works to varying degrees with a team 20x that size. There's no real methodology backing it (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.). This contributes to the existing mess of code. The bar for entry into the company is set pretty high; the interview process is pretty tough, and candidates are expected to have a very strong CS background. During interviews, the company is presented as a really interesting place to work with a lot of tough software challenges around scalability. This gets a lot of people excited, but the reality is much less dramatic. It seems that a lot of really bright people come through the door only to end up with pretty menial work, often maintaining a mess of code that was written up in a hurry by someone else.

Pros: Friendly working environment. Employees are helpful and friendly to each other.

Cons: The website has been the same for many, many years, a little slow on the innovation side.