Pros: Good benefits and a strong salary, even for entry-level positions. The free lunch 3-4 times a week is good, plus the unlimited snacks and drinks. A nitpick here is that they tend to restock the drinks nobody likes and cycle out the ones that I like and are gone. Developing is fast-paced, and changes can be shown to others very quickly after completion. This is full-stack development, which allows all engineers to make their own design decisions for the implementation. There is good communication with the product managers, which allows the engineer to give a fair amount of input. The people at the company are awesome. The culture tends to be laid-back in the teams, and the environment promotes asking other engineers for help on difficult sections. There are a bunch of training classes for spoken languages and other trainings. However, they are not easily accessible, or I never felt that they were easy to seek out. It would be better if fewer were offered at a time and had a visible place to access and sign up. There is some support for this, but it could be better. There are plenty of things to do at the office, including video games, board games, and a foosball table. But aside from the foosball table, these get rarely used, if at all.

Cons: Mobility within the company is difficult. In order to switch teams or offices, you need to be excellent at your current position. The culture for this is one of blame. Bugs you introduce are tracked and remembered indefinitely. These all detract from the excellent rating. This is a serious problem: if you are placed on a product that doesn't interest you, it is difficult to excel and switch to another part. Work-life balance is not the greatest. Engineers are advised that 40 hours is the minimum, and working beyond that is a good way to show their exceptional work. The codebase is not in the best state. Code is often copied and pasted, which leads to errors or outdated code permeating the entire website. Encapsulation is not very well achieved because of this. Similarly, the opposite can occur, where several different ways of doing the same thing are implemented as part of different projects, which introduces inconsistencies. Code is rarely cleaned up; however, there seems to be a push to do more cleanup projects.

Pros: - Really liked my working environment, e.g., co-workers, location. - Good benefits.

Cons: Could have better ways for engineers to grow.

Pros: I've been at Trip for over 3 years and have been incredibly happy. Unlike most companies, Trip actually cares about people being happy. They actively find ways to make the day better and your work environment the best it can be. It's something you notice every day you are there. The food is almost too good, and the office has a very comfy/vibrant feel. The snack game is strong and constantly has new stuff. Everywhere in the office has a feeling like it was built to make you smile and not to cram as much productivity per square inch as possible, like many other companies. You are always working on stuff that people will see. No matter what team you are on, it's easy to see your impact in the product. Similarly, everywhere you go, you will see Tripadvisor stickers, which is super cool. People really do love the Trip brand. The CEO has an actual heart. Many times, when not-so-great things have happened in the world, he has stood up to say what's right. He doesn't hide behind what he thinks will have minimal shareholder impact but is maybe the right thing. He consistently takes a stand that I'm proud of.

Cons: Trip has a rough road ahead. Google has been pushing into the market, and that has a massive impact on what the company can do going forward. They need to make some big choices to deal with that, and those won't be easy. There's a ton of aging code and UIs that are difficult to work with. Obviously, there are projects to deal with that, but they are slow, and you'll have to deal with some pretty old stuff. Projects can easily spend more time dealing with old cruft than actually writing the new stuff. Similarly, there are way too many people working in oversized, unwieldy codebases. You never know when something will change out from under you, or another team could break your code. That's supposed to be balanced by a group "design review" system, but I've never had much faith in design-by-committee. At best, people are impartial; at worst, you end up with nitpicking. Most of the time, it's a smooth process, but there's not really enough buy-in from people to make it worth it. Almost all the work is either reactionary or focused on bottom-line impact. Projects are always focused on short-term goals and rarely think of the longer-term impact, market positioning, or brand value. If it raises profits by more than x%, we ship it. Everything is an A/B feature test, which gets piled into the code. As a result, nothing is ever done with strong intent to get it right. Get ready for changes. Your working team will change every couple of months. People are constantly shifted into new squads, team structures, re-orgs, etc. I can't think of a quarter where there wasn't some major change in who I worked with.