Pros: TripAdvisor's first goal in hiring is to hire the person that fits best, so everyone you are working with is great at what they do, and everyone gets along. Catered lunches 3 times a week, a game room with foosball, Xbox, Rock Band, and Wii make for a fun environment. Drinks, snacks, and comfortable open collaboration areas make for a relaxing environment. Put that together with a relaxed approach to schedules, and you have a stress-free work environment. TripAdvisor maintains its nimbleness regardless of how many employees it has, so there is always something new. It is a job you will want to come back to every day.

Cons: The motto is "speed wins", which means something new every week, even every day. While that makes the job interesting, it also makes it a little confusing and hard to keep the various projects you're working on straight. The company has been growing rapidly, despite waiting for the "perfect candidate" for each position and not rushing the hiring. As such, they suffer a bit from the unavoidable growing pains, as any company would. In some respects, things still feel like a small company, but those clash with some of the unavoidable aspects of a large company. Everyone is devoted to easing this as much as possible, but it just takes time.

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: Everyone in engineering is extremely sharp and capable. This is a great place to get some hands-on web development experience on a large and complex site. You will be writing server-side code that must scale to handle millions of requests, not just CSS/JavaScript when I say web development. The engineering philosophy is to encourage all engineers to handle all layers in the stack, so you will be writing CSS and JavaScript, in addition to backend code. This cuts both ways. It's really interesting when you're starting out because you will learn a lot and feel a great sense of ownership over the entire project you're working on, but after a while, you might decide there are parts of the stack that you'd prefer not to work on. My compensation was pretty good when I started, and I got a nice merit raise after a year. Your engineering co-workers will be fun to work with and more than willing to pull their weight. I didn't encounter any dead weight while I was working there. The hiring process seems to do a good job filtering out under-qualified and under-performing candidates.

Cons: The interviewing process is very heavy on algorithms and data structures questions, which might make you believe that those are the kind of problems you'll be encountering on a daily basis. This really isn't the case. Trip needs to hire really smart people because there is a very large, 10+ year old codebase. Often, a project will require making changes or additions to parts of this complex web of interconnected classes. Basically, it helps to be a genius if you want to read the code and understand it. The interviewing process also serves as an excellent weeding-out mechanism, but many of the recent grad hires don't really have any real coding experience, so the maintainability of the code they write leaves something to be desired. The reality of working here as an engineer is that because they want you to work on the entire stack for every project, you will be writing a non-trivial amount of CSS and JavaScript. At first, if you're like me and never did that kind of work before, you'll learn a lot. But after a while, you might get tired of trying to position a page element and making the styles look correct in IE6. There are some projects that are heavier on this than others, and your mileage may vary based on the group you're on. After a while, if you realize there are parts of the stack you'd like to avoid, it becomes difficult to avoid them. Changing groups is something that is discussed as a viable option, but it's pretty difficult from what I saw. Your manager might try to take these preferences into account, but you will not be able to escape IE6 display bugs if you're in a group that works on any user-facing code. If you're completely opposed to doing any client-side work, don't work here, or make sure you're being hired into a group that never does live site work. The management hierarchy is flat (but growing taller), which means that your chances for advancement aren't super-promising. You can see some people being groomed, shaking the right hands and playing politics correctly to be promoted into the lower management layer. I wasn't striving to be a middle manager in a 100+ person engineering department, and if you want to stay on the coding side of the fence, there aren't really many places to go. They hire startup-minded people, so churn is inevitable. If you're smart (and you are if you get hired here), you'll probably be intellectually challenged for a year or two, learn a lot, and write code that millions of people will use daily. But after that, you will probably get bored and want to move on. The nature of the skills they help you develop makes you well-suited to work at a startup because you've worked on all parts of the web development stack and you're now familiar with lots of the non-engineering aspects of creating and maintaining a profitable website.