Pros: - Good benefits. - There was one time when the company was well known for traveling. But now, any hotel/restaurant I talked to, all over Europe or anywhere in the world, everybody hates the company.

Cons: Since the company started booking on their website without any advertisement or marketing, it has gone down really low. They started charging for everything on hotels and restaurants, which they were not charging for before. As a result, people started hating the company and moved to different booking sites. * Very high expectations for each employee. The reason is above. You will be given four days' work to finish in two days without consideration for any meetings, reporting, or monitoring tasks. So, you end up working during nights and weekends. And there is no appreciation for it, as it is expected from you. * No work-life balance. You work Dublin hours but might also need to end up working US hours too. The engineering team in Dublin reduced from 35 to 8-10 in number. Now you can imagine why. * Poor management in Dublin and especially in the US. The management from the US puts blame on you for even small things in front of the whole team in a meeting, and your manager from Dublin will remain quiet and not even represent you. * No appreciation of hard work. No matter how hard you work, they say, "This is expected from you." * Every Friday, a manager has a meeting to talk about your weekly performance, which is like torture no matter how hard you work. It ruins your weekend. Though you end up working on the weekend to mitigate that. * There is just one person in the name of Human Resource management, who will only listen to you and ignore. No action is taken, no matter how much you try to explain. The end reason people leave. * Last but not least, speed does not always win if you want to run your business for the long term.

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.

Pros: Directly building something people use is great.

Cons: No career growth. I was in the same role 3 years after I was hired. "Speed wins" is used to justify sloppy work and never addressing the mountain of technical debt. New technologies, even those proven elsewhere in the industry, are resisted.