Pros: Great people and management. Overall, an awesome organization.

Cons: No concerns; I haven't worked in a better place yet.

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: 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.