Pros: Smart coworkers. Flexible work schedule. Nice compensation for new grads. Free food/snacks.

Cons: Engineer turnover rate is high. Most senior engineers stay, but more SDE-I and SDE-II left during the past two years. We spend too much on recruiting senior people but do not try to solve the high turnover rate. Low salary increase, low RSU, and low bonus this year. If you were doing great, you get a 2% increase. Managers do not have the power to help your compensation if you are not satisfied with it. Higher management levels do not care about your dissatisfaction. Small teams with fewer engineers do not get higher-level management's attention, which means your compensation and opinions are not important to them.

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: - There are really smart and nice people at TripAdvisor (not all of them, obviously). But it's nice to be able to work with and discuss ideas with your interesting co-workers, which has made my internship a bit more tolerable. - Cool perks, including free lunches, snacks, fruit and drinks, extravagant company outings, and free shuttles to Cambridge. - Hackathon for interns, where you get to work on your own idea for a week. - Get to experience firsthand what "All that glitters is not gold" really means. It does seem cool to have a line on your CV saying that you have worked on the world's largest travel site, but if you believe there is more to an internship than fat paychecks and a big name, you might be very disappointed. - Get an extra $5 on your wage when you get the return offer for the next term (but seriously, think twice about the cons before accepting it!).

Cons: HR and/or management is really poor. They left me waiting in the lobby on my first day for 3 hours because no one, except myself, knew it was my first day. They then gave me one extra hour waiting at my workstation, which had no chair or machines, because these would come in the next hour. My demographic and personal information got messed up on tax and official documents by HR. The tasks are boring, dreary, and poorly defined. There is nothing challenging or really interesting about the work. If you think the interview questions were a sample of the real work, you are wrong! This is by far the most boring and intellectually useless internship I have ever done. The full-stack development style is pretty annoying and it apparently makes the codebase a mess! If you think this style would help you learn a bit of everything, which is exactly what I told myself into taking the offer, be assured that you would be better off picking up a tutorial from the web and teaching yourself whatever it is that you want to learn. This is because all you would learn is mostly likely hacky and unmaintainable code, which you wouldn't even know was bad unless you have seen better code! This is also not a place for you if you are, like myself, not interested in spending hours tweaking some convoluted CSS/JavaScript files to get things to render the way the managers want, as they keep changing their minds! What is worse is that managers always seem busy doing *something else* rather than providing feedback or expectations on your projects. They at times do not even seem to know what they are looking for in a project! It often seems to me that my manager does not care if the projects are finished on time, or finished at all for that matter! Imagine you wrote a piece of code, posted it up for review, and waited up to a month without receiving any feedback! It even feels like these tasks were merely made up just to keep me entertained! Most engineering practices (which I cannot get into details without talking about the internal infrastructures, but think about automated builds, version control, and other related areas) are poor, which really puzzled me because they had very smart people responsible for that.