Tripadvisor

• A great place to learn coding style conventions, scoping of large projects, and many other skills necessary for software engineering careers.
• Free lunch.
• Great place to network with engineers. Lots of startups in the area are founded by ex-TripAdvisor employees.

• Little opportunity for advancement, and the company badly attempts to hide this by promising more opportunities 'if you work hard.'
• Vague guidelines for how to properly utilize the engineering rotation.
• Extremely poor management of technical debt.
• Outdated technological stack, and senior management is resistant to change.
• Tolerance of management/groups that are uncommunicative and insular.
• The HR department is behind the times.
• Very little standardization of technology between groups or even employees. Having employees configure their own dev boxes is a prime example that costs enormous amounts of productivity for minimal learning gains.
• The codebase is collapsing under its own weight. To their credit, they hired a senior engineer solely to mitigate this issue.

When I left the company, morale was quite low. Not only are there very few senior roles available, it is not attractive to take a senior role because the technologies and design philosophy are falling behind industry standards, hobbling the ability to jump to other companies or even to change position within the company.

First and foremost, I left because my technical manager was not managing. I was assigned a project that required around 50 days more work than my manager expected (not a typo). My requests for assistance or better scoping of the project were met with victim-blaming, lambasting me in front of the rest of my group every week for not having completed a Sisyphean task.

TripAdvisor does not have structures in place for employees to share their concerns about management. My situation shouldn't even have been possible.

In this position, the only way senior management can regain employee trust is to be honest and encourage transparent communication. Publish statistics regarding promotion rates and how much various employees like their teams. More importantly, publish how much employees like working with other teams. Have employees meet with HR quarterly to discuss their concerns about their work environment.