Pros
- Great company to work for due to good work life balance, great colleagues (incl my mgt), very international and diverse work force, super secondary benefits & good personal career development. Bonus & equity make the reward very good. - Great secondary benefits (training budget, awesome lunch, drinks & parties, smart and nice colleagues, great office locations, solid HW). Most of these benefits are currently on hold due to the Covid situation though.
Cons
- There was a very strong entrepreneurial and open culture "where everything was possible" that is disappearing due to the successful company growth. Different kind of people are now being recruited and multiple (mainly Dutch) VP's have left in a relatively short time frame. The company is hence becoming more and more a corporate with more senior mgt & more processes and rules in place. - Booking Holdings VPs are taking over and this leads to more (short term) shareholder focus. - Some colleagues are pretty spoiled. Work/life balance is balancing to the wrong side as "minimal effort is often good enough" and amount of hours worked per day is minimal (especially within dev / data science roles). - There is a very diverse & inclusive culture that is very nice as it reflects our values (eg gay pride initiatives + US is for everyone campaign) but at other occasions the inclusiveness is going too far. Eg removing a picture of a piece of meat from the canteen wall as someone took offense. Everyone's opinion is deemed as important as the majority. Booking.com is very risk averse with this and seems to adhere to vocally strong & entitled minorities. - Covid is making a big impact on the business. This has currently a lot of impact on the current working atmosphere & motivation of colleagues. I expect that this will improve after the 2020 reorg and when a vaccine will motivate people to travel again. Lots of the secondary benefits are hence now on hold due to Covid.
