Hopper reviews

Hopper is into STO (single threaded ownership) in a big way (they lifted this, as well as many "core values" from Amazon). This means that each team is theoretically responsible for a one or more product features which typically translates to some components in the mobile apps (iOS/Android) and one or more micro-services (of which there are dozens). In practice, since there is one code base for iOS and one for Android, you have dozens of separate teams all contributing code with little way of enforcing consistency in the UI or in the code itself. Unit testing is inadequate and consider yourself lucky if you find any actual comments in the code. High level executives have told people that "your opinion doesn't matter - it's only what the customer wants". This is an eyebrow raising concept which reminds one of the old automaker quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Hopper instead makes all decisions based on A/B tests. This is fine for deciding on some aspects of the application, but it doesn't take an A/B test to understand that not all customers want to "tip" Hopper by default when booking an airline flight (quite the dark pattern) or that the hotel pricing display is confusing. There is no central engineering function - everything reports up to the STO leader which means in practice engineering reports to product. This means there is constant pressure to make short-sighted decisions to deliver the next product feature that inevitably mean taking short cuts and piling on more technical debt. At some point a reckoning will come and I'd be cautious about being there when it does. It is especially bad in some teams where the STO leader doesn't have an engineering background and doesn't value unit testing, solid code review practices or general architecture. Regardless of your seniority or experience, you are expected to just pull tickets off the Jira backlog like some sort of short-order cook. Heaven forbid you try and take the long view and advocate for putting in place better architecture, testing frameworks or tools to support your job.

Hey, I wanted to share some stuff about where I work. The Flight department has a lot of bullying and teammates using bad language, which really sucks. The top management is all about money and they put a ton of pressure on the middle managers to be rude and push the team to the limit. Forget about having any work-life balance because they have this on-call system that wakes you up at 2 AM on a freaking Saturday! And here's the thing, they don't have a clue about how to develop software or design a good user experience. It's a mess. The only thing they seem to care about is making loads of money by selling additional stuff and fintech to poor travelers. It's like, give us 50 bucks and we'll save your hotel/flight/car for 24 hours. It's pretty sketchy. And to make matters worse, they don't even know much about the industry. They just slapped together this crappy interface to sell flights and houses from other suppliers. It's a total mess. They managed to trick Capital One and a few other investors into putting their money into this startup, but honestly, most of the cash is just going to benefit a handful of top managers. To be honest, I don't have high hopes that we'll survive until 2025. The way we do business is shady as hell.