Tripadvisor reviews

3.5

50% would recommend to a friend

(1,373 total reviews)
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Matt Goldberg

24% approve of CEO

22% positive business outlook

Tripadvisor has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 1,373 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Tripadvisor employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
3.0
Mar 31, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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 my 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 (and 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 real 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.

3.0
Jan 10, 2011
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits package is great. Not only the 'normal' benefits that you get at a company, but being part of the Expedia network, there were a number of perks/discounts that you would get on travel.

Cons

Projects that I was working on kept having more and more layers of management added to them, until the managers were outnumbering the contributors. Scope creep was inevitable and projects that should have been pushed live months in advance, got held up with 'wait, one more feature before we release'

5.0
Dec 1, 2010

Great Job, Wicked Perks

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I'll start with the job part. Because I work on a small team I'm often able to take total ownership of what I'm working on which I find to be incredibly motivating. I can come up with an idea and literally see it through from start to finish. Obviously there are always times when I have to work on someone else's project or pitch in on other things, but generally speaking I've been allowed to essentially manage myself on a lot of things and I really like that. It's very, very rewarding to see something through from beginning to end and to know that if there's something you want to try there's a very good chance you'll have the opportunity. You don't need to be a silent robot here which was my biggest complaint about previous jobs and something I find incredibly demoralizing. Personally, even though there is a lot of work, I also feel very well compensated. I've worked just as hard at other places for peanuts so there you go. OK, now the perks--they're insane. Gym memberships, pet insurance, an iPod when you join, even help with adoption if you want it. Don't even get me started on Christmas.

Cons

As I said my team is small so there are times when I feel a little like I'm floating at sea on my own but really, those are the breaks. I'd rather have that problem than feel micro-managed.

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