Wants to know the average comp at Booking.com vs Uber, Amsterdam for someone with less than 1 YOE? And approximately how much can I save in an year, considering me being a single guy here. I just joined at Amazon India. Thanks.
If you want to make a lot of money stick to India/U.S If you want to come here and chill in Amsterdam then yeah Booking or just any company in Netherlands. Tech/growth wise, booking.com is a career killer unless you are a solid politician and you being a fresher might not be so great at politics. So my practical advice would be to stick in FANG until L6 or 7 and then move to Booking for a retirement job with a million $ RSUs
Would disagree on the career killer comment. Plenty of opportunity for good people.
Hard to get interviews without referrals. Booking is notoriously well known for our questionable development practices
Base comp at Uber should be a similar thing, I'd say a bit more. Stock grant will push it up more, maybe another 20%, but don't have an exact data for eng1s.
Stick to Amazon India. Booking is a career sucide. As far as FANGs are concerned the most boring jobs are shipped here. Cools ones are at the valley.
More than a few people have moved on to FB in the UK after completing the year as a grad. So career suicide it is not. Also, another perk of moving here is 20% of a citizenship per year. 5 years and you get yourself a shiny new passport.
Yes. The worthy grads move on. But in a traditional software company, you learn in your job. What do you think grads learn at booking? This means, the burden of keeping their skills sharp falls on what they do after work. Not an ideal situation, if you care about work life balance. Let’s be real, slapping if else all day is not innovation or learning by any metric.
Uber Amsterdam has 70-80K EUR TC for new grad engineers (most of that cash, some equity). However, most positions are for more experienced ones, there are few, sometimes no junior openings. Uber Amsterdam is professionally a really good place to work - for people into backend, especially distributed systems - it’s hands down one of the best in EU. The work is the same as one would do in eg SF . It’s critical to the company & the upcoming IPO - building all of Uber’s payments systems, worldwide. Comp wise also one of the top, on par with FB in London or Google in Zurich. One thing that Booking is better at is their relocation services - they have a team to take care of literally everything I’ve heard. You can always try joining Booking and later apply to Uber as well - we have quite a few incoming people. Just make sure to keep your tech chops fresh, not all teams at Booking are on the cutting edge. Amsterdam is a cool place to live.
Grad position at Booking pays around 50k+10% cash bonus. After one year, if not terrible, you get hired as Core dev for around 60-65k+15-30% cash bonus+5-30k stocks (variable part according to performance). Within 1.5 years you can become Senior dev if you're good, which gets you to 80-100k+20-40% cash+30-80k stock. For each promotion above that, add 20k to salary range, 5-10% to cash, roughly double the stock. Merit increases around 5% per year, if you're performing well. If you underperform for the year, you get no bonus. Regarding how interesting the job is... It really depends on where you end up going to. There's people doing actual cutting edge stuff (distributed systems, low level optimization, I can't really share some of the stuff, I think). There's others basically writing code to populate data to render a page on the website. You could be writing a new service which will run on hundreds/thousands of servers. Or you could be making bugfixes to a web page used by customer service... There's a lot of bitter people with the company right now, I would say more so than the average. It's a transition period for the company, so in my mind that's natural. There's also a lot of happy people with the company. Wrong people were hired/promoted into the wrong teams so there's a lot of variance.
Graduates don’t get paid as much as core devs when they get hired as core devs. They also don’t the bonus at the end of their first year. A lot of bitter people mainly due to rampant favoritism at workplace. Software engineering managers, who have never written any software. They would promote anyone to be a manager, as long as you please the right people.
They do get a bonus now. It's true that they get paid less than new hires upon promotion, that is because when promoted you get the bottom of the new range and new hires can, and will, negotiate their salaries.
If you are political mastermind - Booking is your choice. Otherwise - better to stay away.
Less than 1YOE gets you a graduate position at Booking. 47k/y + 10% bonus. If you live on your own in Amsterdam you could save 12k or more depending on how much you travel. Sharing or living far from the city could let you save twice as much.
Would you advice me try to get in there, if I am able to save around 6-7k/y by working here in India only. Right now, I am just liking the idea of Living in Amsterdam, though I have heard a lot cons of working at Booking.com on the tech front.
Amazon India will look better on your resume than booking.com or even Uber in Amsterdam. Not worth it if you care about long term career.