Recruiters have reached out a couple of times. Didn't go ahead earlier because I have heard some horror stories about antiquated tech stack & bad work. But I'm interested in knowing if things have changed\are changing. Any present\ex-Bookingers care to comment ? How's the work nowadays ? Is the management competent ? What about pay & wlb ? Looking for insights about the Amsterdam office in particular.
😅
Friend moved there and quit after a year. He loves the city tho cost of living is not cheap compared to a pay cut he took
Wlb is great! Management is disgusting. Tech stack is better in the “Bew product development” department. If you’re backend dev you’ll most likely end up touching pearl. If you’re a front end dev go to the NPD department (react) or to the hotel intranet (Vue) But again... mgmt is HORRIBLE... it is LITERALLY a Russian roulette
I work in NPD. Stack ain’t pretty at all! Microsoft has great PaaS in Azure. The container orchestration at Booking is years behind. No unit tests, no E2E coverage here at Booking. We recently got continuous integration in the form of Gitlab CI jobs. We don’t do CD yet.
Better than core tho
That bad ? 😂
Really depends on your role, your personality, expectations, goals... Netherlands is pretty chill WLB-wise, so our offices (there are a few in Amsterdam) kinda inherit that. Pay is peanuts compared to the US, but still good compared to the average Dutch salary, especially considering the 30% tax break. And that is the best part about Booking - it relocates you and your family to beautiful Amsterdam and pays an OK salary by Dutch standards. Many devs are first time immigrants relocated from the 3rd world countries (Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, India, Middle-Eastern countries...) setting up new life in Europe. Work can be painfully boring, kinda OK, or super frustrating, depending on your role, the track you’re in, and most importantly your manager and their manager. Many incompetent idiots became managers due to explosive staff growth in recent years. HR is understaffed and mostly useless in case shit hits the fan. A few cases of mental disorders (we call them ‘burnouts’ here) surfaced recently on Blind and in official channels. Offices have an open floor plan, so noise and constant distractions are an issue. Introverts struggle here. There’s chaos in internal processes and tooling. I believe we still have manual code rollouts whereas you rollout everything that was pushed by everyone since previous rollout. You can easily spend a day rolling out without luck because shit always breaks. To be fair, recently there were some positive changes there, but there’s still a long way to go. Here’s what folks at Stubhub told us about their former CTO who we hired after a year and a half of searching for one https://us.teamblind.com/s/8ANmOTPa I could go on, but I think you get the picture ;)
It is terrible. Stay away
How is Amsterdam socially, if you don't know anyone there?
Pretty shit, you are usually limited to expats, since Dutch are pretty closed off and most of the friends during the university.
Are the expats at least interesting or more like Zurich/Bay Area?
Have you talked with Uber in Amsterdam? Our tech stack is pretty modern, eng culture on par on what you’d expect within Silicon Valley / FANG and we pay above Booking from what I heard. It is probably harder to get in though.
Heard the work/life balance there is more like Silicon Valley. Most people putting in 10-12 hours a day (feel free to correct me)
Most people put in 40-45hours a week. Office is empty at 9:30am and mostly empty at 6pm. More than a third of people have small kids and people seem to be here after years. I also have kids and WLB works for me. But yes, sometimes you need to get on a call with SF later the night. The next day no one lifts an eyebrow if you come in at noon or WFH. I personally was not looking for the most possible chill workplace in Amsterdam: professional learning and top of the market comp were my main reasons.
Thanks for the response. Good to get more than one person's experience of a place.
The stack is getting better, but it is still mostly Perl, so it's not for everyone. We just got a new CTO after of being 1.5 years without one. I hope we will see more positive changes. Wlb is Great, at 17.30 office is empty. Pay is great for Amsterdam, new hires get 70k+ base a year plus if you come from outside of the Netherlands you will get 30% tax benefit. But as always with the big company we have some shit teams inside, so your experience depends on where you end up.
Can you name some teams which have started moving to newer tech stack ?
What other teams are there in amsterdam?