What do you really think about booking.com Amesterdam office? I’ve read it has a toxic envrionment. Is it true? I want to relocate to Amsterdam and start a whole new job and life. I need to make sure the office culture is healthy and this new job is going to an upgrade for me. On paper, Booking.com seems to have a lot of perks. But what is it like in reality?
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If you are a developer, it can get extremely frustrating. Too many seniors here who don't know very basic datastructure and algo stuff
I’m a data scientist. Any idea about DS team? How the manager is?
No matter which role, you will be rewarded for your PR skills than your work. AFAIK, there is a hiring freeze until end of this year except for some critical roles
If the role is open now, it’s critical. The company is one of the best you can go for in NL, especially for WLB, culture and people, but is going through a lot of change and if you are not the person who is adaptable and thrive into it, you’re gonna feel lost. If you are someone who is proactive and can use this storm on the travel industry to work your way into the org and work hard to get there, booking could be a rocket for your career, but it doesnt happen to everyone and it’s not for granted. Booking is def impacted but financially solid. On the other side, 30% ruling tax break is sweet and if you dont like it, we have uber and netflix as well as some startups. Dutch economy is also very strong.
Netflix doenst hire for all engineering positions as far as i know, i only saw one position which was heavy on the embedded side and integrations with TV etc. Do you know if they are expanding the engineering team here?
I did some research on booking and it looked good to me (prior to COVID) but I read some negative comments here on Blind about the company culture which worries me. But I guess no company is perfect and I just need to be great at my job hoping for the best. Thank you for your comment! Very helpful
Here is an article on Booking from a Dutch newspaper: https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2019/oud-werknemers-over-booking.com-het-is-een-grote-chaos/ . Use Google translate to read it
Thanks! Will give it a read
Read it and weep :'(
I interviewed for senior engineering manager. No coding, no system design, only people management. Seemed a bit strange.
Interesting! Did you get an offer?
No but seems a good place to work.
Not hiring at the moment. If you are relocating from USA or UK, we don't really need you or your shitty culture and politics. If relocating from other EU countries, that's cool.
None of that is true, we are still hiring for some roles.
Could you plz elaborate on UK culture? What parts you do not like?
Run away, a fast as you can. As someone that has been there for longer than 6 years te culture has gone down the shitter. Lots of good people, who have to unfortunately work with horrible backstabbing leadership everywhere. Broken performance cycle, and PIP's being used to keep people in place
What other companies do you suggest I look into instead? I am looking for a data science position.
Data Bricks
We are so frustrated by our leadership that our toxicity is leaking everywhere. /thread
That’s very unfortunate! Sorry to hear that.
It’s very different from team to team, most of them are not too toxic and very relaxed (lots of people doing nothing and willing to give a pass to some others). Management is incompetent and ruins any interesting project. If you are a developer, you will face very few interesting challenges due to managers and leadership shuffling things around all the time. Daily office life is mostly about politics.
How would you describe data science team?
I don’t work close to them. I know there are some good people there. The infra they use seems terrible but that’s the same for developers.
Blind is a really bad place to get this info. Booking's blind is 10x as toxic as the worst team you can end up on. The real problem is that travel is really suffering from COVID and after more than a decade of steady growth we don't really know what the future holds.
This.
You make the pandemic responsible for how badly the company is run for almost a decade? Don't fool yourself.
I was interviewing there in march. A lot of different opinions, i heard they use perl so not great and money is okayish
Did you get an offer? How long does the interview process take?
I didnt because they close roles because of pandemic, online assesment was pretty easy and phone too.