Booking.com reviews

Well, where should I begin? -Very outdated technology. Outdated here doesn't even describe it. If you work on backend for example, if you work long enough in Booking, you may not be hirable anywhere else! -People are nice as long as you don't do or say something against what they religiously believe (and I am not talking about religion), for example, if you ever get into a discussion about why not use Java more instead of Perl (and Java is surprisingly supposed to be an official supported language), someone could ask you to pack your bags and leave in public without any shame about it! -No one really understand what would it take to get promoted or get higher stocks/bonus. Very vague, very politically motivated. You can see people with 20+ years of experience who do most of the work and never get promoted and on the other hand, you can see someone who became a principal just 3 years after getting out of college! So go figure! -No testing and no code reviews. Company stats that we have "monitoring culture" instead of testing culture, which is fine, except that a developer wastes half of his productivity on roll-out and chasing crappy errors forever because of that! -No consistency in anything. You would have products and teams what people are fighting to work for and other products and teams that people are fighting to escape from! -Company thrives on the fact that people in there are free to work on whatever they want, but reality wise, people who are senior to you can shut you down any time, either directly, or by shaming you enough to quit what you are doing!

The London office has a horrible environment. Team leaders are a joke, especially on night shift. They are either having sex with their agents (who get moved to other teams) or they're making racist jokings or they're hiding from their team by having mysterious (work free) meetings constantly. They've no idea about procedures and just pressure you to hit KPIs like you're a robot. After your probation ends your team leader can decide to extend it if you didn't hit just ONE of your 6 stats, even though people from other teams were able to pass with worst stats. They also give bonuses based on if they like their agent and not on your actual performance. The job itself was exhausting when they put you for 8 hours straight on phones while coworkers get lots of picklist (emails). Procedures change every week and alot of times you'll have customers screaming at you over things that are not your fault. they pretend its just peak season that's super busy, NOT TRUE. That's just the period of time when it can take a MONTH to reply to customer. And you have to deal with the angry customer wondering why. During the training you get told ALOT about the premium pay but when you begin you get rostered as close to midnight as possible so they can cheat you out of as much premium pay as possible. This only happened to new staff because they changed the contracts to make you start whenever they want. Daytime pay sucks too because the job is super stressful and underpaid. They also pretend there's a high chance you get promoted but in reality promotions are decided unfairly and the only contracts they give out are temporary ones where you can have NO job security for like 6 months. Most people leave bitterly and don't last more than a year so they staff turn over is super high. Whenever you have an issue the team leaders turn into robots and can't have a human side AT ALL. The sickness and absence policy is crazy because you can only be sick OR late up to 3 times a year. I don't know anyone who doesn't need at least 3 forgivings in 12 months. After 3 instances I couldn't even help I had to have a formal meeting where my team leader told me I could be fired for gross misconduct if it happens again. Seriously?? Team leaders and managers also get fired randomly and an email will be sent to everyone explaining that they broke the code of conduct. Yet if you complain that your team leader has a racist sense of humour it can get downplayed? Team leader also follow you to the kitchen if you go for some water and ask you (with a nice smile) if you're on break or 'personal time' (10 minutes a day that you can use for your own time, that they discourage you from using because it messes your adherence). I truly wish I read an honest review like this before I started because I would not have wasted months of my life in a stressful job being treated like a slave. Good riddance.