Pros
The people on the ground are very welcoming, friendly and helpful. They are usually very strong in their respective fields and willing to share that knowledge.
Cons
The management and the wages. We used to be rentalcars.com and the culture was great. We would have a lot of say in the systems we would engineer and the tech choices that underpin them. Now we've merged with booking.com and management has decided to go to the cloud, without consulting the engineers who have to build the systems or do the work. The decision-making for everything from team structure to technical directions seems very rushed and badly thought out. It feels like they desperately want to shut down engineering in Manchester (was rentalcars hq) and move it all over to Amsterdam (booking.com hq), the cloud is their vehicle to make this possible and they are willing to throw away great architecture and people just to do it.
