Great place to work! But stop paying ex-grads / ex-juniors lower salaries
Pros
Booking.com offers great work-life balance and has a very open-minded and inclusive culture. I've never worked with so many nationalities in my life. The company really makes and effort to accommodate the needs of every employee. As a product owner you get quite a lot of freedom to set the vision together with your team and to determine the long-term roadmap of your product, as long as all decisions are backed up by data. As the company is quite bottoms-up, people are generally encouraged to speak up and challenge their seniors on decision making. Benefits are quite good. There's a monthly office party with free drinks, you get a generous relocation package when you move to the Netherlands, you get parts of your first bike paid for and as a Tech employee you have a yearly conference budget of 700 eur.
Cons
- Former graduates and junior get promoted to professional level, but don't receive the average salary for the role. There's no explanation as to why this is or what they can do to get proper compensation. This is discouraging! - They trust the A/B test tool way too much, rather than their own intuition. An incorrect setup of a bug fix in the A/B tool can lead to public shaming by nitpicky data scientists which has teams re-running a test for the same basic bug, purely for the sake of complying with the tool.