Tripadvisor reviews

Terrible work environment. Favoritism is definitely seen

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the travel industry, and TripAdvisor was hit especially hard. The layoffs that followed were massive and reshaped the engineering organization overnight. The company lost an enormous amount of talent, including many of the most experienced engineers and leaders who carried crucial domain knowledge. Morale collapsed, and a wave of voluntary departures continued for months afterward. Since then, the company has never fully recovered. What used to be a cohesive culture gradually unraveled. Promotions came quickly for those who remained, but the lack of seasoned people to guide technical strategy became a long-term liability. Engineering depth and continuity suffered. What followed was a long series of reorganizations. For years now, it has felt like the company reshuffles its structure once or twice every year. Reorgs became a running joke internally. Each one disrupted team focus, slowed productivity, and forced everyone to adapt to new priorities and leadership structures before the last changes had even settled. There is also a huge operational cost to constant reorganization that often goes unacknowledged. Every reshuffle requires teams to rename themselves, recreate security groups, rebuild access structures, migrate permissions, reorganize Slack channels, update dashboards, adjust on-call rotations, reassign repos, and fix ownership mappings. Weeks of engineering time get spent on this instead of actual product work, and by the time things stabilize, another reorg is already looming. Across multiple rounds of layoffs, the company continued losing some of its most capable and seasoned engineers. Many people who were central to the culture and success of the company either left voluntarily or were laid off based on cost considerations rather than performance. Watching some of the strongest colleagues walk out the door year after year felt surreal. The knowledge gaps widened, productivity slipped, and the once strong engineering identity faded. Innovation stalled. Several new product attempts never gained traction, and large technical initiatives were abandoned mid-way at significant cost. Strategic direction became inconsistent, and communication from senior leadership often felt vague or misaligned across layers of the organization. Meanwhile, the stock price declined to historic lows, reflecting the lack of a clear long-term strategy and growing market uncertainty.