TripAdvisor Reviews

Pros

Benefits package is great. Not only the 'normal' benefits that you get at a company, but being part of the Expedia network, there were a number of perks/discounts that you would get on travel.

Cons

Projects that I was working on kept having more and more layers of management added to them, until the managers were outnumbering the contributors. Scope creep was inevitable and projects that should have been pushed live months in advance, got held up with 'wait, one more feature before we release'

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the layers of middle management and move in a more agile manner, releasing code more frequently and iterating based upon feedback.

Pros

Gold-standard benefits, competitive salaries, stable high-growth company, smart and driven coworkers, great opportunities for young/new employees to learn and grow (to a certain point), easy access to highway for suburban people

Cons

Management team micro-manages, little room for experienced hires to grow, poor work-life balance, no thank yous or appreciation for good work, heavy territorial politics among senior management team, not easy access to the MBTA

Advice to Senior Management

Give your mid-level managers enough guidance on what you want done and then back off and let them do their jobs. Stop reorganizing the company again and again.

Pros

I'll start with the job part. Because I work on a small team I'm often able to take total ownership of what I'm working on which I find to be incredibly motivating. I can come up with an idea and literally see it through from start to finish. Obviously there are always times when I have to work on someone else's project or pitch in on other things, but generally speaking I've been allowed to essentially manage myself on a lot of things and I really like that. It's very, very rewarding to see something through from beginning to end and to know that if there's something you want to try there's a very good chance you'll have the opportunity. You don't need to be a silent robot here which was my biggest complaint about previous jobs and something I find incredibly demoralizing.

Personally, even though there is a lot of work, I also feel very well compensated. I've worked just as hard at other places for peanuts so there you go.

OK, now the perks--they're insane. Gym memberships, pet insurance, an iPod when you join, even help with adoption if you want it. Don't even get me started on Christmas.

Cons

As I said my team is small so there are times when I feel a little like I'm floating at sea on my own but really, those are the breaks. I'd rather have that problem than feel micro-managed.

Advice to Senior Management

I guess I would say just keep the door open so-to-speak. I think the more communication there is the smoother things run.

Pros

cutting-edge company that's growing rapidly

Cons

unhealthy behavior of some of those in leadership

Advice to Senior Management

get rid of the employees in leadership who are toxic for the co and those they are leading

Pros

TripAdvisor offers great benefits, but they're unfortunately overshadowed by bad middle-management and in my case, a horrible manager experience. Some of the benefits:
- Pay is excellent
- Benefits (health, dental, even pet insurance) are great
- Free catered lunch three times per week
- Unlimited snacks/beverages
- Good number of vacation & sick days even for entry-level
- Flexible in terms of time off/working from home (depends on supervisor, so I didn't benefit here)

Also, TripAdvisor has a ton of great people who are passionate about their jobs, and you can learn so much from them if you have the opportunity to work with the right people.

Cons

My experience at TripAdvisor was horrible because of my supervisor. She got me in trouble for being motivated and trying to take on more responsibility (in addition to what my role already required), which is so counterintuitive. Although the company boasts flexibility as a benefit (working from home during storms or when sick, or adjusting hours slightly if you live far away), my boss was a nazi about it. One time I got into a car accident in an ice storm on the way to work, and went back home to work from there the rest of the day, and she still gave me a hard time about not coming in.

Personal experience aside, there was also a lot of office politics in middle-management. Sure, the company went through some growing pains, which is understandable. But considering that the mantra is "speed wins," speed became impossible with the growing amounts of red tape around product reviews. Middle-management also manages by fear, so although the CEO encourages people to try new things even if it means failing, it's hard to take that leap when middle-management might hold your job accountable.

Although they claim that they prefer promoting/hiring from within (essentially, switching departments) it's near impossible to do so. If anything, you'll be belittled for asking. Also, don't ever confide in HR for anything. If you tell one of them something in confidence, it will be the newest office gossip the next day.

Advice to Senior Management

Steve, take a good hard look at middle-management. You claim to have a no-assholes policy, but you hired plenty to work directly beneath you. TripAdvisor has tons of great people who are smart, friendly, and passionate about making TripAdvisor a better site and product. But they're being stifled by several of the VP/Senior-level people.

Pros

Decent benefits and advancement opportunities. Compensation is fair, and culture is pretty laid-back and open. Things get done, often quickly, and employee input is valued. Teams usually work together well without unhealthy competition. I like the people -- a lot.

Cons

Recognition of achievements and contributions is not senior management's forte. As I mentioned above, I think compensation adequately reflects contributions and achievements, but it's not a place where you get many warm fuzzy feelings or often feel appreciated in a qualitative way.

Advice to Senior Management

It seems like we're in a period where we're trying to figure out what kind of culture we're going to have going forward. As the company gets bigger I worry a bit about a more rigid hierarchical culture making inroads. Certainly to some extent adjustments have to be made as any company grows, and such a culture is obviously more easily scalable than a more open-door, fly by the seat of your pants culture, but I think we have to be careful about losing too much of the small-company agility and openness that in my opinion have been among the primary drivers of our success so far.

Pros

There is a pragmatic attitude of getting things done which matches my own. There's also a pretty good understanding of what engineers like me are and are not interested in doing.

Work/life balance is respected - working hours are flexible and I've never had trouble taking time off or working from home when necessary. I rarely feel pressured to work extra hours or rush things.

The catered lunches are a nice perk - they remove one thing to worry about.

Cons

The 'pragmatic attitude' mentioned above does not suit everyone. From an engineering point of view it means the emphasis is on making things work rather than making all the code perfect and beautiful.

As the company grows, it is becoming increasingly compartmentalized. For example, the area of the site I work on has become narrower as the work is spread out among more engineers. (However I have mentioned this to my managers and feel confident I could switch to something else if I wanted to).

I rarely find time to use the games room or kegerator.

Advice to Senior Management

Give up on the line about TA being like a startup that happens to be big - it really isn't any more.

As I mentioned above, the company is becoming more compartmentalized, and there are hints that there is growing internal competition between teams. I don't think this is good for any of us. Encouraging sideways mobility could help reduce the problem - i.e. make it easier for employees to move between teams and work on different parts of the site. (Letting them work together will achieve more than making them eat lunch together.)

Pros

I loved the people I worked with, I always felt like there was an endless amount of information for someone to teach. I have never been surrounded by so many intelligent people.

Cons

TripAdvisor is often unclear in the reasoning for management moves, I wish there was a little more transparency in regards to promotions and performance

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the strong work, TripAdvisor is a very efficiently run business and is a perfect example of speed to market success

Pros

Engineering: The hiring mantra is "great, not good", and the company lives up to it. ALL of the engineers are top-notch - seriously. Furthermore, although the engineering dept has close to doubled every year for three or four years, they've managed to maintain a great culture - you can go to any developer, ask a question, and get a friendly response, a detailed answer, or (at the very least) information on who would be a better source.

The code base is big, and it takes a while to learn - but the technologies are all mainstream open source (Java, Velocity, Postgres, etc.), and there are three or four monthly engineering brown-bag sessions to go over different aspects of the code, best practices, or open Q&As with the VP of engineering. There is an engineering meeting once a week to discuss riskier code designs - this is open to all engineers, and though the presenters are sometimes sent back to the drawing board, it's kept the code base reasonably clean.

Projects are (very!) short, creating the opportunity to work on lots of different things, all the time. If you don't like your project this week, wait three days and you'll be on something else. You won't end up on an 18 month project that gets cancelled. Likewise, with projects this short, there aren't any deathmarches. There are sometimes long hours to make a launch, but things are generally very flexible. We all use laptops, and no one bats an eye if you have to work from home because of a doctor's appointment, waiting for a cable guy, car in the garage, etc. On snow days, there's an unofficial custom of sending a "working from home" email in haiku format.

The tools are generally very good - MacBook Pros, 30" monitors, your choice of IDE, etc. There've been some growing pains in getting people up to an adequate amount of memory (some people are still using older machines limited to 4Gb, new developers get 8Gb), devservers with enough resources to run bigger services, and machines to test Internet Explorer, but that's mostly been fixed. There is a commitment to streamline development, primarily in terms of equipment - there is no set project management methodology (Agile, SCRUM, etc.), as short projects and small teams (usually 1-2 people) generally don't require something formal. Processes are generally kept to a reasonable level.

Product Marketing: This is where many of the complaints in the older reviews come from, and (being an engineer) I have less information about this. However, things seem to be generally better than last year, and on an overall upward trajectory. The people I interact with directly on projects (all below the director level) are fun to work with and highly competent. Again, I don't know much about the politics, but there have been some good hires, and there seems to be a lot less angst on that side of the building than last year.

General: There are lots of nice things about working at TripAdvisor. As everyone says, there are a lot of small perks - three free lunches per week, the wall of snacks, free drinks, video games, flex time, shuttle to green line, etc. Also, the employees are trusted with a lot of information about the company - 3-4 times a year, there's an all-hands meeting where the CEO goes over the financials, discusses targets and results. It's nice working for a company that's bizarrely profitable. Last year was the best year in the company's history. People are nice. And finally, it's nice working on a product that people recognize and like.

Cons

It would have been easier to pan the engineering department in previous years, but most of the day-to-day problems have been addressed over the past six months. One thing to mention is that, because most of the projects are very short, there aren't many opportunities to work on big teams, on large features that fundamentally alter the site or change the architecture. They do exist - for instance, this year they're putting a lot of effort into Facebook-related features, last year they launched the new Flights product, and the year before they added vacation rentals - but these projects are much less frequent, and most of the time you'll be working on short projects. To some degree, this is a matter of taste - with lots of small projects, you get to touch lots of different areas, learn lots of new things, and there's remarkably little territoriality about code. On the other hand, you probably won't "own" a section of the code, or write a brand new subsystem from scratch.

Also, with a ten year old codebase, there's some amount of cruft from previous versions. For example, there are still cleanup projects to convert XSL pages into Velocity, and not all of the services have been upgraded to a newer style. By its nature, this gets better asymptotically, but will never be completely fixed.

Advice to Senior Management

Life as an engineer is good at TripAdvisor, and keeps getting better. If significant unresolved problems remain on the product marketing side, then this should be your most important *management* challenge (as opposed to *strategic* or *leadership* challenges). Consider it your personal BHAG: make TripAdvisor the best place in Boston to work for PMs below the director level.

Pros

great place to work, great people

Cons

the building is so big you never see the same person twice

Advice to Senior Management

continue to grow