TripAdvisor Reviews in Newton, MA

Pros

Variety of technologies, smart engineers to learn from, flexibility, benefits, perks

Cons

politics, too many managers and

Pros

Good pay, friendly coworkers, really good lunches provided, interesting tech talks by fellow employees weekly, yearly week where you can work on your own projects

Cons

Company growing pains, so have to deal with a large codebase, some people (full-time employees) are overworked as they have the most knowledge of the system, and everyone goes to them for advice

Advice to Senior Management

Hire more people and get them really familiar with the codebase to share the load, otherwise, great job - it's a great and exciting place

Pros

Everyone in engineering is extremely sharp and capable. This is a great place to get some hands on web development experience on a large and complex site. You will be writing server-side code that must scale to handle millions of requests, not just CSS/javascript when I say web development. The engineering philosophy is to encourage all engineers to handle all layers in the stack so you will be writing CSS and javascript though, in addition to backend code. This cuts both ways. It's really interesting when you're starting out because you will learn a lot and feel a great sense of ownership over the entire project you're working on, but after a while you might decide there are parts of the stack that you'd prefer not to work on...

My compensation was pretty good when I started and I got a nice merit raise after a year.

Your engineering co-workers will be fun to work with and more than willing to pull their weight. I didn't encounter any dead weight while I was working there. The hiring process seems to do a good job filtering out under-qualified and under-performing candidates.

Cons

The interviewing process is very heavy on algorithms and data structures questions which might make you believe that those are the kind of problems you'll be encountering on a daily basis. This really isn't the case. Trip needs to hire really smart people because there is a very large, 10+ year old codebase and often times a project will require making changes/additions to parts of this complex web of interconnected classes. Basically, it helps to be a genius if you want to read the code and understand it.

The interviewing process also serves as an excellent weeding out mechanism, but many of the recent grad hires don't really have any real coding experience so the maintainability of the code they write leaves something to be desired.

The reality of working here as an engineer is that because they want you to work on the entire stack for every project, you will be writing a non-trivial amount of CSS and javascript. At first, if you're like me and really never did that kind of work before, you'll learn a lot, but after a while you might get tired of trying to a page element around the page and making the styles look correct in IE6. There are some projects that are heavier on this than others and your mileage may vary based on the group you're on. After a while if you realize there are parts of the stack you'd like to avoid, it becomes difficult to avoid them. Changing groups is something that is discussed as a viable option, but it's pretty difficult from what I saw. Your manager might try to take these preferences into account, but you will not be able to escape IE6 display bugs if you're in a group work on any user-facing code. If you're completely opposed to doing any client-side work don't work here, or make sure you're being hired into a group that never does live site work.

The management hierarchy is flat (but growing taller), which means that your chances for advancement aren't super-promising. You can see some people being groomed, shaking the right hands and playing the politics correctly to be promoted into the lower management layer. I wasn't striving to be a middle-manager in a 100+ person engineering dept. and if you want to stay on the coding side of the fence there aren't really many places to go. They hire startup-minded people so churn is inevitable.

If you're smart (and you are if you get hired here), you'll probably be intellectually challenged for a year or two, learn a lot, and write code that millions of people will use daily, but after that you will probably get bored and want to move on. The nature of the skills they help you develop makes you well-suited to work at a startup because you've worked on all parts of the web development stack and you're now familiar with lots of the non-engineering aspects of creating and maintaining a profitable web site.

Pros

Lunch is provided 3 days out of the week!
Benefits are good from what the full-time employees said.
Great people to work with.
Casual dress code.

Cons

The computer I used while at TripAdvisor was terrible always shutting down.
As a temp your not always included in the events and informational meetings.
I didn't have orientation so I didn't get the background on the company.
I wasn't offered a full-time position at the end of my contract.

Advice to Senior Management

When someone is a temp don't refer to them as an intern.

Pros

In general, coworkers are dedicated and smart so it's a place where you can learn from others. The pace is very quick but that means you get a lot done so you always have a feeling of accomplishment and are always busy. There are opportunities to do more or take on special projects or additional responsibilities. The engineering group in general is wonderful to work with in any capacity. The free lunch is a nice fringe benefit. I think it can be good place if you're young and you want to work on a known product to get some work experience at a fast paced company and if you have a good manager.

Cons

Although you will accomplish a lot because of the fast paced environment, you are always asked or expected to cut corners which gets tiring especially when cutting out features means a poor product in the end that isn't what is needed. Also, every project has to be justified by numbers so if there is a project that needs to be done but the numbers don't back it up, it will probably get shot down.

One of the big issues at the company is that there is a lot of favoritism that goes on. This results in individuals being promoted because are liked by upper management because they did one thing well in the past or have become friends with the right people but they don't actually have the skills to be a people manager or to lead a team. This means that some managers overseeing their teams as a vehicle to make himself or herself look good to the higher ups while the individual team members careers are completely ignored. Also the favoritism can also be quite blatant as there are some coworkers who get away with doing very little because they report to a friend. Unfortunately the favoritism does lead to low morale which is ignored because the manager doesn't want to deal with the issue at hand in a constructive mature manner.

There is very little praise and recognition if you're not someone's favorite or aren't constantly selling yourself, even if it means stepping on other coworkers, so you will never get recognition or any sort of praise for doing a great job on something or going the extra mile. I think this leads to the feeling and perception that managers and above don't care about individuals.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop promoting within just because someone did their job well for awhile and stop allowing friends to promote friends. Managing people is a skill and needs to be learned so train folks on that skill or hire people who actually know how to manage (as in look out for and support) their team members.

You have some very smart people there, especially the ones who do the day-to-day tasks that do the behind the scenes work. You should be doing what you can to keep them. Free lunch is not enough.

Speed only means you get a lot done but it's not good quality. Quality does matter in the end so let the engineers take the time to build good thought out products once in awhile.

Please address the favoritism that is right in front of you. It can be outrageous at times and leads low morale.

Pros

The perks are great. There is a really good benefits package (medical/dental/etc), and then a ton of stuff to keep employees happy at the main Newton campus - catered lunches, sodas, snacks, foosball, gaming systems, a kegerator, the list goes on.

Pretty much everyone I worked with was very bright - the bar to get in is set pretty high, and there is an informal 'no a**holes policy' that is fairly effective (though opinions on this my vary based on your own definition).

Their development methodology is better than a lot of larger engineering groups. The company motto 'Speed Wins' continues to be applied to a development group that has grown by a ridiculous amount for the past few years (also a con, see below), and fortunately things are still moving quickly.

Work/life balance is good. There are rarely any (as in I never personally experienced any) crunch-time periods on projects.

The CEO knows what he's doing and is leading the company in a good direction.

Cons

If you're a Java developer and enjoy writing code like it's 1997, by all means join the development team! The codebase is a mess. It has grown organically over the last decade or so, and is unwieldy and not well architected (and therefore harder to understand and maintain). The coverage of the testing frameworks that are in place is nowhere near where it should be, and so very little refactoring happens to improve the situation. Traditional singletons are everywhere. There are methods that are thousands of lines long. It's a jungle. To some extent there is a not-invented-here mindset; bringing in 3rd party code isn't encouraged and must be approved by management. People who are hired are smart and expected to write code that works, but they don't necessarily know how to write clean code that is maintainable, and management doesn't put much value on that either.

As mentioned in the 'pros' section development is still approached like the company is a five person startup. This works to varying degrees with a team 20x that size. There's no real methodology backing it (scrum, XP, lean, etc). This contributes to the existing mess of code.

The bar for entry into the company is set pretty high; the interview process is pretty tough, and candidates are expected to have a very strong CS background. During interviews the company is presented as a real interesting place to work with a lot of tough software challenges around scalability. This gets a lot of people excited, but the reality is much less dramatic. It seems that a lot of really bright people come through the door only to end up with pretty menial work, often maintaining a mess of code that was written up in a hurry by someone else.

Advice to Senior Management

Engineering leadership should be providing guidance on implementation, not making decisions for the people actually doing the work. The code review process is overly restrictive and focuses too much on code conventions instead of more important issues like testability and code structure.

Start lowering the bar for some engineering positions; people don't need to know how to most efficiently implement binary search tree operations or big-O complexity for sorting algorithms to just maintain code and tweak HTML. You hire a lot of bright people with high expectations for what they'll get to work on, and often disappoint them.

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

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

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.)