If you are a Software Engineer, this place is not suitable for you - Software Developer Booking.com Employee Review

1.0
Aug 5, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Good relocation and visa support

Cons

- Software Developers are second class citizens, they are seen as 'Developers' not 'Engineers'. - No CTO for more than a year, upper management is not addressing the present issues. They are just keep lying and avoiding challenging questions during AMAs. One example is: someone asked the leadership about why the glassdoor rating is so low? They have answered that the company have a good rating (3.1) and the reason it's not great is other departments. But when you filter reviews with keyword 'Developer' you will see the Development rating is 2.4 and actually this department is having the biggest problems. - Mid level management is terrible, you can find out designers/copy writers/hr people there. There was even a presentation from one of those about how to manage people whom you don't understand work of. They don't understand developers and just make life terrible for developers and during performance reviews you will get a random score thanks to these people. - Senior/principal developers are blocking all the innovation and company is stuck with old tech and a terrible set of tools. Propose a new language or start a new project and Perl dinosaurs will come after you and block your project. - There are no code reviews or unit/integration tests. Deployments are manual you have to spent hours and hours to deploy your changes and test everything manually. Development tools and environment is terrible. Mediocre developers are always there to break the development environment by pushing their codes without testing and they get away with this thanks you mid level management. - This company is not a tech company at all, you will see it's struggling around this all the time. The company tries to build new products and fails miserably. The containers infrastructure is being build for more than two years and they keep revamping it before reaching to the usable state. - Failures are justified with 'Learnings' all the time and there is no accountability. - People are very selfish and only think about their own interests because of broken performance evaluation and reward processes. The management is either failing to see this or they are doing the same thing. Product Owners will justify stupid, broken ideas that will keep them alive or help grow their head count. Manager of software developers will take stupid technical decisions even though they are incompetent just for their own good and result will be very bad for the company and developers working under them. Some developers will keep lying and coasting doing minimum work and their team will not get this, it will only frustrate other developers around. - Developer experience is terrible, no good tools/processes and also they install spyware on your computer to track everything you do. - There are also really good people around but they leave for better opportunities, the company is failing to retain the talent it has, only the worst people or people who are waiting to finish their 5 years to get a european passport will stay. - Most of my colleagues were depressed and I have seen lots of people going to a burnout leave. - There is no clear career opportunities, promotions depend on drinking buddies.

Explore other reviews about Booking.com

5.0
May 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great, definitely recommend if looking for start up

Cons

No cons all pros only

avatar
Booking.com Response
2d
Hi, thank you for the wonderful feedback! We're so glad to hear that Booking.com has been a great fit for someone with a startup mindset. Our culture of experimentation and innovation is something we're really proud of, and it's great to know it resonates. We hope you continue to thrive here! The Booking.com team
3.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexibility, make your own schedule

Cons

NO learning and development Opportunities for growth often required moving into a different role or team found the compensation to be below market

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