Pros
For people with very little work history, Booking.com can be a great experience. Starting your career here will expose you to a couple of fundamental concepts in the online business (such as how to run a basic A/B test), and you’ll get to meet people from around the world. Others who have potential to thrive here are ones who need the instant gratification offered by Conversion Rate Optimization. In terms of CRO, Booking.com enjoys a substantial amount of traffic on which people working in IT can easily access to run experiments. Financially, Booking.com will be fine for the foreseeable future. Finally, the work life balance in IT / Product is quite good (though this is partly because nobody seems to be passionate about the products they are building).
Cons
For anyone other than those mentioned above, including those with any measurable work history or those who enjoy building great products consumers love, you will almost certainly find Booking.com to be a nightmare. The company is very political, title-driven, obstinate in its way of operating, and arrogant because of its past success. From a product perspective, Booking.com leadership seems unable to think about doing anything that might take longer than one week to build. Apart from doing A/B tests, the company is also not very data-driven. As a result, people who rise through the ranks are often those most adept at playing politics, who spend a lot of time talking over people’s heads and trying to sound more intelligent and actionable than they actually are. Booking.com doesn’t hire particularly strong, well-rounded people, so many people, when encountered with the show pony, foolishly trust that the show pony knows what he or she is talking about. In the end, nothing of value for the Booking.com consumer gets done, causing great frustration for results-driven employees who genuinely want to build great products consumers will love. Financially, Booking.com employees are highly undervalued. The company pays extremely poorly compared to anywhere considered a major tech hub, but extremely well compared to Eastern Europe, where no significant tech presence exists. As a result, the company relies greatly on the intra-European income disparity (as well as the 30% ruling) in order to be able to say it pays a competitive wage. The reality is that any of the top talent at Booking.com could easily go to the US West Coast and earn at least 3x the salary. The comp structure is also incredibly one-sided (three-year cliff vesting on stocks is the legal maximum, and Booking.com takes full advantage of that).
