Pros
At Skyscanner you generally feel well taken care of. The offices, IT, equipment, induction etc are all great. The pay is fairly competitive too; for the roles I was aware of in Edinburgh, I don't think you could really do much better. The people are generally good and they certainly pay a lot of lip-service to fairness, respect, equality etc in the workplace. I never felt like I was under an undue amount of pressure or that I was treated badly or spoken to rudely by a single person ever. In the good times (pre-COVID), it was still a growing business with great economics that genuinely believed in letting the staff share the rewards of that growth. I'm sure those times will come again and, when they do, it'll be very enjoyable to be part of that journey.
Cons
The company is extremely processes-heavy and it's very, very hard to really get anything done. They are tied up with bureaucracy and legacy and asking for endless business cases for doing even the most trivial things. They somehow hope to catch up to the competition by going slower than them. The leadership talk about a 'bias to action' but the reality is there is a bias to documentation. The endless, endless documents can really drag you down. If you ask a simple question, you will be hammered with links to about a day's worth of reading instead of getting an answer. The product side of the business has far too little drive and too much ownership. They seem to gate-keep the resource for everything while contributing very little in terms of initiatives that actually take the business forward. Trying to fix or improve even the smallest thing, like replacing an outdated airline logo, can take days and days of being passed from squad to squad because nobody wants to take ownership of anything. Engineering resource is impossibly limited, despite something like 60% of the business being engineers. I literally have no idea what they do all day. They're very proud of their 'ship rate' but so little actually changes that you'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the site today and 12 months ago. The actual product itself, the website, is getting desperately behind the competition. I myself use Kayak when I'm booking my flights because it's better! Rank and file staff often suggest feature improvements but they are hand-waived away by senior leaders as being not important, while instead, they focus on 'brand' and what they *think* travellers want/need. The old leaders of the business that made it great are long gone and those in charge now seem to lack real vision. Although there are a lot of talented and dedicated people at Skyscanner, the overall standard is surprisingly low for somewhere that has such a ridiculously onerous interview process. There are a lot of people, including at Director level and above, who have absolutely no business being in their positions.
