Skyscanner Reviews

Pros

Low pressure environment, it really doesn't matter if your squad doesn't hit deadlines or doesn't deliver any real value. Pay is decent. Low/mid level colleagues are friendly and approachable. You can work from home (WFH) two or three days a week without anyone batting an eye.

Cons

The newly installed CEO (Moshe Rafiah) is a mouthpiece for the parent company Ctrip. Devoid of vision and likes to spout empty platitudes. Quite clearly brought in to slash headcount at the company, close offices and cut costs. The company as a whole lacks any coherent vision for the future. Product leadership is weak - the evidence and data led approaches from when the founder Gareth and his appointed successor Bryan were CEO is gone and the usual 'features for the sake of features' mindset has set in. Features are shipped and then teams are reallocated without measuring RoI or the effectiveness of what was added. Long term I see the stagnation of the core product (cheap flight search) as the leadership is running scared from Google Flights and is desperately trying to stay relevant. Product management is overstretched and without focus. All low level product managers within the company were served redundancy notices, leading to the already distant and distracted senior product management to be further overstretched. The more competent offices in the company are being closed and the staff made redundant. The Budapest office contained the bulk of the mobile app experience and expertise and the Singapore office was staffed with hard working and competent engineers and product leadership. Instead the company has chosen to renew its focus on the lacklustre, disorganised and error prone teams in China. Progression is nigh on impossible at the company. Expectations for promotion involve impact and reach that aren't possible given the extremely hierarchical and closed off Tribe/Squad structure that Skyscanner uses. Expect stagnation and stress when at every 6 monthly performance review meeting you're told to stop writing code and to focus on generating more confluence documents, setting up meetings to bloviate endlessly and deliver nothing of value to our travellers. This review sounds extremely negative and you may well be asking "why hasn't this person spoken to their manager" - management at Skyscanner exists to maintain the status quo. If you want to change things for the better be prepared to be called out for your difficult attitude, then marginalised and ignored. The teams in China work distressingly long hours. It's not unusual for them to be responding at 3 or 4pm UK time (close to midnight in Shenzhen). The management in the UK see this as a positive, despite the output of those teams being enabled by other squads in the company and the constant stream of incidents those teams generate. The company has a progressive attitude towards WFH but refuses to contemplate remote working patterns. The initial WFH attitudes were set by the founder and original Scottish leadership. As the company has become more corporate, American and Chinese led these attitudes have ossified and progressive changes to working patterns are dismissed or outright refused. Employees who deliver no value and who do little work are rarely put on performance improvement plans and dismissed. High performers aren't rewarded. It's a culture of "keep your head down and get through the week" that rewards mediocrity over all else.

Pros

The company offices are very friendly, pleasant places to work and there is a really forward thinking work-from-home culture. Essentially, work-from-home whenever you want. An exceptionally high fraction of employees are considerate, friendly and intelligent. This ranges from intern to executive level. I have never worked at a place with so many pleasant individuals. The company, and all its employees, emphasise the maxim "Traveller first, partner second, Skyscanner third". Everything that is built is done to improve the product for our customers. When you tell someone you work at Skyscanner, they say "wow, Skyscanner is awesome".

Cons

Working at Skyscanner is a headache. The largest challenges at the company relate not to the work itself, but to navigating Skyscanner's confusing organisational structure. Teams are scattered across different offices. Projects get prioritised, de-prioritised and re-prioritised according to no discernible criteria. Autonomous squads work towards wildly different goals, collaborate poorly, constantly repeat each other's work and build systems that do not communicate with each other. Internal data is a mess and almost everyone who has worked in a data-related discipline is jaded by it. The greatest positives about the company have been rendered obsolete by covid-19: the friendly office is closed and the forward thinking work-from-home culture duplicated by all other companies. Skyscanner cannot be faulted for this, but it is worth stating nonetheless. More worrying has been the way in which the company has undermined its own values – previously its greatest trait – by its approach to recent redundancies. Everyone within the organisation expected them, and no one will fault the organisation for needing to make them. But the manner in which they have occurred was poor. Communication was consistently unclear and certain senior leaders did not reach out to check in with their employees. There was also a strong disconnect between how employees were previously emotively asked to sacrifice salary to save Skyscanner, and then offered poor severance packages when made redundant. It felt like Skyscanner disregarded the empathy it so frequently preaches. The new CEO is poorly perceived internally, and there is a wide perception that he has been brought in solely to enact redundancies. There is a reason why the vast majority of recent Glassdoor reviews either disapprove of, or have no opinion of, the CEO.