The shit of booking.com
A few times every month someone asks me how is it to work at booking.com. People know that I worked there some time ago and they tend to gather more information about the company in which they are going to be interviewed for a position of a developer.
The dates before the 21 December 2012 are the best ones to stop thinking about the company where I spent 1.5 years. Although both booking.com and I are strongly related to the Perl programming language and its community, the text below the cut-line is not about any technical issue in Perl, but is about the way booking.com stops the contracts with their employees. I intentionally use the feature of MovableType that allows splitting the abstract and the body. So, please do not read further if you don't want to read things that are there.
If you are an employee of the company and you love to work there, also please skip this blog post. Neither it is recommended for those who just joined the company and is still in a state of a mental and emotional condition in which a person experiences intense feelings of well-being, elation, happiness, excitement, and joy (also known as euphoria.
The text has nothing agains hotel reservation operated by booking.com. According to my personal experience as a tourist, it is safe to book hotels through this site, although you still may face poorly managed hotels which can make the journey less pleasant. On the other hand, I have made no bookings on booking.com since I left the company a year ago.
Should you feel uncomfortable, please stop reading. If you think I made a mistake in the description or you disagree and have strong arguments against my opinion, please contact me personally or left a comment below. I waited a year so that emotions disappear. Please note that the story is closed with the end of the year and I do not intend to read the comments after that date.
The title of this blog post is a linguistic joke.
Booking.com hired me in the summer of 2010 as a highly-skilled Perl developer and a person known well in the Perl community for his Perl events. I agreed to make a downshifting and leave Moscow with its high salaries to conduct an experiment of leaving in Amsterdam.
I felt nothing wrong with starting in a low position of a bare Perl developer, and at least I was promised that that kind of start helps better understanding the company's infrastructure, codebase etc. Which is quite reasonable by itself.
Nobody could imagine at that time that that only meant that booking.com hired me as a poorly-paid immigrant who has a lot of restrictions abroad due to his non-European citizenship.
There are a few things the company's HR managers would not tell you before you join and see it yourself.
Bookign.com doesn't need talents. They need people who agree to do what they are told to do. Not less, not more. Regardless your previous professional history, age or experience you will find a manager that will tell you to fix this or that in a predefined manner. That manner is crap. I am not a code purist and am completely OK with having not shining code, so that was not a problem for me that the majority of the codebase is dirty.
The problem for me is that any attempt to make things better is regarded as a move against the company's culture. Everybody has to move in parallel with the others. This is a very poor mentality. With this kind of thinking, people would still treat an Earth as a flat thing laying on three elephants. The world we live in is not a 2D picture. There are so many possibilities if you think of it at least of a 3D object. You will not be allowed to do that.
After a year of working there, Ben Mouw, my team leader at that time, said: you are a coder here now. Thank you Ben for a direct message from the company management to the guy who made for the Perl community times much more than you did.
At booking.com, I realised that I see more people that I don't trust to, then I wanted to see. It is very uncomfortable to work in the company when you do not trust the person in the position of the Director IT.
Mr. Brendan Bank started with accusing me of spreading the panic among the developers when I notified the HR department that I need my Dutch residence permit to be renewed. Booking.com only offers a one-year contract, so they have to renew it so that I can renew my legal status here. I am not the fist one with that "problem" but the HR thinks they are very experienced and can do that in the last minute, while the IND (the institute issuing residence permits) clearly asks everybody to start the procedure in 12 weeks before the end of your current contract. Mr. Bank thought that I did not have to complain about the fact that HD refused to start doing their work in time, and promised me to have a talk in a different manner if I would insist on my rights.
twitter.com/Running_Marc/status/278792130556747777
Mr. Bank also promised to 4x my salary if I would comply everything. OMG, I did not ever think that such talks are possible.
I am not an ass liking person, and there are more people who work in the company now to satisfy expectations:
twitter.com/brendanbank/status/279545200379035650
Regarding money, booking.com does not tell you, for example, the final tax amount. Something about 30%, I was told. Quarterly bonuses, which are quite poor by themselves, were paid only every second time, and the team leaders first tend not to tell you why.
This is the part of the bigger concept, not to share much with employees, even if the hidden fact is about you. Mr. Mouw did it a couple of times very successfully.
The worst thing that I saw in booking.com was that people, who work there and are brainwashed, really begin believing in booking.com's ideology. They really start thinking that poor decisions made by senior developers are smart, scalable, flexible and worth implementing. People stop thinking about what and how they do their work. This is very dangerous for the employees.
Even more, I have a number of examples when people spread poor ideology of monetizing everything for their own life and family.
Watch this video fragment from their annual meeting and note how the camera is shaken when it was announced that everybody would get an iPad mini as a Christmas bonus. Disclaimer: Darren Houston is great in his role and a very kind person, so this video is only about the fact that people become mad when they receive a bonus of less than 2% of their not-so-big salary. This is wrong. It is wrong to think that it's great if you can't buy an iPad yourself and have to praise the company for doing that.
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=kISEbFR8pAg
All in all, it is not strange that I could not agree with the ideology that was being injected into me. This is what Gilion Goudsmit, the Corporate Culture Advisor at Booking.com treats a joke:
https://twitter.com/gilimanjaro/status/279214673591693312
If I would stay at booking.com I would stop my professional development. It is not possible to follow the modern world if you are not allowed to learn and use new technologies. The chaotic approach to development and treating the employees children (I'd avoid saying monkeys) can help rising more and more money in return of having less and less professional stuff that will call you silly if you will ask, for example, if it is safe to send credit card details via fax.
This is what I saw in one of the hotels I stayed in (I notified the hotel staff about the fact, and they reacted immediately, so, no worries).
This picture illustrates how far you can degrade if you will not work on yourself on a daily basis.
Despite the booking.com is an extremely highly loaded site from the technical point of view, you would not become a specialist in anything because all you are told to do is not only old fashioned but makes people shy when they talk about their work. Booking.com's employees like to speak at the conferences about how good the process is organised there but ask to turn the cameras off so that nobody can see their secrets.
The Business Aware Programmer talk at one of the Perl conferences (vimeo.com/32371928):
If you managed to survive and save your brain clear from the corporate stuff, you will be asked to leave the company. There are a few people, that I know of, who were forced to leave with the scenario similar to mine. The stories they tell privately contradict with official stories (if any).
In the end of 2011 I applied for the internal programme for career growth. Mr. Bank together with Top Pel, the HR head for the IT department, interviewed me because of that. During that interview, Mr. Bank clearly said that the company was run in a Dutch way and it was better to leave the company. They issued the following paper.
Note that this document prescribes me, a highly-skilled migrant, to stop working for a half year, and on top of that wants me to keep additional restrictions of what I may, according to booking.com, or may not do in the following 18 months. They refused to fire me because of the fear that I will come to the court. Instead, they wanted me to agree that I sit silently (dim down, as Brendan articulated that).
Dudes, the fact that booking.com is the number three in e-commerce is not an argument for me to think of myself as of a grey mouth. Hey, guys, did you read my CV?
I would like to say that if you are going to work for booking.com, you have to find the balance between you yourself and the necessity to comply with their culture. If you are young and want to relocate to Amsterdam, keep going! If you are experienced guy who wants to change the world, be careful.
Additional reading
Booking.com Reviews at Glassdoor
Reviews left by Perl developers
Started pretty well, ended pretty bad
To work here is the worst thing I've ever done in my life
Booking.com treats you like dog
Booking.com used to be a great place to work.... not anymore
Other posts
A couple of links not related to the topic but rather for the purpose you don't think I photoshopped the picture with fax paper hanging from the ceiling.
I blog about Perl.
Andrew, I encourage you to delete this post. It does very little to hurt Booking, but it may in-fact hurt you.
Let's say I'm looking to hire you and one other person. I'm on the fence about it. Which am I going to hire? The person who wrote a scathing interview about their former employer, or the other?
I'm all for being the whistle-blower if in-fact Booking had done some grave injustice like not paying you for work you had done, or some sort of abuse. However, in this article as you have articulated the situation, it appears that you and they simply had a difference of opinion about how things should be done.
Are you right for wanting this to be done better than the same old way? Absolutely. Are they right for wanting you to do what they pay you to do? Certainly. Neither of you were wrong here. So don't hurt your own career over a squabble that doesn't matter. You've moved on, they've moved on. Leave it in the past.
Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.
Wait, so they paid you half a year worth of salary without actually working for them? Yeah, bastards!
Maybe you really would like to lay down and get payments. Not me. I quit in a month.
JT is right on here. You should delete this. It's not going to help you.
I think the right way to handle this is to just publicly announce that you're leaving Booking. If someone is considering working for Booking, they should be smart enough to do their research. Then they can get in touch with you privately to find out more.
I'll gladly discuss grievances with past employers privately, but you'll never see anything about it on my blog.
I really don't want to take sides here, but I think you should've mentioned that your current employer is a direct competitor of Booking.