Pros
- A great place to learn coding style conventions, scoping of large projects, and many other skills necessary for software engineering careers. - Free lunch. - Great place to network with engineers. Lots of startups in the area are founded by ex-TripAdvisor employees.
Cons
- Little opportunity for advancement, and company badly attempts to hide this by promising more opportunities 'if you work hard.' - Vague guidelines for how to properly utilize engineering rotation. - Extremely poor management of technical debt. - Outdated technological stack and senior management resistant to change. - Tolerance of management/groups that are uncommunicative and insular. - HR department is behind the times. - Very little standardization of technology between groups or even employees. Having employees configure their own dev boxes is a prime example that cost enormous amounts of productivity for minimal learning gains. - Code base is collapsing under its own weight. To their credit, they hired a senior engineer solely to mitigate this issue. When I left the company, morale was quite low. Not only are there very few senior roles available, it is not attractive to take a senior role because the technologies and design philosophy are falling behind industry standards, hobbling ability to jump to other companies or even to change position within the company.
