Skyscanner reviews

Skyscanner operates like a company 10x its size, with all of the disadvantages that come with that and none of the benefits. The much-vaunted culture is a facade. 'Traveller first' used to mean something, but these days it's ignored in favour of adding over-the-top tracking and features that nobody wants or needs. Skyscanner's app in particular is filled with technical debt but Product keep pushing new features instead of allowing teams time to fix it. Salaries are not competitive. The company gaslights people into thinking they're lucky to work there while paying well below market rate. Alongside this, they continually waste money on useless third party tools and closing offices that were inexpensive to run, which necessitates hiring replacements in very expensive markets. They have money, they are just choosing to waste it on other things instead. Promotions are a mess, optimising for how well you can talk about the value you deliver instead of actually delivering value. They take months, can be rejected for the most trivial of reasons, and even if you get one you won't get the salary increase for months (and it's not backdated when it does come through). Tribe leadership is full of passengers who maintain the status quo and do nothing to try and improve things. Skyscanner replies to a lot of these reviews, encouraging people to provide feedback internally to raise these concerns. Reader, know that I and many others raised concerns about these things over and over for years, then eventually left when I realised nothing would change. They are listening but not actually doing anything in response.

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.