Skyscanner reviews

The previously excellent company leadership has been replaced by a team of puppets effectively. The new CEO pulls the strings and they do as they are told. The previous company culture was largely thanks to the previous COO. He was never replaced and there has been a noticeable void in leadership ever since. As a result, the company culture has been in freefall since the end of 2016. That isn't helped by an HR function with no evident desire to do anything about the deep issues which exist. To be fair, HR is really good at supporting you and your lifestyle but not the problems in your working life. Toxic behaviour by senior people goes unreported, because people don't feel safe enough doing so. The design team leadership is comically bad. They are more concerned with impressing company leadership than trying to support and protect the team. Leaders in the Design Team steal the work of the designers doing the actual work then claim it as their own in front of company leadership. The Design Leadership is a boy's club (this is the term designers use internally to describe it), some of the treatment of my female colleagues has been appalling. But as I said, there is no security to report such things. Otherwise your chances of progression as a designer lie in how nice your slidedecks look when you present them internally. Designers have learned this and there is more concern about presenting nice-looking work to colleagues than making any useful changes to the product. The Design Team behaves like the end user is the CEO rather than the millions of people who actually use Skyscanner. There are a few good product managers left to work with but generally the standard is quite low now. I've worked with some amazing people at Skyscanner, but they have either mostly all left or are in the process of leaving.

What is preached and sold, in terms of culture is very different from reality. I should have listened to all the red flags during the interview process: lots of questions not technically relevant to the position, too many (strange) "cultural" questions, interviewer bored/uninterested and not capable to connect, clearly not a clue about why they were hiring in the first place. Skyscanner does not like dissent, there is actual concern in speaking up. Technically it appears that Skyscanner has all the answers and their way is the only one, unique and right. Engineers are requested to run in circles following the latest quarterly fad (they call it goal) that will change again in a few months. Self promotion, lots of talks, showing off. Politics. Extremely hierarchical and cliquey. Design team is terrible. Squad leads (except a few) are total bullies. Some tribes are awfully technically antiquated. This is the real culture of Skyscanner!