Skyscanner reviews

* Slow moving and difficult to change anything. If you propose anything different from the status quo, the default answer will be NO. * Lots of politics and egos to please. * Documentation and bureaucracy in excess. You are going to spend more time writing confluence documents than writing code. (And no one will read it) * Very poor onboarding process. They just throw you a bunch of confluence and that's it. * Endless discussions on technical topics. Everyone has a different opinion and no one seems to reach an agreement. * Lots of duplicate work. Different squads solving the same problems in different ways * Technical debt is huge. Poor code written everywhere, no standardised way of doing stuff. * Very hierarchical. Senior managers and tech leads say how things should be done and everyone else follows, no questions asked. * Having to go back to the office twice a week. * Promotion process is bureaucratic and full of politics. * Teams are not diverse. * Senior engineers are treated as mid-levels. * No opportunity to learn anything new, your career will get stuck in time.

A bunch of talented people I personally know haven’t been promoted in years. It doesn’t matter if you’re a high performer, the promotion is only possible if you know the right people that can lobby your career progression. Meanwhile, people who do almost nothing but skilled in brown-nosing, organising useless meetings or writing long Confluence documents containing a lot of buzzwords tend to rise to the top. It’s all about the politics and self-advertising at Skyscanner. Full remote working is still not embraced (especially by the Scottish leadership), although everyone has been working from home for the last 6 months. Instead of allowing people to work wherever they want until at least 2021, every town hall starts with ‘We’re expecting our employees to get back to the office next month’. Come on, the world has changed. It’s not 2002 anymore. With Gareth’s and Bryan’s departures, the company has become incredibly corporate. This is reflected in the way we talk and think as a company. Newly appointed senior and principal managers coming from corporate backgrounds don’t care much about the users, but rather how much money we can take out of their pockets. ‘Traveller-first’ company only exists on the paper surface. New CEO Moshe doesn’t have a clear vision and strategy where the company is headed: he’s trying to win at everything but you cannot have too many North stars, there can be only one. As much as you would love it to be so, but ’Be the best at X' doesn't sound like a solid strategy. Over the course of COVID-19, a lot of questions were asked about the runway and possible layoffs, but the answers from execs were extremely generic and vague, and unfortunately, it’s still the case. It feels like they’re all reading from one script rather than give honest, human answers. The redundancies had been expected but the way they were made is questionable at best. The previous CEO Bryan Dove gave his employees a false glimpse of hope that Skyscanner could be ‘saved’ if the majority would switch to work 3 or 4 days per week at pro-rata salary or take unpaid salary (let alone the bonuses). The people who did that felt deceived because a couple of months later they would get an email from Moshe that they’re affected, regardless of how much they have sacrificed for Skyscanner so far. Yes, to find out whether you’re at risk or not, you would sit staring at your inbox and wait for an email that’s written in incredibly complex legal language, so that you wouldn’t sue the company. A great example of how much trust they have for their own employees.