Loads of good people, a great potential, poor execution and missing the point!
Pros
Work / Life balance was excellent. So many great people were around to work around your schedule with regards to family or other commitments. I never felt the pressure of working hours before or after COVID times. When we were in the office, it was really fun and social on Fridays. Now on Zoom, although not replacing that experience, still, there is an effort to keep people connected. The People Team, IT, Payroll, Internal Portals for Benefits, Internal Communications and all these supporting functions work really well for the company. The offices, meeting rooms, social areas were excellent. You could definitely see that company invested really well in these areas. Laptops, monitors and office desks were top class. After COVID, company allowed people taking their chairs etc. for a better WFH setup. Most of the internal tools connected to Slack. This made certain chores much easier. Most of the processes were written. Most of the domain knowledge were available via Skyscanner University. These helped understanding the business during onboarding days.
Cons
Most of the below are towards my perception and interactions. I cannot say 100% of the Skyscanner is like this. However, I'm still sharing for future references and maybe, just maybe, for improvements...... There were some critical managers in critical roles with really poor leadership. They were mostly first time managers and most probably learnt the job on the go. This is not wrong in general but it has became so obvious and inefficient in the time of crisis. Let alone crisis, even before COVID, these people were so hesitant to change and taking risk. It looked like as if this company will be making money forever and these people are going to be here forever with their benefits, salaries etc. a.k.a Status Quo These managers were so inefficient that even if number of people produce reports and in-depth analysis to steer away company from certain practices and technologies, they decide and inform without even talking to those individuals. Instead, those decisions were made in a 100% top-down approach. Some managers even regarded certain technologies and practices as their pets and maybe their only meaningful connection to the engineering and the company was that. This has created so much pain for the engineers to do their best job. Most of the time these pains and reports ignored with a very well executed lip service. At the end of the day, you always go back to square one. CxO level has lost some important names. The biggest lost was obviously previous CEO, Bryan Dove. Bryan's leadership was replaced with greater amount of lip service, cooperate success theatre and loads of scripted cold messages. The town halls perviously in Bryan's time were fun and motivating. When Moshe took over, town halls became an exercise of answering questions asked a week ago with well-played choreography. Some town halls even felt like a pre-recorded video in motion. The connection to people started to weaken everyday. Competency Framework for career progression was one of the manuals you would never understand as an engineer in one go. The challenge was the asks in the document compared to what you have in real setup. The promotion process and the use of Competency Framework combined with poor leadership turned the whole setup impossible to progress for some. I have seen people admitting that the best way to promote is actually switching to another company. Some people even sarcastically mentioned that it is easier to join Skyscanner at a higher level than hassling for the promotion. Internal tools for Cloud computing were intentionally good but execution wise were really poor. Instead of working and using well known public cloud practices, you start to practice internal tools. This leads to be deskilled in the long run if you stay very long. Because, as an engineer, you always work towards someone else's abstraction and understanding of the core technology. The amount of levels you need to get through for a simple POC in production was getting harder everyday. Spotify's cursed squad/tribe model, even Spotify don't use it, turned the whole engineering organization into two-pizza sized teams working on half-slice problems. Not so many people and teams had the chance to solve a problem end to end. They were either stopped midway due to change of priorities or new OKR storm came by and reshuffled their focus. This has led so many half baked products in production. Even internally in so many channels, people admit these but never take any action. So many of these were shared with managers but as part of lip service, I didn't believe they made it to the top level, CTO. There were even criticism around certain projects and teams being elitist. While some people agreed, most of the things didn't change. This lead funding wrong parts of the product and missing the foundations. The biggest issue I perceived was the existing tech, people, leadership & management took Skyscanner to today but will very much less likely to the next level. If not in the next 2-3 years, definitely in the next 5-8 years, Skyscanner will be much gone and eaten by Google and Airlines themselves. It is just sad seeing this very big opportunity slipping through the fingers and very less number of people without power and influence see it.
