Great people, short-sighted management - Technical Writer Expedia Group Employee Review

Pay is lower than you would expect compared to other tech companies. I was never really given an honest-to-goodness onboarding experience, opting for a "sink or swim" approach where I was just immersed in the work and trusted to figure it out. As a result, I never learned basic things like "how do I found out who to talk to about X?", and was later chastised for not knowing these things when I hadn't been given any guidance. Expectations are often unclear; when I asked about criteria for promotion, I was provided a very vague skills matrix, but told that "this is going to change soon, so don't get too hung up on it". It was "going to change soon" for six months, and I never saw it change. I would often not find out that I had missed the mark somewhere or was not meeting an expectation until a month or more after the fact, which it is much harder to adjust and correct. When I raised to my manager that I felt some of these things were coming out of the blue, I was told "we've been having these conversations consistently" about topics that had literally never come up in any of our conversations. When I tried to raise this concern up the chain I was told "well, communication is complicated" and not given any assurances anything would be done about it after my departure. EG is pushing an absolutely non-sensical Return to Office policy: even if none of your teammates or none of the people who requisition work from your team are based in your location, you are still expected to come into the office 50% of the time. That 50% seems to be an entirely arbitrary number picked out of the air to please shareholders, not based in any kind of analysis or fact. This wouldn't be so bad if the office was actually a good place to work, but the office culture is severely lacking in organization or basic etiquette. Desks and chairs are ergonomically awful, with 80% of them facing directly toward exterior windows so glare is a constant issue. Desks are first-come first-serve during the day so if you don't arrive bright and early you are stuck with a non-adjustable desk that means you're uncomfortable all day long. Despite the existence of conference rooms and phone booths, people often take Zoom calls right from their desk, including two people at side by side desks jumping into the same Zoom call. This is a common occurrence because, as a global company, even if everyone on a team is in AN office, they won't be in the SAME office, so they're conducting all their business remotely anyway. The end result is doing the same work you do at home, in a less comfortable desk, with worse equipment, and more distractions. Of course, nobody wore a mask as of early 2023, and you would get weird looks in the halls for wearing one. Exceptions to the in-office policy are only given out for physical health reasons, and even then mostly only on a temporary basis. If you don't wish to come into the office for mental health reasons (to say nothing of the basic practicality as outlined above), the official company line is "see a therapist and suck it up". This is to say nothing of the fact that in October of 2022 they removed any kind of vaccination requirement to come into the office, so you can't even trust that the people around you are vaccinated against COVID. Leadership seems to be charging through all of this with oblivious aplomb. When the office first opened, Peter Kern released a message to employees telling them that it was option, and if anyone didn't want to come in for any reason (including "You're just not comfortable doing it"), you would not be made to. At some point this message was quietly discarded, and the policy changed from 50% to "50%, not counting Monday and Friday". Eventually "Expedia Weeks" were instituted, where a week every quarter would require everyone to come in all five days. This resulted in chaos, long lines for all food and drink options, and special events that could not handle this capacity. No collaboration or increased productivity took place, but leadership smiled and insisted it was a success. Every candid conversation I had with a fellow employee made it clear that these policies are wildly unpopular with everyone except the highest level of management or those who have thoroughly drank the Kool-Aid. The result is an environment where I don't feel like my needs are taken into account whatsoever.