Pros
I've been at Trip for over 3 years and have been incredibly happy. Unlike most companies Trip actually cares about people being happy. They actively find ways to make the day better and your work environment the best it can be. It's something you notice every day you are there. The food is almost too good and the office has a very comfy / vibrant feel. The snack game is strong and constantly has new stuff. Everywhere in the office has a feeling like it was built to make you smile and not to cram as much productivity per square inch as possible like many other companies. You are always working on stuff that people will see. No matter what team you are on it's easy to see your impact in the product. Similarly everywhere you go you will see Tripadvisor stickers, which is super cool. People really do love the Trip brand. The CEO has an actual heart. Many times when not so great things have happened in the world he has stood up to say what's right. He doesn't hide behind what he thinks will have minimal shareholder impact but is maybe the right thing. He consistently takes a stand that I'm proud of.
Cons
Trip has a rough road ahead. Google has been pushing into the market and that has a massive impact on what the company can do going forward. They need to make some big choices to deal with that and those won't be easy. There's a ton of aging code and UIs that are difficult to work with. Obviously there are projects to deal with that but they are slow and you'll have to deal with some pretty old stuff. Projects can easily spend more time dealing with old cruft then actually writing the new stuff. Similarly there's way to many people working in oversized, unwieldy codebases. You never know when something will change out from under you or another team could break your code. That's supposed to be balanced by a group "design review" system but I've never had much faith in design-by-committee. At best people are impartial and at worst you end up with nit picking. Most of the time it's a smooth process but there's not really enough buy in from people to make it worth it. Almost all the work is either reactionary or focused on bottom line impact. Projects are always focused on short term goals and rarely think of the longer term impact, market positioning, or brand value. If it raises profits by more than x% we ship it. Everything is an a/b feature test which get's piled into the code. As a result nothing is ever done with strong intent to get it right. Get ready for changes. Your working team will change every couple months. People are constantly shifted into new squads, team structures, re-orgs, etc. I can't think of a quarter where there wasn't some major change in who I worked with.
