Dysfunctional, headed in the wrong direction. - Senior Software Engineer Skyscanner Employee Review

The newly installed CEO (Moshe Rafiah) is a mouthpiece for the parent company Ctrip. Devoid of vision and likes to spout empty platitudes. Quite clearly brought in to slash headcount at the company, close offices and cut costs. The company as a whole lacks any coherent vision for the future. Product leadership is weak - the evidence and data led approaches from when the founder Gareth and his appointed successor Bryan were CEO is gone and the usual 'features for the sake of features' mindset has set in. Features are shipped and then teams are reallocated without measuring RoI or the effectiveness of what was added. Long term I see the stagnation of the core product (cheap flight search) as the leadership is running scared from Google Flights and is desperately trying to stay relevant. Product management is overstretched and without focus. All low level product managers within the company were served redundancy notices, leading to the already distant and distracted senior product management to be further overstretched. The more competent offices in the company are being closed and the staff made redundant. The Budapest office contained the bulk of the mobile app experience and expertise and the Singapore office was staffed with hard working and competent engineers and product leadership. Instead the company has chosen to renew its focus on the lacklustre, disorganised and error prone teams in China. Progression is nigh on impossible at the company. Expectations for promotion involve impact and reach that aren't possible given the extremely hierarchical and closed off Tribe/Squad structure that Skyscanner uses. Expect stagnation and stress when at every 6 monthly performance review meeting you're told to stop writing code and to focus on generating more confluence documents, setting up meetings to bloviate endlessly and deliver nothing of value to our travellers. This review sounds extremely negative and you may well be asking "why hasn't this person spoken to their manager" - management at Skyscanner exists to maintain the status quo. If you want to change things for the better be prepared to be called out for your difficult attitude, then marginalised and ignored. The teams in China work distressingly long hours. It's not unusual for them to be responding at 3 or 4pm UK time (close to midnight in Shenzhen). The management in the UK see this as a positive, despite the output of those teams being enabled by other squads in the company and the constant stream of incidents those teams generate. The company has a progressive attitude towards WFH but refuses to contemplate remote working patterns. The initial WFH attitudes were set by the founder and original Scottish leadership. As the company has become more corporate, American and Chinese led these attitudes have ossified and progressive changes to working patterns are dismissed or outright refused. Employees who deliver no value and who do little work are rarely put on performance improvement plans and dismissed. High performers aren't rewarded. It's a culture of "keep your head down and get through the week" that rewards mediocrity over all else.