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Skyscanner Reviews
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UK - All CitiesFull-timePart-timeApprove of CEO
Bryan Dove
0 Ratings
Pros
"Great working culture - sociable, smart people who respect work/life balance" (in 16 reviews)
"Flexible working, your views matter, great culture, treated amazingly" (in 14 reviews)
Cons
"Seems quite a bit of nepotist culture as well" (in 3 reviews)
"Efforts of non London/Edinburgh employees often invisible to Senior Management" (in 4 reviews)
- Featured Review
Helpful (1)
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"Non-stop learning in a friendly and supportive environment"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than a year)
Pros
- Supports and encourages constant personal development / learning
- Unafraid to admit to mistakes, learn from it and move on (right up the the CxO level)
- Exciting product with huge ambition for the future
- Trusting working environment with great options for flexible work
- Beautiful central London office
- Recruitment sincerely cares about culture fit of their new hires which works well for Skyscanner and those starting new positions
- They employ grown-ups: none of the infantilising tech company gimmicks to be found hereCons
- Strategy amendments appear to happen quite frequently - think twice about applying if you're not comfortable adjusting to change [kind of a con but I'm happy about it if we're making changes for the right reasons]
- Strenuous and tiring interview day process - I was shattered afterwards!
- Strategy changes take a while to materialise and the interim period can feel a bit like you're spinning your wheelsAdvice to Management
Work on keeping people focussed and motivated during strategy changes. Continue the high bar with recruitment especially with respect to culture - it's my number one favourite aspect of working here.
Skyscanner 2018-03-26 08:39 PDT ![Skyscanner Logo]()
"Inspiring!"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
Skyscanner is a fantastic place to work. Aside from the many benefits like gym discounts, bonus, yoga, mindfulness classes, health and pension there are many reasons to work here! Our teams (squads) work closely on hard problems, designers working alongside project managers and engineers in an autonomous environment. You are encouraged to be the best you can be with regular work in progress sessions and peer feedback. This has helped me in some cases to completely change my thinking and attitude and has helped me immensely. Flexible working environment is excellent. Culture and values are wholesome and genuinely believed, encouraged and form part of our working day. We truly do believe in helping every single traveller and putting them first!
Cons
Can be difficult to be promoted as a sole contributor if you do not want to go down a people management route. However it's not impossible, our competencies allow for people to move forward even if they do not wish to people manage.
Environment can change and pivot pretty fast, you need to be prepared for this and be adaptable to change.
We are short of engineers and cannot hire quickly enough. We need more engineers please to build the great ideas we have!
Eager to move forward and cannot go quickly enough.Skyscanner 2018-06-21 02:23 PDTHelpful (5)
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"Not awful but some big problems"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo opinion of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (Less than a year)
Pros
Good offices
People are generally friendly and well meaning
Culture is good and open
Modern equipment
Generally good policies on corporate travel/expenses etc
Decent pay and perks
Good work-life balance for engineers and flexible hours/WFH.Cons
Terrible management - my line manager is overbearing, micro-manages and incredibly corporate.
Too much talk and not enough doing.
Decisions are opaque and consensus has to be reached by too many teams to get anything done.
Goals changed every 6 months, and work wasn't maintained so be prepared to throw everything in the bin you've worked towards.
Teams don't practice what they preach - lots of talk about engineering best practices, but in reality all codebases are a total mess and product just want stuff shipped. Seeing as you'll throw everything away every six months it just leads to more and more crap in production.
Meetings - you'll spend most of your work week in unnecessary meetings, even if you're just a standard developer.
Difficult to be promoted - the criteria are clear for promotion, but unrealistic to attain for most developers. All about working cross-tribe and cross-squad, which most developers won't get the opportunity to do so.Advice to Management
Stop messing teams about, changing goals every 6 months.
Don't sell your company as having fantastic leave policies - 32 days leave is great, but once you take into account bank holidays, 24 days of leave is average/below average
Weed out bad managers. Focus on do-ers and not talkers.Skyscanner 2018-08-29 02:24 PDT![Skyscanner Logo]()
"Nice company, good tech stack but somewhat stifling"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookNo opinion of CEOI worked at Skyscanner full-time (More than a year)
Pros
Skyscanner has (in my opinion) a noble ambition: providing travellers with the best prices wherever they want to go and generally being a champion for consumers in this sector. If you are passionate about travel this is a great company to work for.
They also work hard write software in the best way - so it's a great place to work with up to date technologies (GRPC, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes) and use some impressive internal tools to get the job done.
The company does really seem to try to look after their employees with flexible hours, working from home, nice offices and positive attitude to training. That translates to an overall nice atmosphere - probably the most polite company I've ever worked for!Cons
The company structure is very hierarchical with a lot of management layers. It always felt like getting any decision made require consensus with a huge number of people - so as an engineer I felt that I struggled to make an impact outside the small bit of code I was working on.
It's a very distributed company relative to it's size (engineering teams presently in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Barcelona, Sofia, Budapest, Singapore and China) so can feel a bit remote at times.Advice to Management
I think more decision making can be delegated down to the squad/tribe level. It should be easier for tribes to start and stop a particular initiative if it fit's with the general goal they are working towards.
Skyscanner 2018-06-22 12:43 PDTHelpful (2)
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"Good place to work but some managers can make it hell"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
Lots of perks, cool environment and lovely colleagues
Cons
Some managers are so rigid and not willing to try new stuff.
Some poor managers can make you rlife hell and People Team do nothing to help.Skyscanner 2018-05-29 04:14 PDTHelpful (1)
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"Decent, nothing extraordinary."
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsNeutral OutlookApproves of CEOI worked at Skyscanner full-time (More than 3 years)
Pros
Great company perks: annual BBQ, flexibility from your home country and other Skyscanner offices, kitchen filled with snacks and gym incentive.
Cons
Career growth and development is all dependent on networking and close personal relationships. No meritocracy in place .
Advice to Management
Focus on hiring people by the culture code, not for their skills. You can train anyone anything, but not teach them how to be personally.
Skyscanner 2018-06-02 10:40 PDTHelpful (6)
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"OK company generally, bad for product managers"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than a year)
Pros
+ Nice office environment
+ Clear what you need to do to get promoted (though I’m not saying it’s achievable, just clear)
+ Good salaries
+ Opportunities to travel
+ Reasonable autonomy: your goals come from above but you can decide how to tackle them
+ Plenty of money to spend on equipment, team outings, user research, etcCons
- Terrible line management: you’ll see your direct manager once a month if you’re lucky and it’ll be a status update rather than a meeting about your personal development. This is true for product but totally the opposite for engineers, who seem to have plenty of great well-trained line managers.
- Slow pace: it’s like wading through treacle trying to get anything done. There’s so many people you have to consult with/get buy in from and then the engineers in your team will spend a third of their time in meetings not related to the team’s work
- Zero commitment to diversity and inclusion: there’s a lot of talk but the gender ratio is still worse than Uber’s and nothing actually seems to get done
- Product managers often placed in teams that don’t need PMs or where the work doesn’t match their skills. You never know what team you’ll be in before your first day at the company, and sometimes it’s totally unsuitable. Once a PM is assigned it’s slow and painful to get reassigned, and even then there’s no guarantee your new assignment will be any better.Advice to Management
Actually commit to fixing problems rather than just talking about them. Start with the bureaucracy and diversity issues. Pay attention to how unhappy PMs are!
Skyscanner 2018-05-18 00:03 PDT![Skyscanner Logo]()
"An impressive company to work in."
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (Less than a year)
Pros
High engineer level, rapid development, open culture and great opportunities to start your career.
Cons
I cannot think of a big downside of working at Skyscanner.
Skyscanner 2018-02-25 11:46 PST![Skyscanner Logo]()
"Great place to work"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than 5 years)
Pros
Strong management
Competitive pay
Talented peers
Competitive benefitsCons
Can't think of any. A loyal employer.
Advice to Management
Continue doing what you're doing!
Skyscanner 2018-01-28 14:40 PST![Skyscanner Logo]()
"It's a great place to work"
StarStarStarStarStar- Work/Life Balance
- Culture & Values
- Career Opportunities
- Comp & Benefits
- Senior Management
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEOI have been working at Skyscanner full-time (More than 3 years)
Pros
A lot of learning, talented Engineers, good carrier growth, very good benefits, excellent work life balance.
Cons
Outside the Eng world there's quite a lot of confusion. Senior Management is still a question mark as there are quite a few of mediocre managers.
Skyscanner 2018-01-04 11:13 PST
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