A place to coast - Principal Engineer Skyscanner Employee Review

Where Skyscanner starts to go wrong is in the beliefs that they have a high bar of entry and that they are still a startup. The former is repeated as a mantra by management as if saying it enough times will make it true. Product is driven from the bottom up, using the latest fad of OKRs. While this gives teams autonomy, it also results in a lack of alignment across product verticals and an endemic propensity to reinvent the wheel. There is so little buy-in from across the organisation that silos have formed even within Tribes and as a result each squad does its own thing to reach its end goal without Product Managers ever talking to each other. This then causes frustration when a squad is forced to have to interact with another squad (either within the same tribe or in a different tribe) and nothing quite meets in the middle. This propensity to reinvent the wheel also extends to platform services in Skyscanner, in something of a snowball effect: any given opensource tool doesn’t quite match our ill-conceived requirements at Skyscanner so we’re going to write our own from scratch - and then because we wrote this tool from scratch we also have to write another tool that depends on it from scratch. Ad nauseam. As a result, by working for Skyscanner you lack the exposure to tools and libraries that the rest of the industry is using because you are forced to work within the confines of this square wheel utopia - and as a result will likely deskill over time rather than upskilling alongside your peers in other companies. And god forbid if you ever call this out - dissent in Skyscanner is crushed without mercy. The only way to get promoted out of Senior/Principal level as an individual contributor is to be part of a clique. The clique that drives this kind of reinvent-the-wheel decision making and backs it to the hilt. Whenever the political nature of The Clique is brought up in an all-hands meeting, senior leadership denies that this is a thing at Skyscanner. This same clique then enforces that all squads adhere to magic numbers to show that they are healthy. Let’s take test coverage as an example: we all know that good test coverage makes us feel safe to make future changes as the tests will likely catch any bugs raised due to backwards compatibility breaks. The Clique’s idea: mandate that all code must have 80% test coverage (which is then folded into another magic number rather than even being displayed transparently). But 80% test coverage simply means that 80% of your code is executed during tests. It doesn’t make those tests valuable, nor does it actually guarantee that your code is good. But squads are forced to add tests for getters and setters just to hit that magic number. This isn’t helped by the lack of presence of the CTO, who has delegated all of his engineering responsibilities to one individual, and all of his management responsibilities to another individual. The only time you remember that Skyscanner has a CTO is when the rest of the exec team joke about forgetting the CTO. On the subject of the exec team, they have largely been absent during the coronavirus crisis and have adopted a “let’s close our eyes and cross our fingers and hope everything is back to normal soon” approach to the pandemic. Trust in the exec team and their vision, as shown by the latest company-wide survey, is at an all-time low. The convenient departure of the CEO responsible for this vision and a round of redundancies back in September of last year may be a step in the right direction but more work is required here. More work is also required on dealing with people that are not performing well - another recurring theme in the company-wide survey. Managers have significant difficulty in either providing negative feedback or recognising poor performance - I like to hope that it’s the former rather than the latter, but given that some senior poor performers have been promoted in the last year this hope may just be false. Last but not least, the pandemic has hit Skyscanner hard. This has been the case for the whole travel industry, and is largely outside of their control. But this meant that Skyscanner had to cancel all additional benefits that they once provided (working from other country offices, extended leave, milestone bonuses, share options) making it a much less competitive company to work for when compared to companies in other industries. This is something driving the attrition rate to record highs and if Skyscanner are not careful will result in complete brain drain - leaving only The Clique behind.