[formerly_ta]

Ex-employee here.

It's got its up-and-downs. It's a highly profitable company that still wants to hire smart people, so it bills itself as a "startup culture." Then you join and you're in a multi-level org chart with different silos literally competing for resources and attention. Very corporate. So their turnover is pretty fast, particularly in engineering.

It is a very profitable company with legit tech and legit scale, so there are some great experiences to be had there if you're lucky enough to land on the right team or impress the right boss. And because they have a pretty high bar for hiring and a reasonably high burnout rate, having worked a few years at TA means something to many Boston tech companies.

[eropple]

Leaving the green-colored names at the door (none of this is something I haven't or wouldn't say to anyone in management there, so it's not like I'm talking out of school), I'd agree with pretty much everything said here. Especially the bit about other tech companies--I still get asked what I did at Trip even though it was my first job out of college. It's not at all a startup culture and if you go in expecting the kind of autonomy and trust you see at a smaller company you may be very disappointed, but the consolation prize of an above-average (not top-of-market) salary, easy work, and a few impressive-sounding bullet points for the resume may be worth it.

As a first gig out of college, it was great and I don't regret spending time there. It was a gentle-enough introduction to large corporate structure and while I'm not temperamentally suited to "Cog #541" type of gigs, it's easy to see why as a company it's very successful.

[walterbell]

I wonder what would happen if Yelp joined the hotel review business.

[eropple]

I don't know if they'd lose, but I don't know if they'd make a dent in TripAdvisor as opposed to the smaller competitors. People go where the data is, and Trip has the reviews and has the reputation for trustworthiness. Yelp doesn't have a good rep as far as trustworthiness goes--the allegations of paying to hide bad reviews, etc.--and would be starting from zero or near-zero.

(And, having seen a few organizations handle fraud in user-generated content, I think Trip does a pretty good--not great, not perfect, but better than anybody else I've seen--job of it.)

[jghn]

Very interesting, thanks.