Your performance is absolutely irrelevant in relation to your promotion and growth opportunities and that is more emphasized in some teams than others.
If you are lucky to have a decent manager, you'll be fine. However, the company has grown very fast and the HR department has done a surprisingly terrible job at recruiting management roles (lower, mid and high management). There are obviously unprepared people all over the company managing teams and despite complaints, clear and evident proof of lack of management skills, there is a reluctancy to let those people go. Which in turn results in a very high turnover of front-line workers. In a team of 30+ people that I joined about 3 years ago only 2 of us remain. THAT crazy is the situation. Which means overload of work for those who remain.
Management is also unable to train all the new joiners that are needed, which means work flows to already overloaded "booking dinosaurs". In line with the above, in that 30+ people team there where at least 7 people on long burnout leave in the past two years - an astonishing +20% of the workforce of the team!
The company used to be good in terms of salary but it is falling behind. You can find far better working conditions in other companies. Utilities are going down in general in the Booking Holdings group substantially, so I wouldn't expect even reasonable increases for 2025 or even 2026. In fact, there is a substantial push to cut costs.
I believe Booking.com already peaked two years ago and its going downhill in terms of employment environment ever since.
I also will NEVER get over the fact that during Covid the company received a substantial subsidy from the Dutch government to limit layoffs. They did however lay off a great part of Customer Support while, at the same time, granting that same year unethically high multi million bonuses to C-Level Management. It was an entire scandal and you can find all over that in google. The CEO is still the same... do you own assessment of the situation.
Finally HR team is a joke. Their work is far below standards. You are encouraged to give feedback and speak up. DO NOT if you decide to join. That is a ticket straight to the career growth blacklist.
