Adyen reviews

Adyen still has a lot of growing up to do. I think 'The Formula' is a nice way to guide people, as sort of a moral compass. But in practice it's either misused to defend otherwise invalid arguments or it's just not followed at all. HR is trying to get people to "talk straight without being rude", for which feedback workshops are provided. That's nice. But it's not happening at all, or barely sufficient in the work place. Adyen doesn't tell you what to do, is the idea here. The result is lacking feedback, growing problems and stagnation. I think this needs more structure. As a developer you'll waste a lot of time getting your build to work. It's not very developer friendly, but improvements are being made. The codebase is huge and monolithic, and has quite some legacy. It can be challenging to work with. There's indeed little hierarchy, but more than enough political games. The whole "Make an impact from day one" is a lie. "You'll be told 'no' from day one" would be more applicable. Either because of security/compliance/paranoia restrictions or because the guys who've been there from day one don't like it. There's some very old fashioned ideas on what good code looks like floating around there. Also regarding industry standards, people really like to invent the wheel here. Your experience with those homemade tools is pretty useless outside Adyen. As your skills have an expiry date, with rapidly evolving tech outside the company, soon you'll be useless as a developer at any other company. You can "own your career" as a developer by getting promoted to a team lead position. Great. So now there's developers in manager positions, who aren't capable of managing. The team is often missing it's best developer, because he's a manager now, who owns his career. He's still owns the same income, or maybe little more but only after he's proven himself. Baffling. Finally, there's the financial compensation issue. I can't grasp the motivation behind underpaying your staff, especially at a financially very successful company. But it's happening a lot and great Adyenners are leaving because of it. Recruiting, relocating and training new staff is a costly business. But for some reason the money is rather spent there, as opposed to just properly compensating the staff already in place.

Working in the tech department is a gruelling experience. If I were tasked to create a work environment that prevents anyone from getting any work done, without making it technically illegal, I would take the Adyen setup and not change a thing, Standard modern Java libraries and frameworks are off the table: no Spring (boot), no testing frameworks, or anything other than plain Java. The monolith has been created about 15 years ago and the technology from around then, plus some home grown half-baked additions are all the tools you get. All tech decisions are made by a group of grumpy old men who have been working at the company since the beginning. Their main job is to prevent any modernization or other improvement to change the system they invented. The standard arguments are: "it is not secure enough for us" and "it will be too difficult to understand if someone has to fix a time critical live issue". It is hard to argue that security and maintainability are not important, but I believe the opposite is achieved currently. As senior positions are only handed out to people who have been in the company for a long time, and not to new hires, the group think only strengthens and new ideas are kept out the door. The macbooks are overworked to run the software locally. They are painfully slow, with a local redeploy of part of the software taking 5 to 10 minutes and a full redeploy around 20 minutes. Both are required many times a day. Due to the monolithic nature of the software and the imperfect CI, it is common that errors are introduced, break your local build and/or the CI build of your changes. The laptops are centrally managed, which probably accounts for some of the slowness, and certainly for the regular broken updates, forced reboots and frustration as installing any software locally is forbidden. Regular engineers have no permissions at all, making it necessary to beg for information or configuration changes from the happy few senior engineers. No database access, configuration access on any test or production machine. Many parts of the code are extra protected, requiring explicit permission from the senior engineers. The "This is fine" cartoon of the dog drinking coffee surrounded by fire is maybe the best description of what's going on here. Everything is up for improvement and modernization, but the old men in charge deny this and are blocking any attempt at that. I genuinely regret ever starting here and would not recommend it to anyone.