Adyen reviews

Politics. Of course, joining a corporation and not considering that there are going to be office politics is naïve. This con is expected everywhere. However, in particularly for Adyen, there is the trap which is called “Adyen formula”. You will get the idea that there is freedom and flexibility and due to open dutch culture you can speak your mind (without being rude off course). Here you must be incredibly careful as there is a very strict inner cycle where even mentioning something “different” can lead to veeery nasty consequences. This is mentioned in other reviews as well. I cannot offer more details on what these consequences mean but you will notice people suddenly exempt from work for no apparent reason. Middle management: There is literally no managerial training for team leads and if you are unlucky to run into untrained/ambitious people you have to be very careful on how you react as you will never receive any feedback, just consequences. On the bright side, if you keep a fake smile and pretend to work you can flourish. Have seen main projects unfinished for years and routine tasks failing frequently but you can get away with blame culture mixed with adyen formula quotations. It’s sad to say it but performance does not matter, I have seen multiple high performers “disappearing” suddenly. HR: This function is non existent. You will collaborate with them when you come and when you go. They will not coach or try to solve any matters within teams. Be careful not to communicate any issues to them or else you will have nasty reactions. As of the day of this post you can see that in negative glassdoor posts there is no questioning from someone on what happened in bad reviews. Adyen formula / “Culture”: The formula has the same concept as the Bible in middle ages. You can interpret it as you like but in the end it applies for few and will be used against the weak. By few I mean the inner cycle and any newly developed leads of vanity teams. This concept it was good maybe in previous years but due to the insane hiring and untrained management this applies only for the specific inner cycle. Don’t get fooled by the insane hiring. Most of the hires are junior and in some cases without a content which can be a bad realization when you join. It’s not bad to have an open ended role but if ideas (not even mentioning actions…) are penalized severely then obviously things contradict each other. Apart from people disappearing also new joiners leave within the first months.. I have been working for more than 2 years and I only saw 2 interns leaving in good terms (willingly or not…). I am excluding some of the old guard who left due to getting rich during the IPO. I am skeptical on whether the 5 star reviews are real (all really resemble each other) or are written by entry level joiners in most cases.

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.