Adyen reviews

3.7

71% would recommend to a friend

(904 total reviews)
avatar

Pieter van der Does

80% approve of CEO

68% positive business outlook

Adyen has an employee rating of 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 904 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Adyen employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Finanzas industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

904 reviews
2.0
Apr 9, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Free lunch - Interesting industry with great clients - The best work-life balance - We improved our on-boarding with better documentation for new hires - Most people are really nice and sincere people - Trips to Europe, of course if you are wise with spending. - There is no predilection of European hires over American - It has an extremely bright future due to the product, in spite of the toxic culture

Cons

It is with great sadness that I write this review after years of being at Adyen but I find it necessary for the company to listen without putting myself in the crossfire. I would entice everyone to read at the positive reviews and see if they give pointed examples or facts as I do here. You will notice most are insipid because 1) they are 'requested' by HR to write reviews 2) they really have not substantive material to defend their position. I would suggest the company is a great option for people who are far enough in their careers or just starting off. - Compensations: Low base salaries, and bad stock options (read below). - Stock options: As mentioned stock options are very low. New hires received the same as old hires. 100 stock options - Removed Management: Upper level management (e.g. COO) removed all of the managers (Marketing, Sales, Technical Support, etc.) because they supposedly could not bring the company to scale and replaced them with people with a big ego, b-level pedigrees, and who had the 'culture' that fit with the COO - Department Management: They believe their way of doing things is right without taking too much into consideration members who have been in the payment's industry longer than they have. They may be expert is marketing or sales, yet not when it comes to payments. Listen. - Retention: Most people leave because of low compensation or no career growth (read below), they have left to Stripe or some other lead competitor. I really wish them all the best. - No Career growth unless...: As others have mentioned, no career growth is true. HR and Management will say there is no career path set and that it is not a place for people who want "flat structure and told what to do". They seem to put the blame on something being wrong with you and not them. They need to listen. The company has seen a number of these examples play out. 1) If you want to join a different team they will say they are not hiring for that team to keep you from joining. Even if you try to do projects with the team and make moves so that you are already doing the role, you will not be given the role. It is evident you can not create your own career path. There is no commitment and only postpone having conversations about career progress. If you have another offer, take it. They will not ever be able to match. The honest difference between those who have advanced e.g. Account management > product management or some other department is because they fit the 'culture'. - Kool-Aid: It is a forced culture, you have to drink the kool-aid. Very few people are actually aware of what is going on. - Not scaling: Will not hire engineers because it would be impossible to retain them, they will only ever have business people and even some core team they will not hire. It is all in Amsterdam. - Ego: Management in SF does have an ego - Perception is reality: If someone has a problem with you, they will not come to you, and has the ear of management you will fall out of favor.

2.0
Dec 5, 2018

Ok, but not for too long

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Free lunch and really good coffee - Beautiful office, central location in Amsterdam - Hours are very good. People generally don't make a fuss about how early/late you choose to come in as long as you get your work done. - As an industry, payments are more interesting than your typical development job at an e-commerce site.

Cons

I don't see myself staying at Adyen for much longer than a year for a few reasons: - The senior developers are really not open to change. They've decided that their way of doing things for the past 10 years is the way to go and that's that. For instance, they prefer writing and maintaining custom tools for streaming data processing instead of using well-documented and reliable open source solutions. Even considering all the security concerns that come with using third-party software, custom-building everything is just error-prone and counterproductive since it takes time and resources away from developing Adyen's actual products. This is the most glaring example of their way of thinking I could briefly provide here. Really, their stubbornness is evident every time a discussion about best practices or anything code-related comes up. - It follows from the point above that as an Adyen developer you get very little exposure to new technologies, which makes the job itself quite boring and is probably a bad thing career-wise. They explain this lack of new tech as being very concerned about security, which I appreciate since we are talking about a payments company. But being overly risk-averse is not good for anyone involved. - The culture ('we talk straight', 'we launch fast', etc.) feels very forced. Some people seem to love the culture, or are very good at pretending they do. To me it feels like there is this constant tension as company politics and egos clash but everyone still pretends Adyen is always wonderful. It feels to me that a lot of people are just going along with it until they are ready to move on to something else. And some people thrive in this culture and end up becoming decision-makers for better or for worse. - This may differ from team to team, but the onboarding process for new developers is not good at all. New hires are given tasks with very little context (and not everyone has prior experience in payments). Sure, they can go around asking anyone and everyone who might be able to guide them, but I think team leads should feel a greater deal of responsibility in seeing how their new developers are doing and to provide some guidance. - The team leads, although they really are smart people, are focused solely on the company and their respective products and pay very little attention to people management. Some teams are malfunctioning, but the team leads either don't notice or don't care. This doesn't make for a pleasant working environment some days.

2.0
Sep 26, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

A good job and pay if you are new to payments or finance. Adyen tends to be a stepping stone for a lot of people into their next role elsewhere in payments. Trips to Amsterdam, and potential opportunities to work out of different locations. Traveling for work at Adyen is an expectation. Free in-office lunch at all locations and free coffee that’s pretty good.

Cons

If you are a candidate for Support I would recommend pushing to interview as an Implementation Engineer. Support Engineers are just as (if not more) proficient than their Implementation counterparts, but Implementation pays significantly more for less work. I also would only recommend taking a technical role at Adyen in North America out of the Chicago office. San Francisco and New York are satellite offices where management is letting the technical teams atrophy. There is no respect, recognition, or rewards for working on Support. Overall the company has failed to grow effectively with their plans to scale 10x. Most new hires have little to no experience where it is needed while top performers have mostly left the company for better pastures. The company explicitly now hires mid to low range candidates with no payments experience which has hamstrug the company in comparison to the competition. The migration over to Salesforce Service Cloud from Zendesk has been an absolute dumpster fire. Management accused the support team, the same people that are put in front of merchants when things catch on fire, of “cherry picking” tickets. The reality is that we now have more fire alarms over minor tickets that have sat open for days because no one has access to them or can see them. The biggest takeaway from this migration is that leadership has no idea how individual contributors work. Operations management is full of non-technical people making very-technical decisions who fundamentally do not understand the scope of the work that their individual contributors do. The most common answer to every question during this migration from all levels of management has been “I don’t know” or “no”. The only way to get promoted on the support team, or get access to projects that provide visibility, is to have come from the same company that the Head of Support previously came from. Both HR and the executive level are aware of the nepotism on the team as it has come up in multiple exit interviews and they flat out do not care. Overall at Adyen, being your boss’ friend is more important than any metric. Good sales people are regularly laid off simply for not being liked. It might take some time to see, but the company is VERY political. Especially in Amsterdam. You will have to juggle the politics of your local office along with the politics of the global team you work with. “Because we’re so important” Support never gets to fully participate in any company-wide events because we need to be on hand when stuff breaks. Adyen once had a “recharge week”, and Support management basically opted the whole team out of participating. Your role will require you to regularly solve million dollar problems, but the most you can hope for is a team pizza party while Sales goes on excursions and out for steak and lobster dinners because sales is seen as making money while operations is seen as spending money. The company goes through great lengths to keep the two teams separate. If you visit the San Francisco office you are not even allowed to sit with or near Sales or the execs who work on the floor above you. Seriously. With the new reorganization there seems to be a creep of “not my job”. Funnily enough a former Adyener once told me “I’ve never heard someone here tell me “that’s not my job”, and when it does happen, I’ll know it’s finally time to leave. In a recent “fireside” chat an executive said that in the Amsterdam office they will only maintain a certain percentage of Dutch employees, which is really messed up. There is no software quality assurance team. There is however a support quality assurance team where people with no experience in your field give you feedback on the tickets you respond to. For every process you streamline our automate there will be a new process, flow, or spreadsheet someone with the word “manager” in their title will throw at you to slow you down again.

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