Support is a dead end - Technical Support Engineer Adyen Employee Review

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.