Pros: Free lunch, free drinks, snacks, and fruit. Good colleagues and a convenient location in Amsterdam.

Cons: A bunch of smart engineers collaborate together, which results in flaky and bad code. Even to have a simple feature, it needs chatting with previous coders, patience, a waste of time in vain, and luck. They lag behind the state-of-the-art tech way too much, which, however, is not the focus of tech leads who care too much about networking. When it comes to work, tech leads would rather micromanage everything than trust people to finish their work. Tech leads don’t have the basic domain knowledge but dictate over how one simple solution is implemented. When it comes to big decisions, they become self-defensive and afraid of making mistakes. You need to try to figure things out, even working overtime while managing your manager. Inexperienced managers and team leads with bloated egos, arrogance, and hidden personal agendas. You often hear “I am always right” in various situations. If you stand up to them, you don’t get feedback but face consequences of revenge. “Own your own career” doesn’t mean you have freedom to explore team-wise or tech-solution wise. It is an excuse for bad management and ignorance. In fact, no matter how senior you are, you are stuck in very junior, and most of the time below-junior, monotonous work. You cannot learn anything at work, and your passion drains away, and some colleagues even face chronic depression. It is a dog-eat-dog world.

Pros: You can learn some things. Some very competent people work there.

Cons: own frameworks, you're locked to learn their frameworks that are used nowhere else.

Pros: Good pay, lots of room to grow, cool tech, very welcoming and international colleagues. Awesome offices as well.

Cons: The culture at Adyen was great pre-COVID and adapted well during the pandemic, but over the past year and a half, there have been noticeable changes. Ever since COVID ended, there has been a gradual shift towards micromanagement and excessive control. More than half of the company's workforce was hired during the pandemic, a period when the company was thriving. During that time, leadership delivered numerous speeches praising everyone for their dedication in overcoming challenges, emphasizing the importance of flexibility, and promoting trust in one another to get the job done, regardless of where we were working. Yet, as soon as COVID disappeared, this sentiment vanished. Mandatory in-office days and rigid bureaucratic rules were implemented without consideration for individual circumstances. The experience at Adyen transformed from feeling like you were part of a cool community building something amazing to feeling like you were a cog in a machine that didn't care about you at all. "You've got this" has turned into "fall in line". Both the people and tech are unique at this company, and it's a shame to see the culture on a forced downward spiral. The top-level management's attitude is my way or the highway, and I suspect a lot of us will choose the highway.