Adyen

• 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 or 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.

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.

My advice would be to remove some hurdles when it comes to testing and using new technologies in production. People are going to get increasingly frustrated with the outdated practices. Don't just listen to your core senior developers. Of course, they don't mind the current way of working – they designed it the way it is.

Tone down the Adyen formula story. You are hiding behind the Adyen formula and pretending everything is OK, when in reality, your managers don't proactively take steps to understand how their teams are performing on a day-to-day basis. It seems a touch hypocritical.