Adyen

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

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.

• Hire professional people from outside.
• Start to do some solid work instead of talking fun and smart.
• Build a culture, not a cult.
• Be a gentleman instead of "talking directly," which is, in the core, just offensive, rude, and leads to finger-pointing.