Adyen

Strong business position in the payments industry.

Code quality is chronically poor. The “design pattern of choice” is an ever-growing chain of if/else statements, where adding new functionality usually means bolting on yet another else rather than designing a clean, maintainable solution.

Testability is nearly absent. Many components can only be verified manually, or through convoluted setups that make proper automated testing impractical.

A culture that resists engineering best practices. Attempts to introduce abstraction, maintainability, or extensibility are routinely dismissed as “too complex.”

Outwardly, the company claims to be about empowering people, but internally personal initiatives are often discouraged. Product-driven initiatives dominate, while genuine engineering-driven initiatives simply do not exist.

Engineers are seen as executors rather than partners, with little influence or visibility into the actual banking and payments domain they are supposed to be building for.

The company’s “values” are little more than a façade. Outwardly they speak of being candid and humble, empowering people, and putting ego aside. In reality, candid feedback is discouraged, empowerment stops at Product, and ego is very much alive — just not on the engineering side. The mantra “Winning takes care of itself” translates into “we’re winning, therefore we must be right,” and “We make good decisions quickly” really means “decisions are always assumed to be good — as long as they come from the top.”

Stop hiding behind slogans about “empowerment” and start creating an environment where engineers can actually contribute beyond execution. Trust them with both domain knowledge and technical decisions.

Invest in code quality and testability as non-negotiables rather than luxuries. The current culture of piling on if/else statements may feel fast in the short term, but it creates fragile systems that slow everything down in the long run. A proper architecture and automated testing culture would pay for itself many times over.

Encourage engineering-driven initiatives instead of treating Product as the sole source of ideas. Without bottom-up innovation, you risk stifling the very people who could bring long-term technical excellence to the company.

In short: if you want to retain strong engineers, treat them as partners, not as interchangeable task executors. Otherwise, the gap between the “empowerment” you advertise externally and the reality inside the company will only keep growing.

True empowerment starts when engineers are allowed to do more than add another else.