Adyen

• Most colleagues are really nice and helpful.
• Adyen provides a unique opportunity to experience how it was to be a Java developer at the turn of the century.
• Despite everything, the product offered seems to work for end users, so job security is not an issue.

Working in the tech department is a grueling experience. If I were tasked to create a work environment that prevents anyone from getting any work done, without making it technically illegal, I would take the Adyen setup and not change a thing.

Standard modern Java libraries and frameworks are off the table: no Spring (boot), no testing frameworks, or anything other than plain Java. The monolith was created about 15 years ago, and the technology from around then, plus some homegrown, half-baked additions, are all the tools you get.

All tech decisions are made by a group of grumpy old men who have been working at the company since the beginning. Their main job is to prevent any modernization or other improvement from changing the system they invented. The standard arguments are: "it is not secure enough for us" and "it will be too difficult to understand if someone has to fix a time-critical live issue." It is hard to argue that security and maintainability are not important, but I believe the opposite is achieved currently. As senior positions are only handed out to people who have been in the company for a long time, and not to new hires, the groupthink only strengthens, and new ideas are kept out the door.

The MacBooks are overworked to run the software locally. They are painfully slow, with a local redeploy of part of the software taking 5 to 10 minutes and a full redeploy around 20 minutes. Both are required many times a day. Due to the monolithic nature of the software and the imperfect CI, it is common that errors are introduced, breaking your local build and/or the CI build of your changes. The laptops are centrally managed, which probably accounts for some of the slowness and certainly for the regular broken updates, forced reboots, and frustration, as installing any software locally is forbidden.

Regular engineers have no permissions at all, making it necessary to beg for information or configuration changes from the happy few senior engineers. There is no database access, no configuration access on any test or production machine. Many parts of the code are extra protected, requiring explicit permission from the senior engineers.

The "This is fine" cartoon of the dog drinking coffee surrounded by fire is maybe the best description of what's going on here. Everything is up for improvement and modernization, but the old men in charge deny this and are blocking any attempt at that.

I genuinely regret ever starting here and would not recommend it to anyone.

Bring new people and new ideas into the tech department. Hire a VP from outside to shake things up!