Adyen

The teams are cool, mostly full of open-minded people that don't care about helping you to get things done.

The environment is fantastic. The building has a great location, and you will feel inside an international company. They will offer you business trips to all offices, and you can easily know the world while working for Adyen.

Work-life balance is great. They understand your moment and help you in several ways to improve your quality of life. They have amazing parties with lots of drinks and food in a nice environment, so you would feel empowered to make connections with other employees. They fly people from all offices to meet in Amsterdam. Amazing!

The expedition will begin on your first day. You will receive your MacBook and will be taught how to set yourself up and how to build the project for the first time. They have one repository to rule them all, and everything you can think of is in that repository. Then, you will do a rough 30-minute build to have a clean state project.

You will notice on the spot that the machine is always slow and bottlenecked. That's because they have many 'big brother is watching over you' software running in the background. Also, you will have a simple user account with no administrative rights, so you can't install anything, and there are a lot of restrictions. Even your favourite IDE or your favourite plugins might not be available. There's nothing you can do about it.

Adyen is a company that handles security hard. That's good because they are in control, but it comes with a price. As a developer there, you will not be exposed to new technologies and you will be stuck with a brand-new 2006 architecture.

They will brag and tell you that there's a new architecture, and it uses REST endpoints and modern technologies. That is true, but be aware: the new technology is used only in customer-facing applications, and the real game-changing features are done in the old way.

Their senior developer group is formed by the old guard that joined at the beginning of the company, and they fight hard to maintain the architecture the way it was designed in 2006 with all resources they have.

The job, in a nutshell, comprises asking around what needs to be done, looking at a similar feature, and implementing it almost the same way you find an example. The daily basis comprises pure copying and pasting code with some minor adaptation, without taking much care of testing.

You will struggle every day with permissions and a lack of transparency about what's going on within the system. If you don't mind asking people repeatedly, you will survive. Everyone was in your shoes once, and they will help you when possible.

Architecture-wise, they don't rely on modern solutions, and everything is built in-house. That is not bad if they refurbish the architecture, but people are stuck with the old design. Everything that is in a modern solution is not there. Load balancers, DNS, auto-scaling – everything is done as it was in the old days.

Testing reveals a lot about the developer's mindset. There are A LOT of static final methods and classes, so it's impossible to mock and do unit testing at all. You will end up using old-school techniques to populate a crazy cache structure and then trusting in a database state. Also, the database is shared among developers, and it's easy to spot false positives. They don't have mocking frameworks, they don't believe in good testing, and there are no conversations about changing things. Even popular Java testing frameworks are not there. You will find only JUnit, and that's it.

Once finished, you will onboard the release train. Every release follows a strict calendar, and you should know it. It's possible to have a patch, but that requires a lot of approvals and bureaucracy to be done, so developers often wait for the next release.

Management is bad. Managers don't care about ground-floor activities and are solely thinking about themselves. There's no agile going on besides daily (or weekly) stand-up meetings. I had the misfortune of hearing my manager say in a meeting: "What would be of Adyen if we heard everyone's opinion?"

To wrap it up: Adyen is a great career path if you don't mind working with outdated software techniques. There's a lot to explore, and people are nice. Ask as many questions as possible to see if you are a fit.

The C-level staff are great. They will make you love the payments industry, and they are aiming for the long run. I don't understand what is going on in the operational aspect. Every manager is not up to the standards that Adyen deserves, and they are really bad.