Great financial company, bad IT company
Pros
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 lot's of drinks and food in a nice environment so you would feel empowered to make connections to the other employees. They fly people from all offices to meet in Amsterdam. Amazing!
Cons
The expedition will begin on your first day: You will receive your MacBook and will be taught how to set up yourself 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 minutes 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 of '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 could 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 be not exposed to new technologies and you will be stuck with a brand new 2006 architecture. They will brag about 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's need to be done, looking at a similar feature and implement 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 lack of transparency of what's going on within the system. If you don't mind asking people repeatedly you will survive. Everyone was is 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 stick 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: that reveals a lot of the developer's mindset: There's 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 the 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. Things 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 to 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 unfortunate of hearing of my manager in a meeting: What would be of Adyen if we hear everyone's opinion? To wrap it up: Adyen is a great career path if you don't mind working outdated in 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.