Vantaggi
If you're fresh out of school, I think Adyen is one of the best places to start out. There's time to work on your skills and plenty opportunity to grow. For a starter salary, it isn't bad. You'll meet lots of likeminded people, many students who are working on their master thesis and generally I'd say that the age is quite young. There's some nice party's and a lot of free alcohol. I think Adyen is also great for expats who are relocating to Amsterdam. Generally they get to know a lot of people trough work, and I've seen them end up with vibrant social lives because of that. If you're coming from abroad, alone, that's great. What I really enjoyed was the work-life balance, which is highly respected at Adyen. Working from home incidentally isn't a problem at all, just like having to excuse yourself from the workplace because of private issues that need to be dealt with. There's a strong focus on hiring people that are a good cultural fit. Next to that a large percentage of new hires join by being referred. This works out mostly and I think that's why there's so many nice people in the company.
Svantaggi
Adyen still has a lot of growing up to do. I think 'The Formula' is a nice way to guide people, as sort of a moral compass. But in practice it's either misused to defend otherwise invalid arguments or it's just not followed at all. HR is trying to get people to "talk straight without being rude", for which feedback workshops are provided. That's nice. But it's not happening at all, or barely sufficient in the work place. Adyen doesn't tell you what to do, is the idea here. The result is lacking feedback, growing problems and stagnation. I think this needs more structure. As a developer you'll waste a lot of time getting your build to work. It's not very developer friendly, but improvements are being made. The codebase is huge and monolithic, and has quite some legacy. It can be challenging to work with. There's indeed little hierarchy, but more than enough political games. The whole "Make an impact from day one" is a lie. "You'll be told 'no' from day one" would be more applicable. Either because of security/compliance/paranoia restrictions or because the guys who've been there from day one don't like it. There's some very old fashioned ideas on what good code looks like floating around there. Also regarding industry standards, people really like to invent the wheel here. Your experience with those homemade tools is pretty useless outside Adyen. As your skills have an expiry date, with rapidly evolving tech outside the company, soon you'll be useless as a developer at any other company. You can "own your career" as a developer by getting promoted to a team lead position. Great. So now there's developers in manager positions, who aren't capable of managing. The team is often missing it's best developer, because he's a manager now, who owns his career. He's still owns the same income, or maybe little more but only after he's proven himself. Baffling. Finally, there's the financial compensation issue. I can't grasp the motivation behind underpaying your staff, especially at a financially very successful company. But it's happening a lot and great Adyenners are leaving because of it. Recruiting, relocating and training new staff is a costly business. But for some reason the money is rather spent there, as opposed to just properly compensating the staff already in place.