Treats employees like a commodity - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso PokerStars

By far my biggest issue with Amaya is that they do no appreciate their employees. I've seen the token emails from upper management and speeches at meetings claiming otherwise but all other evidence paints a different picture. One thing that stuck out to me is that they often complain about how much salaries cost when they do not pay that well. The way it was worded it seemed like they thought of employees were nuisances that were tolerated rather than valued parts of the company. The standard way they deal with what they view as cost heavy offices is to lay people off. I have witnessed many layoffs in multiple offices. In each case it was reasonable that some needed to happen but Amaya jumps to layoffs far too quickly and easily. In between mass layoff a number of individual removals happened as well. Even in offices that were profitable and short staffed. One of the ways they go about layoffs is to pick some role or business area and decide that it is no longer necessary. So they fire people of type x regardless of how valuable they are or the damage it does to an office or business area of the company. Then a few months or even weeks later they realize that they actually need those people, beg one or more to come back and start hiring for those roles again. The people let go were generally hardworking skilled employees, this was not a performance issue. This has happened several times. In one case they let go of everyone who knew how to maintain a critical system then had to beg to get the weakest member of that team to come back. The better people were not interested. Amaya was not short of money at the time and as far as I understand they never have been. To me that says loud and clear "We don't care about employees", and shows a poor understanding of how to run a company. As a result most of the really good people have left and a significant number of people who remain are toxic or borderline toxic or are buddies with someone higher up or both. There are still some great people but the number of people who were unpleasant to deal with, or be around, and who do well in the company because they know how to play politics or have a buddy network was a big issue for me. Another area of problems is anything to do with creating or running software systems. None of the systems Amaya are currently using were built by the original team of founders and early hires. They were all bought through acquisitions. This has caused a disconnect where upper management does not understand how build and maintain the scale of software systems they own. The company's original sms lotto platform was a simple and small project compared to what they have acquired. Because of their success with that small system and the short time the original team spent in the product development phase the executives seem to have grown an ingrained lack of understanding of serious software development. They assume everything should be as easy and smooth as that first small project. Because the executives do not understand software development but run a software product company they hire and appoint proxies to manage the software teams for them. How can a person without skill in software know how to recognize that skill in someone else? They cannot. Creating software is a hugely complex endeavor and it takes real knowledge and skill to tell the difference between someone who puts on a good show and someone who actually knows what they are doing. Because of this middle and lower management is fairly weak, and there are a significant number of people in positions of power that are there almost entirely because they know how to put on a show and play politics, and do not have the management skills, people skills, or software skills to excel. The worst managers I have worked with in my career are currently at Amaya. Finishing up pay is below average for the caliber of people, staff are expected to go the extra mile but not given much in return, there are no bonuses, taking time off is frowned upon, and work life balance is not great.