Pros
Adyen has an amazing pool of talent - if you want to work with smart, kind, hard-working people who are willing to share their knowledge and experience freely with you, this is the place for you. It's a highly collaborative environment. It's also a place where you can geek out and become an expert in topics that interest you and help your colleagues, take ownership of your goals and set priorities for your own work. The product solves real issues for real paying customers, and is both deepening and widening in scope over time, while at the same time scaling hard. Getting involved in this growth is great fun, and is available to almost every team in one way or another. Adyen uses something called the "Adyen formula" to give a common language to how people should try to practically work together on complex problems across many time zones and specialisms. As a result you'll hear internal catchphrases like "make good choices", "launch fast and iterate", "pick up the phone", "own your own career" or "no blush" much more often than phrases like "work instruction" or "corporate policy", and you'll get to try these concepts on for size and fit for your needs. Travelling to Adyen locations around the world is a great perk, and discovering that your colleagues there are as warm and as welcoming as back at your home base is wonderful. Meeting customers and partners while travelling opens up new dimensions to your understanding of the business and your place in it. At Adyen, you work with people from quite diverse backgrounds and life experiences, and your colleagues will welcome your lived experiences and you as a whole person if you choose to share it with them. Spending time with them, either physically or in close collaboration through video meetings will give you new friends around the world. Hands down, the best place I have ever worked. Thanks everybody!
Cons
Not everybody thrives at Adyen, and especially if you're more comfortable with a clear, templated growth path supported by work instructions and formal process, you are likely to have difficulties adjusting. I'd also say that if you think back to your studies and think about group work and remember that you weren't the one or two people on your team doing all the work, Adyen might not be a fit. While other people in your team will be looking out to support you in your work/life balance, it's possible to over-commit, with consequences for your personal and family life. This isn't as well managed as a lot of other things at Adyen, and you do need to look out for yourself to some extent, although there's been significant improvements recently in this area. Adyen's largest office is in Amsterdam. It has some more large offices in major markets or international hubs, and these are the locations where a lot of the networking and decision-making take place. This will sometimes have impact on your work day and your home life, even if you work from Amsterdam, since the colleagues and customers you'll be working with may be many timezones away, and the practice of working intensively together using calls is built into the culture and practices. "Own your own career" has been proven to be tough for some new hires, and the advice that I'll give is to focus on gaining mastery in your area, a good mentoring network and keeping an eye open for opportunities to grow, since the best opportunities won't be handed to you on a plate. Tech as a whole has suffered from a lack of diversity, and while a lot of progress has been made there's still a lot more to do. At Adyen, diversity and inclusion is a high priority, and if you're a new hire from an under-represented group in some teams and countries you might find yourself doing some gentle path-finder work, which is not for everybody. Many real decisions are made mostly - but not always - bottom-up. If you're new and want to make a big impact, simply pitching your ideas to management typically doesn't work. If there's a smell of CV-driven priorities, without a real game-changing business impact, you might be SOOL. Change and impact works by building up a network who support your ideas and who will help prototype what you want to achieve and pitch with you across the organization. This can take some time and practice.