I left Adyen in April of 2024 after being fed up with the work culture that leadership and management cultivated. After spending a lot of time thinking, I believe that making my two week notice letter public is the right thing to do. To explain my reasoning, I have a bit of what's become a personal mantra that I am now going to share:
If being open, honest, and helpful about my experiences puts me at risk of not receiving a job in the future, I'm better off for it. If what I am about to say helps one person, then it is all more than worthwhile. The way in which Adyen leadership operates is far more shameful than anything I am going to share here.
Here is the plain text in case the file wont load:
April 30th, 2024
Adyen
274 Brannan St #600
San Francisco, CA 94107
Dear Adyen Human Resources Team,
Please accept this letter as my formal two-week notice. My last day at Adyen will be May 13th. I have decided to leave Adyen after receiving feedback, both verbally and in writing, from multiple Leads and other team members on the Support team. The feedback has been that some Support Leads have been spreading rumors that I wrote a negative Glassdoor review. Additionally, Marissa Nijhuis believes that I wrote such a review because of this gossip. Consequently, Marissa Nijhuis and Molly Mcmahon scuttled a recent opportunity for me to transition to a senior title and will sabotage any future opportunities for me at Adyen.
To be crystal clear, I have never written an Adyen company review.
When I met with Molly Mcmahon on March 7th, the main piece of feedback I received was that “Marissa (Nijhuis) thinks you have an attitude problem” despite the fact that until April 25th 2024, I had never had a conversation with Marissa. I was not given further examples or context as to what that meant when I asked. When I did meet with Marissa on April 25th she told me “[she] never told Molly (Mcmahon) that I have an attitude problem”. Earlier this year I was told in a 1-on-1 by my manager that “myself, Molly (Mcmahon), and Sophia all agree that you deserve a significant increase in salary”. On March 22nd during my only 1-on-1 with [redacted] as my manager, before she was fired, I was told that Marissa Nijhuis “fucking hated” her and that “if Marissa (Nijhuis) does not like you she will ruin your fucking career”.
Unfortunately, this recent retaliatory incident is not an isolated case during my time at Adyen; rather, it reflects a broader culture of retaliation, bullying, and racism. Shortly after he was hired, James Beesley made a comment in a Zoom meeting with Ted Reddington and myself that we needed “less white men with beards and glasses interviewing”. The agenda of the call was to discuss a candidate for Support we had interviewed. Shortly after that comment I was subsequently removed from interviewing Support Team candidates. When I inquired with Ted Reddington two weeks later he told me that he didn’t know why I was removed from interviewing and that we were slowing down hiring. During this time a woman of color on the team complained about how busy she was with interviewing and asked me how I managed to get out of it. I subsequently was told later on from [my manager at the time] that the reason I was removed from interviewing was that James Beesley thought I had a “disposition” problem without ever being given specific examples or feedback about what my disposition is or was, or what feedback on disposition is even supposed to mean.
I did not feel comfortable about going to HR about the above situation for two reasons. First, When I spoke to other employees at Adyen about these situations, I was sometimes told not to rock the boat because HR would not take me seriously based on their previous experiences facing harassment at Adyen. Second; a previous interaction I had with HR. In the summer of 2021 I went to my manager Ted Reddington and then eventually HR about being bullied by Sarai Acquino. Sarai Acquino had scheduled me to work Support Duty on a holiday without any notification or communication that I would be scheduled. When I spoke to Sarai Acquino about this they informed me that it wouldn’t matter if I had already requested the day off anyways, it would still be my responsibility to manage someone to cover for me if Sarai Acquino scheduled over time I had requested off. Most of this conversation can still be found in Mattermost direct messages during July 2021. At the time I was still in Support Duty training and on the fence about participating in Support Duty at all. When I subsequently decided not participate in Support Duty, Sarai Acquino regularly started assigning me work directly and monitoring all tickets that were assigned to me in Zendesk. These tickets were completely unrelated from Support Duty. Sarai Acquino would then escalate what they personally perceived to be issues with my work to my manager and [the North America Head of Support at the time] when I reassigned Sarai Acquino back the tickets they assigned me or did not respond to them in a way that Sarai Acquino did not personally find timely or adequate. Sarai Acquino also subsequently removed me from upcoming Scheme Product and Acquiring trainings that were happening.
When I brought the situation up to Ted Reddington and told him I felt like I was being bullied, he told me that Sarai Acquino knows and does a lot at Adyen as a justification for their behavior. When I went to an HR representative to ask if Adyen had an anti-bullying policy, and that I did not want to give specifics, the HR rep told me that they did not think there was a bullying policy, but that I could tell them anything and it was completely confidential. When I declined to provide further information, the HR representative repeated five times throughout the call that anything I would tell her would be confidential before I gave in. Shortly after that call, the HR rep called me back to tell me that what I told her was not confidential, that she had to report it to the global lead of HR, and that the global lead of HR would be reaching out. I subsequently declined the meeting request that was sent to me by the global head of HR and completely dropped the subject.
Despite all of these challenges, I have been expected to be a subject matter expert at Adyen and be the only person in North America that is able to step up when certain products break. In the past year I have not been able to go on vacation or participate in training without there being a major issue that I need to address. Merchants message me on Linkedin when things break when I’m on vacation and say there’s no one to help them. I am the highest performing and most experienced Support Engineer in North America when it comes to plugins and partnerships. Despite this, I am the lowest paid person in that vertical. Nevertheless, the feedback I get directly from management is vague, contradictory, and based more on prejudice than the quality of my work.
I wish you all the best with the cultural challenges Adyen is facing.
In my exit interview HR told me that they had been too busy to get around to fully reading my letter, but they would get around to it.
Since I was scapegoated for a review I did not write, I figure that I should get my figurative money's worth and platform the the review itself further. What have I got to use? I've already been accused. Besides, I have genuinely been too busy to write a Glassdoor review of my own, and given that:
- Whenever I sit down to write, what I have to say resembles that more of a dissertation rather than a review.
- Glassdoor would likely take down what I have to say anyways.
I thought of this page as being a more functional use of my time while I balance collecting my thoughts with my busy schedule.
Support is a dead end, September 26th 2003
Pros
A good job and pay if you are new to payments or finance. Adyen tends to be a stepping stone for a lot of people into their next role elsewhere in payments. Trips to Amsterdam, and potential opportunities to work out of different locations. Traveling for work at Adyen is an expectation. Free in-office lunch at all locations and free coffee that’s pretty good.
Cons
If you are a candidate for Support I would recommend pushing to interview as an Implementation Engineer. Support Engineers are just as (if not more) proficient than their Implementation counterparts, but Implementation pays significantly more for less work. I also would only recommend taking a technical role at Adyen in North America out of the Chicago office. San Francisco and New York are satellite offices where management is letting the technical teams atrophy. There is no respect, recognition, or rewards for working on Support. Overall the company has failed to grow effectively with their plans to scale 10x. Most new hires have little to no experience where it is needed while top performers have mostly left the company for better pastures. The company explicitly now hires mid to low range candidates with no payments experience which has hamstrug the company in comparison to the competition. The migration over to Salesforce Service Cloud from Zendesk has been an absolute dumpster fire. Management accused the support team, the same people that are put in front of merchants when things catch on fire, of “cherry picking” tickets. The reality is that we now have more fire alarms over minor tickets that have sat open for days because no one has access to them or can see them. The biggest takeaway from this migration is that leadership has no idea how individual contributors work. Operations management is full of non-technical people making very-technical decisions who fundamentally do not understand the scope of the work that their individual contributors do. The most common answer to every question during this migration from all levels of management has been “I don’t know” or “no”. The only way to get promoted on the support team, or get access to projects that provide visibility, is to have come from the same company that the Head of Support previously came from. Both HR and the executive level are aware of the nepotism on the team as it has come up in multiple exit interviews and they flat out do not care. Overall at Adyen, being your boss’ friend is more important than any metric. Good sales people are regularly laid off simply for not being liked. It might take some time to see, but the company is VERY political. Especially in Amsterdam. You will have to juggle the politics of your local office along with the politics of the global team you work with. “Because we’re so important” Support never gets to fully participate in any company-wide events because we need to be on hand when stuff breaks. Adyen once had a “recharge week”, and Support management basically opted the whole team out of participating. Your role will require you to regularly solve million dollar problems, but the most you can hope for is a team pizza party while Sales goes on excursions and out for steak and lobster dinners because sales is seen as making money while operations is seen as spending money. The company goes through great lengths to keep the two teams separate. If you visit the San Francisco office you are not even allowed to sit with or near Sales or the execs who work on the floor above you. Seriously. With the new reorganization there seems to be a creep of “not my job”. Funnily enough a former Adyener once told me “I’ve never heard someone here tell me “that’s not my job”, and when it does happen, I’ll know it’s finally time to leave. In a recent “fireside” chat an executive said that in the Amsterdam office they will only maintain a certain percentage of Dutch employees, which is really messed up. There is no software quality assurance team. There is however a support quality assurance team where people with no experience in your field give you feedback on the tickets you respond to. For every process you streamline our automate there will be a new process, flow, or spreadsheet someone with the word “manager” in their title will throw at you to slow you down again.
Advice to Management
If you want to hit 10x get rid of a quarter to half of anyone with the word manager in their title and give a fraction of their salaries to the individual contributors. You’ll see productivity and automation skyrocket overnight. If you want to grow 10x, implement a policy that the only people who can use Google spreadsheets are people who know how to process and parse through spreadsheets and CSVs with a programming language. Middle management is bloated and ineffective. I honestly believe the formula point about stewards was modified because managers got tired of subject matter experts calling out their bad decisions.
 | ||||
| Screenshot of the Adyen Tech Support Glassdoor Review |
When I am finally able to sit down and write a comprehensive review of my experience at Adyen, and post it to Glassdoor, I will be sure to post it here as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment