Pros
# Introduction I've been working in Amadeus for three years after having spent more than ten years in an other IT company. At first, very enthusiast with a lot energy, I'm now starting to be fed up and disgusted. I'm even thinking of leaving before being demotivated and depressed. Three years ago I couldn't have believed my opinion on the company would get so bad... # Location Mountains are close. You can go skiing in one hour and a half. Main restaurant and food are good. The weather is nice. # Work life - Stable situation, security of the job. - Private/work life balance is more or less ok. - Diversity: eg: LGBT association, ecology actions and responsability, etc. - Recruitment process was easy. Induction and training are nice - Theoric possibility to work in other country
Cons
# People and culture - Once passed induction and training, the real life is very different from what was advertized. - Easy recruitment process is nice but also an issue. It also means that no technical skills are required and the soft skills (communication, vision, character) are badly judged resulting in people that shouldn't be hired. - Workforce reduced but workload stays the same if not highest - Lazy people. If you don't work, you won't have any problem. I saw several people looking at youtube all day long, even contractors. It was known to managers but nobody did anything. - Childish and immature mentality, people into gossips, dramas and backstabbing. A unusual concentration of condescending and arrogant people there. A lot of people there don't support criticism even positive. They will hide their thought and will talk about you at their management. - Very political, you will spend most of your time doing diplomacy, maneuvers, little wars on insignifiant things and being worried instead of creating added values for the company. - Losing 80% of my time in useless meetings. Rest of my time, I play fireman jumping from urgency to urgency. - ITIL has been reinvented in a less effective way - Said to be international but in Nice there are mostly french and italian. Poor english level. The people are also not really international minded, a lot of them never even left France. - That's the world we live in but you also have to know that Amadeus can fire people to maintain the financial margin - I'm internal but I can see that contractors are not always treated with respect - A lot of people there mostly worked for Amadeus. Therefore, they have no other point of view, can't think out of the box (or don't want to). - Don't be too active, don't have too much ideas. Don't propose to change what is in place, even with the good form of communication. It will be badly perceived by your colleagues and your management. In case of issue, people won't hesitate to spit on you behind your back. # Technical - Very low technical level. For example, I've met "DevOps experts" that didn't even know how to use git and discovered Ansible! - Amadeus has a high image of itself and thinks it compares to Google. They're so far from it. You have to know that Amadeus did maneuvers in the past to evict Google implantation in Nice region because HR were afraid to loose the good engineers. If Amadeus were at least close to Google in term of attractiveness and technology it wouldn't have been necessary. - Nobody has an overview of the architecture, even the architects - Poor technical stacks, dated back from 15 years, from the airline that merged their IT to create Amadeus. Nothing really changed. The mainframes have disappeared but the names, the architecture, the monolithic mindset are still there. On top of it there is now a mixed of - You will never have time to work on refactorising or making things clean, you will just navigate in a mud of bugs and inconstitencies and will have to build over that mud, hoping to espace that hell one day to flee to an other team/project/company. - Every tool is internal and in house. Even opensource solutions are wrapped making them unusable with the time. And when it gets too worse, let's take an other technical stack (that was "modern" 5-10 years ago... gasp) and redo the same errors of the past with the same people. Internal tools are badly (not) documented. Developments teams are tangled with stress, calendars and don't work toward the vision of the company. In my carreer, that's the worst I could have seen. - It will take you between one or two years to understand a minimum the technical stacks. Everything if overly complicated. And that's not related to travel industry. - I feel my soft skills have improved a bit but in a bad way whereas my technical skills have been degrading since I work here...