Pros
It pays very well in Amsterdam and people still likes and comes back because it is a big company and it has structures and silos and rules, and many things still works because we uses to hire great people and value scalability overtime
Cons
It has americanized overtime. Not a Dutch company anymore, depending what team you are work/life balance is not a thing. A lot of C-level decisions in the last 3 years (mostly unnecessary) don't sit well with me from a human integrity perspective. Middle management is a disaster, we have lowered the bar of hiring, because "you can't take that long to find the right competent people" and then you end up with managers that are not a fit at all with the culture of the company and have no idea how to do their jobs, have a different vision of what their teams should do when they have never worked with such type of teams. And instead of sitting down learning what we do and with who they work with, like "who are you and how do I make you strive", what they care is just make it look the team is doing thing "doesn't matter if the work is half done or designed not to last 2 weeks, we will think about this or that later just close your tasks in time. Quality is not important" Then there are the absent PMs. Since we moved from POs (Product Owners) to PMs (Project managers), no one feels they own anything "it's the team's fault, they are too slow delivering". They don't help breaking down tasks, they don't have a proper view of the effort of every project nor they have a vision or roadmap, and you can't trust to send them in meeting and say the right things. Things are still standing because people that have long left or some "dinosaurs" how we call people that have been here for a good amount of years, they put together the foundations of certain things that have kept up the old values of doing the right thing (doesn't matter what) and make good, scalable and durable products. So many good people have left or have been let go, mostly because their value was not recognized by their managers, they were "too difficult", because they would point out how a shitty job they were doing. Burnout is still very high, people don't manage to get leaves because the company doctors of course are useless, and Booking told them to only do one preventive meetings and redirect them to their managers (which are most of the time the problem and have no internet of getting you fixed), you really have to have severe problems (like suicide) to actually get to talk to a psychologist regularly. I had to get my own a couple of years ago and spent 12k. The company changed and I tried again to get help, same stuff, you can't make the barrier, although you can't sleep, are tired all the time, get triggers with nothing, always tense and anxious, can't trust to leave work because your manager would do things behind your back and wouldn't respect decisions you have made. Also going to talk to their managers to ask for help is just so political. They assure you everything will be fine they will talk to them, they agree with you, then nothing changes, maybe you hear from your manager the right words but you see that he doesn't believe in them (it's just because he has to say them) and you just feel miserable You see these people overworked, tired, that get triggers very easily, disillusioned, cynic, that are a shell compared to who they were before that are only left with the choose to leave.
