Pros
- The area in the meaning of nature and weather - The medical system in France is quite ok - I learned to appreciate numbers of things in a normal job, after leaving Amadeus pathology
Cons
# Area: - I have never lived in a such narrow minded environment. Although, it is 30 km far from Italy, I've met people who never left France! - Very hard to socialize, most of time you are considered as a tourist, or enemy (if you don't speak French) - There is no real city. Nice seems to be a city, but when the summer is over, you can die of boredom. The rest is even worse - Everything is expensive and mostly the quality doesn't follow the price # Technical: - If you are unambitious, skill-less, lazy person, that likes gossips, it's a place for you. - It's not an IT company, it's a political institution - The management's technical decisions are inconsistent. I.e We migrated to Mercurial, what required lot's of effort, just to migrate to Git the next year - I bet it's mainly thanks to management that is completely not technical aware... - The technical interview is... There is no technical interview - According to the Joel Test, Amadeus have 2 out of 12 (source control, bug database) - It's so easy to question Amadeus technical solutions, most of time using just logical thinking - If you want your career to stay technical and you are an engineer, don't come here - Technicaly the company is more or less in the same place, as when they started - Everything takes literally ages! They offered me becoming staff, and the recruiting process took more than one year. I left before it was over. - Every single tool they use is internal. If it can't be internal, it becomes internal as they wrap it in script hiding most of the functionality. Appearently people there are not able to handle something so complex as mercurial command line. - It may become extremely hard to find a new job, after working here, as you won't learn anything new, and mostly probably you will forget what you know # Management & HR: - Mushroom management is the way of running the company - The management has no clue about software development. Neither most of the engineers do - Linus Torvards wouldn't be hired by Amadeus, he didn't finish Grande Ecole - The same about numbers of talented people, like TopCoder bests - Thanks to that they fire experienced consultants and hire fresh graduated - However a kid after University is easier to manipulate - It happpens so many times, that a guy was moved to another team, as there was a budget cut, and a month later there was a new person, as the budget changed again. - The most important is to show your enthusiasm about working for Amadeus, what might become hard after spending several weeks of digging in a spaghetti code, and patching it. No enthusiasm? They may fire you, even if you are a leading developer - Don't be an active person. Active person brings troubles, they don't like troubles. They don't like active persons. - I don't know anyone, who is not french and has a management position - The team is never informed about managemant decisions, only single persons are. They are usually asked not to share this knowledge - If you are not French, they think you should be thankful for working for such a amazing company as amadeus. Then you have absolutely no right to your opinion # Cooworkers: - People lie in your face. It doesn't matter, it's a colleague or a manager - Lot's of gossip and back whispering - People are immature, even those who stay there for years, are not able to solve problems in a mature way - Keep your remarks for yourself, they are not able to handle criticisim, or run a discussion - When I worked there I felt like I entered a world of hysteric children, who goes to complain to their mom, everytime someone has a different opinion - Most of the people stay in the office for 10 hours, or more. However they do nothing - Huge turnover! Within 2 years almost everyone from my team left (including me). Only French stayed. - They pretend to be international company, however switching to french even while team meeting, is normal according to them - It wouldn't be much worse if they hired random people from the street. They have guys that were surprised when I show them how to revert a file to a previous version using SCM # Company: - They still make money, but honestly, only because they lie to the clients, selling something they don't really have - Delay is the second name of the company