Amadeus reviews

4.0

78% would recommend to a friend

(4,379 total reviews)
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Luis Maroto

80% approve of CEO

66% positive business outlook

Amadeus has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 4,379 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amadeus employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

4K reviews
1.0
Nov 10, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

To have a relaxed easy life without any work pressure, probably before retirement, this could be the perfect place. Great for having a life-life balance (notice the deliberate missing out of work)

Cons

One should guess from the start of the recruitment process, that this is the place to avoid. A place which hires, regardless of which team you would work for, means your individual skills just don't matter. The technical content of the interview is just the online test, which is a cake walk compared to other companies. After that a team leader telephone chat is briefly technical, and then the only face to face, is with a senior manager, who stopped being technical more than 10 years ago! Agents will tell you to just show that you are keen to work in the airline industry and you will be hired! Besides, who you interview with, has no bearing on who you will work for. I never saw the manager or the team leader I interacted on the phone for the 2 years I worked there. Just before joining, one random manager gets given a new joinee, based on who requires a new robot to do the button pressing work that's all that goes on in this company. It has the most antiquated tools and process, which are so cumbersome and slow, one sometimes wonders if pushing paper between desks might be quicker than their processes. A one line code change can taken you a week to locate, a minute to do, and another 2 weeks to take through the laborious SDLC using a 19th century like bug tracking tool, which should be consigned to the history books. You make the code change, regression test it, get it code reviewed, submit a pull request. If that succeeded, you manually mark the change in the bugtracker as "Approved". Then you must remember to mark the code review state to "Submitted", otherwise the bug-tracker won't have the right state later on. Then a week later, when the code is loaded in UAT (thankfully not by you), you have to remember to mark your issue as "Loaded test". Then if you or some BA actually cares, you verify the fix works, or like many people asked me to do, just hit the next button on the issue "Verified in test"! Then you may have to wait 2-3 months and come back to this issue again when the code is loaded in PROD (after several fallbacks), to mark the issue as "Loaded in Prod"! Again, if you don't do it, some other tracking will fail which will annoy some managers. A lot of manual labour for a 1 line code change. Imagine this being your job on a daily basis! Then the less said about the software the better. One encounters 1000 line C++ functions on a weekly basis. Yes, 4 digits, it's not a typo! People are too scared to refactor old code "incase it breaks". Well, given the recent public fiascos seen in the massive failures, it is no surprise such things are now falling apart. How can one possibly trace such long functions and make sense of the code. Recently, a massive failure was attributed to the lack of code reviews. Then, code reviews became the new mantra of the day. The problem is senior management has no clue about how modern software should be written. They wrote and left this mess some 10 years ago, and now they are too late to modernise. Often they send emails reminiscing in the failures at past cutovers, almost as if celebrating failure. On a daily basis there are issues with the tools that are taken for granted elsewhere, for example disk space for development, doing builds. There is never enough disk space to check out all the code to work on and it takes hours to build if you do manage to checkout all the code. Even after that the tool chain is so bad, that you can't tell if a build failed or passed without significant effort. The intranet pages also are terribly flaky, one or the other set of pages breaks several times a day. The company doesn't have a test team! It relies a completely non-deterministic regression test framework, written by developers, which if they fail one night, the boss will tell you just wait one more day, it will pass tomorrow. Right enough the nightly failures would have passed the next day! It is a well known fact that there are scores of these regression tests which pass, but don't test anything of value. Many failures are blindly accepted as false positives when actually code remains broken, but the effect of it isn't seen till much later. If a test which used to "pass" before started failing, quite often, people put a sleep in the regression test to make it pass! Some people have been making efforts to push unit testing of code, but it is a huge struggle with attitudes of old and new staff not being receptive to the idea, so it remains a pipe dream to make this a formal part of the process, which is what may actually add value, besides investing in an independent test team! Whoever works there and leaves, doesn't say anything bad about the company at exit interviews, because, everyone who's been there realises that this is the place of last resort! If you can't find a a job elsewhere, you can always come back here, as the bar is so low!

2.0
Apr 4, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They seldom fire anyone, because it's hard under the French law, which makes it a perfect spot for subpar people

Cons

It's full of subpar people, many software engineers don't know anything about software engineering, Amadeus hires anyone, you only need _some_ engineering degree to be a software engineer at Amadeus. PDefs - Functional Analysts - they can be literally anyone with _any_ university degree. The management is incompetent, but they think very highly of themselves. Our department is in a constant crisis over the amount of incidents and bugs ever since I came 5 years ago, and the famous Deco project, which was started by people who are not even there anymore, is late in the range of years, really, YEARS. Many Amadeus people have NEVER worked anywhere else, straight out of school they landed a job with Amadeus and they stayed there ever since. In Amadeus performance doesn't matter. Diplomas matter, who are you friends with matters and who are you brown-nosing matters. Don't expect a promotion or a raise for good results, it will never happen. Promotion is only for the Grande Ecole elite, and loser brown-nosers who have been there for +5 years, no kidding. Without an elite French school forget about getting anywhere above a team leader level. And without a French nationality forget about any promotion at all. In this company you need to keep your mouth shut about others' shortcomings, or crappy solutions, and keep smiling and brown-nosing. Provide any negative feedback and people will hate you, only nice words are allowed at Amadeus. And if people hate you, they will not confront you, but badmouth you with their clique. Occasionally they'd gang-up on you. Many people at Amadeus, besides being subpar, are also unbelievable cowards. Silence is for them the way to go and anything except nice words and smiles is seen as a threat. And so you spend days diving into spaghetti code that was written 10, sometimes even 20 years ago, trying to figure out how does this ^&*# works (there's either no documentation, outdated documentation, or incomplete documentation), and on top of that you'll be dealing with self-important amateurs who really have no clue what they're doing. There's constantly something broken at Amadeus, no day without an outage, no day without a bug in the provided Amadeus tools. And no one is fixing them, it's been like this forever, and everyone thinks it's fine. Oh, besides promotion, forget also about internal mobility, maybe except within Sophia, otherwise it's all BS. You will never get anywhere, you will never be promoted, you'll never get a significant raise.

1.0
Jul 12, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- no strict working hours - enough time for your personal "stuff". ( I had a french kid by my side watching youtube 6 hours per day). - Sophia Antipolis is a very nice place (if you have a car!). - Full of young nice people! - Good payment. - Is the french riviera!!!!! - Good place for having first slots filled on my CV (pls don't stay). - Good people for normal french people who want to live on a nice calm place inside a brain-dead stable job.

Cons

-Terrible commutation, more than 1 hour to get home on public transports. -Managers aren't real managers, and decision making is made by clowns. -Dev infrastructure is the worst kind. 0 Design patterns or architecture. Spaghetti code. No documentation. No functional knowledge. Archaic methodologies and sloooooow procedures. - No real growth in carriers. - They see contractors as objects, not human resources. - Elitism. - The English spoken by several higher ups (taking appart the french accent issue) is kinder-garden level like. - A terrible choice for any transport company. - nice vacations

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