Amadeus reviews

4.0

79% would recommend to a friend

(4,380 total reviews)
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Luis Maroto

80% approve of CEO

67% positive business outlook

Amadeus has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 4,380 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 Information Technology industry (3.7 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!

1.0
Jan 12, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good work/life balance (flexible hours, can work from home from time to time) Friendly coworkers

Cons

Legacy code all over. A few minor projects might be cool, but the main projects are untouchable: if you ever dream of proposing refactorings, forget about it. Working code must never be changed. And code quality is incredibly low, probably also because the average senior developers usually have no more than 5 years experience. Testing: mirroring the code quality. You have this "regressions" (which is just a bad name for some end to end tests) written in this awful custom scripting language, pretty impossible to understand unless you've worked here for more than one year. Unit testing is almost impossible: some brave hearts have tried, there is a framework available, but the components are too tighted, and badly written (huge classes with lots of static, enormous private methods), scenario setup is too difficult, so I gave up one or two weeks after I tried. And since you can't even refactor, it's useless. Development tools: extremely painful. You can only work on remote linux machines via ssh. You can't compile and edit code locally, you can't have an IDE (I've tried using it with a remote filesystem share, but it's too slow), and building in those remote machines really takes a huge amount of time. Learning curve is way too steep. People here talk their own language, they use acronyms for everything. There are a few trainings available, from time to time, but it's far from sufficient: the projects are too big, too badly written, and nobody really explains you anything. Coworkers are usually friendly enough to answer every question you ask, but to be able to work on your own you'd really need someone to stick in pair with you for months. Too much bureaucracy: you spend a huge amount of time tracking records and filling forms. And nobody explains anything in advance: some day you just discover that you have to do this or that procedure, or maybe that you even had been named as "load responsible for the week" (they use to call it sheriff), and you haven't the faintest idea of what you're even supposed to do. Finally, nobody really checks what are you up too, so many people simply slack in here. Developers have no challenging objectives, so everything is just "live and let live".

1.0
Nov 17, 2015

Unpleasant Culture.......

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

As an experienced individual - NONE New or building knowledge - Use the organisation for a maximum of 2 years and get out irrespective of the utter garbage fed to you by Senior Management.

Cons

Too many to list in terms of professional progression. What started off like a fun place to be ended up being the worst form of Corporate nightmare plus the frankly unfair and duplicitous behavior from management.

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