Pros
I have worked in Adevinta for years. When it was still Schibsted it used to be a better company, with a higher level of management and competency, especially in Engineering. The number of positive reviews and total rankings on Glassdoor seem weird and don't reflect reality: there is actually a very high turnover of personnel and surveys on satisfaction of internal staff are not looking great (only 20-30% of happy employees and 70-80% of personnel looking for other opportunities). In fact despite offering a good payslip, they struggle to find talent: if you notice Adevinta has a number of open positions, most of which stay open for ages. Having said that, let's highlight positive sides: - Adevinta marketplaces receive a large traffic so you can work at scale - in Barcelona they pay well compared to the city average (even in Tech) - Adevinta, as other multinational companies of its size, has some well-structured processes. You can learn a lot on this regard, in particular if you come from a less structured organization - there are clearly some bright individuals (with which I am still in touch), although unfortunately the level has lowered widely. Many good people already left in recent years - multinational culture based on transparency: you can ask tough questions even to the VPs during public meetings, and they get to answer - you will find a lot of opportunities to exercise your speaking skills: meetings, workshops, talks, guilds, gatherings. It's a company that talks a lot. - many marketplaces are well known brands in their home country - Adevinta exploits recent technologies, microservices and streaming architectures. Data travel on KAFKA. The company adopted some good tools, available for all teams
Cons
unfortunately, multiple signs of decline: - satisfaction of employee low - highly political environment - there are reorganizations each 2 years in which they radically change the internal hierarchy, fire managers and even get rid of entire projects in an effort to solve problems. However, problems are still there because are deeper - high turnover (lot of managers and employees leaving) - not clear technical strategy and direction from the CTO resulting in confusion, unclear responsibilities and too much free initiatives of the different areas. No central architectural recommendations - low technical competence that leads to frequent architectural bad choices. Few teams are exception to this - a lot of software components developed in-house representing weak points of overall infrastructure. They are also managed by teams that didn't develop them making things even worse - product and tech is just partially organized in feature teams (Spotify model) and some teams are dependent from one another - lack of accountability of the various teams - lot of overhead and void paperwork - poor execution overall (with some exceptions) - gray zones of responsibility between areas with people bouncing responsibilities to each other - top management that don't dare to step in to solve problems frightened of making some people unhappy - as in many political environments most of the people seek to maximize consensus at the expense of what makes a good company: its ability to deliver - hiring process can take 6 months, even 8 months in some cases - as execution is difficult you end up working long hours and on too many things at the same time
