Best place to ... not work !
Pros
+ Nice area is very pleasant to live in. Weather is sunny almost the whole year and beach is just a 10 minutes drive ! + Many activites to do in the region + Almost no stress at work, and most of the time, there is not even enough work to fill your day (this can be seen as a pro or a con depending on one's perspective...) + Many interesting people to work with from different nationalities and cultures + Starting salary is one of the highest in France for a software engineer + If you want to work on IT field and become a functional expert in travel industry, then you should seriously consider joining Amadeus
Cons
- For people who want to stay technically up-to-date, my only advice is : Run, Forrest. Run! - Worst code quality I have ever seen ! I stress on this since you have to be psychologically preapred to spend countless hours undertsanding an if condition in a method which has a cyclomatic complexity of 20... - Unless you are really lucky, you will do a lot of maintenance and bug fixing during your first years. This has some dramatic consequences such as : * You will spend some of the most boring moments in your life * You will probably encounter no challenge and will begin to count hours remaining before going back home * After a couple of years, you will find that you forgot most of the things that you used to know when you were at school... - You will hear long annoying speeches from top management about empowering people, innovation and going agile. This has nothing to do with reality for three main reasons : * Amadeus staff is aging and no longer up-to-date technically speaking. Besides, there is almost no turn-over, so it is literally impossible to make things move (the Texas Instruments syndrom is not far from us...). * The only criteria which counts for top management is your school diploma. There is little room if any for your coding talents or your innovative ideas...Even Steve Jobs would face tremendous difficulties to progress his career with such a vision... * There is an amazing number of complex processes out there, and most of the decisions are taken based on "political" interests. You are no more than a little small ant in a big anthill... - Amadeus exclusively uses buggy home made technologies which are unknown to other recruiters (believe me this is a real handicap once you start looking for a new job and you will hear your interviewer saying "Aria, Aria what ?")... - I have seen people around me working for 15 years as software engineer ! It is not that they love what they do, but chances to get responsibilites are infinitely small (unless you use some unorthodox manners)... - The Bangalore effect or How to ensure your financial growth by replacing Nice engineers with Bangalore ones and apply a magic formulae : Cost of 3 Indian developers = Cost of 1 French developer...