Are you a lousy developer with zero ambition and want just a stable cushy job? Join Amadeus! Really. Most competent people within 3 years realize what kind of a gigantic mistake did they make and leave.
The technology is old, the code base quality is horrendous, everything is overly complicated, and all processes are unbelievably slow.
There's zero innovation, just patching the mess over and over again.
High turnover on lower levels (developers), almost no turnover on higher levels (management). Amadeus takes in hundreds of fresh grads each year, many of them without any prior development experience, or not even just a CS degree. Many are contractors.
The management above the team leader level is an elite "Grande Ecole" old-boys club. No matter what you do, if you don't have the right diploma, you can't join in. Maybe nationality is a factor too, I've yet to see a non-French person there... This group only issues commands but takes no feedback.
Since the job most of the time doesn't require serious coding skills, the focus of the work itself is to learn how to use the internal Amadeus tools, which tables to change to get the desired behavior and so on. Not very useful once you leave the company.
Thanks to the hiring policy, you'll work along many incompetent people with terrible coding skills, who know little more about technology than what they memorized at Amadeus. If they persist, after a few years of being a contractor, a year long hiring process (no kidding), and another few years, they themselves sometimes become team leaders. Some team leaders have no coding experience at all because they were before PDFs (functional analysts - people who write specifications and make powerpoint presentations). These people then judge you and evaluate your skills...
Since no serious tech skills are required, innovation is missing, the only really important thing to most people is politics. There's a lot of gossip, general distrust and shady methods going on. People don't readily share information, not even within teams. Team leaders tightly control what kind of information will they pass on to whom, and generally like to leave their subordinates in the dark. They won't give you any clear feedback either, if they don't like you, they'll instead start secretly working on getting rid of you - if you're a contractor, your mission will be terminated without any clear explanation, if you're an employee, they'll ruin your reputation behind your back and make your life miserable to force you to leave (it's hard to fire people in France), also without a clear explanation.
Lots of dishonest cowards in this company for whom gossiping and backstabbing is a second nature.
Your living choices are:
Nice - the biggest town of them all, a 'vast' selection of good pubs: 2 or 3 , and good clubs: 1 or 2, 30min-1h / 30 km away from Amadeus
Antibes + Juan-les-Pins - a small town where most Amadeus people live, commute usually takes 30 min (but sometimes 1-4 h, depending on how bad the traffic jam is or if there's more than 0 mm of snow), there's 1 good overpriced pub (even more than the rest) and no good clubs, except a few small beaches that get old quite fast there's nothing else to do
Sophia-Antipolis - a great place for loners, good luck living here without a car
Cannes - another town, although closer than Nice, commute strangely takes equally long or longer
Then there's a few smaller towns or villages around, but they're not worth mentioning since not so many people live there.
All services, including buses, are unreliable, and have customer-unfriendly working hours. Most people exhibit the small-town mentality, and there's just a few non-Amadeus people to socialize with.
