Pros
- Super nice colleagues, some of the best I ever had - Flexible working time - Good facilities such as sports hall, gym, etc - Good cantine
Cons
-Unfair and demotivating career system, especially for newcomers: Contrary to what is written in the contract when being hired, no salary progression within the first three years, no matter how good or efficient someone is. This is very demotivating for new people, since they start already at a much lower salary grade than they would have a few years ago, and then the salary progression is non-existent in the first years -Extremely random factors decide over your career, do you have a "good" manager or a hardliner, this will determine your career progression basically for years to come - Absolutely unproductive management decisions, that demotivate you more and more, absolute top to bottom military hierarchy with authoritarian structure, decisions from the top are enforced no matter if they make sense or not - 5 year contracts for new examiners which absolutely makes no sense at all in this kind of job, since it takes 3-5 years to fully understand the complex tasks and the complex topics behind the work of a patent examiner - speed oriented, mind numbing tasks: it is all about speed, not about the intellectual depth of your work; the faster you are, the more "points" you get, the faster your career progression (but only if you are lucky to have a benevolent superior, if not, forget it) -the starting salary and social package in general is much worse than it used to be -The workload increases from year to year, and if you worked fast last year, well, bad luck, because you'll have to work even more this year, and even more next year, and so on -tools are released prematurely, because the release is pushed by management, these tools are really buggy, basically alpha stage software, and slow down the workflow instead of increasing it