I personally think the grey office in Belgium is like a prison. Even in the brightest day in Leuven when you naturally happy about the good weather, your smile is melted down at the very moment you step inside into that depressive place and see what it did with the other people already there.
Apart from that Engineers in the second floor are working in a big place where everybody see everybody else. Managers and leaders have their own offices.
Managers accepts nonsense deadlines simply impossible to achieve with the given amount of time and resources. When they accept them, the project is delegated and pushed to the engineers, whose must work day and night to perform it. Working on the weekend is not exceptional, but a habit due to the deadlines. It is just morally unacceptable that decision-makers do not sharing the weekends and are not appearing while their team must. Engineers have not got any compensation for the extra work, but they are obligated to do so.
A kind of outsource they did is also unfair. Most of the software engineers located outside of the Headquarters paid less and demanded to work more.
Don't expect to learn high level of testing nor high level of coding. Object oriented programming is some kind of sci-fi, request for refactoring is constantly denied, time for designing considered to be wasteful and testing is generally done by the same people who wrote the code.
Not a healthy work environment either. You sit in a 30 years old uncomfortable and ragged chair in all days and your back is going to hurt. No room for small entertaining like every startups or big tech companies usually have. If you go across the warehouse you probably sniff tons of metal dusts and your eyes are getting red.
Public humiliations like a manager yielding to a people in front of everyone is also not rare.
I decided to quit and I have not regret it at all.
If you are thinking to accept their offer I suggest to do not, and if you are not moving, because you are afraid that other companies are just like them then I can say they are not. Do not be afraid to move from there.
I do not recommend this place for any human being on the Earth.
