I have the feeling that the owner has his own set of "rules" not in line what is acceptable by many:
- Payment dates of wages: You get paid anywhere between the 15th and the 28th of the NEXT month instead of at the end of the month like majority of OTHER companies normally do. So if you have something like rent, mortgage or other fixed date occurring expenses, good luck trying to balance your sheets. It may also occur that you won't get your payslips consistently unless you explicitly nag the Owner for it. He seems to really dislike administrative tasks.
- Travel expenses: You don't get any travel expenses reimbursements for gasoline or parking by default, only an NS card, but you may not immediately receive the NS card when you start working. In that case you will have to front those costs yourself for the first couple of weeks until you get it. They claim you will get your money back for such expenses made if you fill in some form, but I have gone back and forth between HR and the owner for over well 2 months now without ever seeing or hearing anything back.
- Agreed upon remote dates: The contract does not state which days you need to come to the office, but they tell you its on Tuesday and Thursday, however this could change to 3 to 4 days to the office if the Owner decides to change it. Currently some other colleagues were also protesting to keep these on premises days, but I personally dont expect that it will be only 2 days in the office in the future.
- Contract extensions: During the interviews you are told you will receive a 4-month contract, followed up by a 12-month contract, followed up by an indefinite contract which is understandable for such a start-up. However, your contract may very likely never get extended past the first 4 months. In that case by Dutch law, your contract gets extended automatically by the same period after it expires for a maximum of 3 times afterwards becoming an indefinite contract automatically by law. There are employees there working for 2+ years who have never had an extension of their contract and are currently on such an automatic indefinite contract. They still get paid, but they may have allot of difficulties in the future to get a mortgage from the bank or rent anything as they don't have anything written on PAPER.
Overall I find the owner to be a compulsive liar, pshyopatic and manipulator using different social techniques to guilt-trip employees in his way of thinking or to mask his incompetencies. I think that he believes himself to be a highly intellectual person, but then somehow is too dumbfounded to figure out how to modify an Excel Sheet Template to send the payslips consistently.
During my time i felt that the owner would gladly spend the equivalent of 2 working days talking about his vision and history, or spend weeks to find plants for the office, but couldn't be bothered to arrange basic administrative needs for their employees. This felt really disrespectful to me and towards others.
I also noticed and experience from a personal point of view that the company direction was not very stable, changing priorities and vision on a month-to-month basis or after the Owner had some drinks. In the past there also was an lawsuit in Hungary about equal payment and many employees have left the company briefly after that period. I am not sure if this lawsuit was in any way responsible, but I have a feeling it was linked somehow
Try looking up the statistics on LinkedIn and contact some of the ex-employees to decide for yourself if you deem (to my personal opinion) the financial insecurities, bleak future prospects and headache inducing company culture worth it to start in the HPC industry.
Writing this I am definitely expecting a deformation suit to happen, but they really need to sort out major problems in their company before hiring more people. I have tried to write this from a personal opinion point of view, so prepare others for what they can expect when they decide to work here.
The owner once mentioned that his goals is to be at 100+ employee, with the owner wanting to hire multiple employees in a short timeframe.
My personal response to that would be:
How about you first try to manage the existing 15 (18 in the past) and making sure they don't feel cheated, unheard or dis-respected?
