Pros
The company has a good working atmosphere, there are a lot of nice people working there. The work-from-home rules that came into place after COVID are very generous. Only 4 days per month are mandatory (on a specific week each month), the rest of the time you can work from home - if you live in Luxembourg. If you are a cross-border commuter, you have to follow the rules established between the country of residence and Luxembourg, which AFAIK limit the number of work-from-home days to 20 something days per year (differs by specific country of residence). So the coworkers who live in Germany (quite a few of them do) are usually in the office. Even the 4 mandatory days are not stricly enforced, at least for developers - depending on the team and the agreement with the team lead. The office is nice and comfortable, spanning several floors with glass outer walls all around. So, plenty of light, if the weather is good (Luxembourg has mild but quite cloudy winters, with a drizzling rain on a lot of days). Every morning there are free croissants, sandwiches etc (each day different stuff) available in the canteen until ~08:30. There are kitchenettes on every floor with coffee machines, tea, etc. There are some recreation rooms featuring arcade machines, ping-pong, etc. The location is also good, close to supermarkets and well-connected to transit. There are some (limited) parking spots available in the building parking lot, that can be reserved via an app. Everyone gets a powerful modern laptop, mostly Dell and MacBook. Desktop PCs and external monitors are available for the people who want them. There are a few standing desks, but in the majority of workdesks are regular ones. It shouldn't matter so much if only going to the office for the 4 mandatory days per month. But if working in the office, it's probably possible to request a stand-up desk. Of the benefits provided, probably the best one is the free supplementary medical insurance, which can also be arranged for family members for a modest monthly fee (~50 EUR/month for a partner and ~25 EUR/month for a child). Luxembourg's standard insurance (CNS) already covers a lot of health things (especially for children, almost everything is fully covered), but the supplementary insurance significantly improves dental coverage and glasses. There's also free gym membership (Jim's Fitness) for people who want it. The company organizes special events like thematic lunches or visits to the cinema. There's a big outdoor family day in the summer, where workers can bring the entire family, and every December there's a corporate Christmas party for the employees (and contractors as well) but not their families, with nice food and some surprise presents. In terms of career development, the company is quite generous to offer horizontal career changes. I know many cases when coworkers were given a chance to change projects, teams, programming languages, transition from support to QA, QA to development, office management to IT operations, IT operations to IT security. You're also quite likely to be able to grow by one rank from lower positions (e.g. fomr Junior to Specialist, from Specialist to Senior). However, it seems that very few people are able to transcend the Senior level. There are very few people in the company holding Staff Engineer or Software Architect positions. Most Engineering Managers are hired externally and not promoted from developers (with rare exceptions). The main revenue of the company comes from its adult entertainment (webcam streaming) business. Sex and gambling are always in demand for thousands of years, so I have a good reason to believe that this company will keep thriving, even if the management sometimes experiments with things that turn out to be unsuccessful. I believe there's a high chance of stable income and low chance of layoffs. It's one of the few workplaces where you could (hypothetically) play a porn movie or watch NSWF pics on your monitor in the office and no one would bat an eyelid. Despite this, the workplace is very professional and people treat each other with respect. The company is quite strong on anti-discrimination, anti-harassment and supporting various social causes. To me (an open-minded straight white heterosexual male...) it seems to be a safe and comfortable environment to work with, regardless of your gender, skin color, or sexual orientation.
Cons
The most common complaint among coworkers is poor project preparation and too much bureaucracy (meetings, processes). We often dive headfirst into projects which are quite unclear in scope, but the management already wants to have estimates and target end dates - even before the business requirements and designs are done and approved, or cross-team dependencies are figured out. The company likes to think of itself as following the agile methodology, but in a lot of cases it seems to be just a facade. We spend time doing SCRUM ceremonies etc, but in the end we don't really adhere to the agile rules. We are often forced to put tickets into the sprint which are not properly prepared, then during the sprint we re-estimate things, add a lot of unplanned tickets to the sprint, remove planned tickets from the sprint etc. This doesn't improve productivity and brings unnecessary stress. Hopefully the engineering managers and CTO will at some point realize the issues and take steps to improve the situation. In terms of red tape, it sometimes feels like we're wasting time working on some RUP preparation tickets, creating Confluence pages with technical plans (based at best on half-prepared technical requirements with draft designs). Only to realize during the actual implementation, when the requirements are clarified and the designs are approved, that half of this preparatory work was just a waste of time. I guess it's similar in many tech companies, but I feel that this part of the job can be optimized. The process of getting a promotion and salary raise involves jumping through a lot of hoops, performance reviews, etc. Even then, the worst part is that it's not clearly defined or transparent, and very slow. Even team leads and engineering manager often don't know what's going on with a developer's application for promotion / salary raise. On average, I saw fellow developers get promotions/raises, but it doesn't happen often, and the process is usually full of frustration. I remember only a couple of cases when someone was obviously undervalued, and they got quickly promoted to a more appropriate rank. Once people reach a certain level, it seems quite difficult to go one more step ahead. Sometimes there's a small salary raise given, but it's pretty hard to advance in position. It seems that a lot of the people in management positions are Hungarians. Well, the company is originally from Hungary, and there are a lot of employees originally from Hungary, these are some valid reasons, but still there are quite a few coworker who feel like there might be some amount of prejudice when choosing who to promote to management, especially at the top management level.
