- Chaotic direction and constant reorganisations: Frequent restructures and shifting priorities make it difficult to plan long-term or grow within the company.
- Overly corporate: Decision-making is slow and heavily bureaucratic. Many layers of approval before anything moves forward.
- Employee feedback is rarely acted upon.
- Poor compensation structure: Salaries in Belgium (after tax) are well below market for anything below Software Engineer 4 due to poor optimization (no mobility budget or company car, low net lump sum, no cafetaria plan, etc.). Meanwhile, raises and promotions is slow and not transparent.
- Cross-team collaboration is painful: Teams you depend on often refuse to help unblock your work, citing "tight deadlines". Even simple requests require formal escalation or ticketing which kills productivity.
- Inconsistent work ethics across regions: Different country offices operate with different priorities. Some are people first, while others aren't. This creates friction and impacts morale and mental health.
- Communication issues: Major decisions are often made without informing or even consulting the teams that will be affected.
- Meeting overload: Expect to spend about 30% of your time in meetings (even as an engineer), many of which could easily have been an email or a short document.
- Poor work-life balance: Often times expected to do on-call without an on-call implementation in place. Production issues would lead to people being contacted via private messages in evenings and asked to help (without any compensation).
