Good company and culture - werkgeversreview President, North America bij IDS Imaging Development Systems

Family owned German company; generous vacation days and quality products

Not a huge company, so opportunity for advancement is somewhat limited

Nice colleagues, peaceful location, easy access via public transport (very close to tram station)

Team leadership and organisation of the workforce is rather poor. While an attempt of an "everyone do what you can" approach is visible, there is very little redundancy in the knowledge separate developers have hence leading to a situation, where there is too much work for some and too little for others. Micromanagement is also a big negative. Team leader wants to stick to old tools and techniques. Doesn't like critique especially when it comes to code he has written himself. Lack of flexibility and active listening to suggestions by developers from management leads to a lot of wasted potential, errors etc. Testing is chaotic at best with the big question "Which OS do we actually support?" popping every single release (minor or major). Poor communication between QA and developers creates vacuum that increases the chance of things going south right before a release. Slowly dying drive towards innovation and investing in the own developers to acquire new skills. The seminars and "workshops" that are offered are quite often useless or come at a time (due to poor planning and lack of proper learning materials), when they are no longer needed. As an example I will give JIRA - now an essential part of the company. I got the seminar 3-4 months after I joined the company at which point (due to a daily use of the tool) a seminar provided very little to no new knowledge. When it comes to the development of UI-related products, it is completely astonishing to think that for basically every generation of cameras (based on the communication interface) there is a similar UI product for configuration and management of the respective devices. There are 3-4 UI-based products overall and each needs to be pampered until not a single customer needs it any more. Higherups don't want to hear about creating a product to incorporate all cameras thus providing customers with a complete solution that the company can even charge for. Sadly this attitude is shared by all but the actual developers, who have to take care of all the bug fixes and weird requests by the management. This attitude is probably due to 1)too many UI failed products and 2)UI-products are shipped for free. The company sells the devices and the software comes second (except maybe for the drivers). There is a whole unexplored market that the company can gain a lot from if anyone at the top decides to actually look into it. Biggest issue for me is the extremely rapid growth the company has seen in the last few years - from just 40-50 people to more than 300. This has led to a lot of chaos and poorly designed processes that are currently being worked on but it will take a lot of time. A perfect example how NOT to grow your company.