Speaking of the Groningen office only:
The Development team is a mess. There is no real teamwork and a lot of clashes between colleagues. In addition, communication with other departments, for example with support, is also quite messy, with many unresolved fights and disagreements.
In a nutshell, it all comes down to management and the awful job they do. The weight of all decisions falls on the developers, sort of, but not really. I know, it's confusing. The product owner will shut down most ideas while not being clear about what they actually want. Likely because they don't know. They are very unqualified for the position and have a bare bones understanding of how scrum should work. We are around 22 developers now and there is no clear lead. Some people are sort of divided in teams but with no real team lead. Fresh out of college students are put on new projects completely alone and with no guidance. How to implement and develop new features is never discussed, there is no architecture design. Pick-up the task and do whatever you want. Some developers commit code without bothering to test it and leave it up to the reviewers because they don't want to deal with installing new systems we're working on. Some decide to completely re-write parts of the code because they didn't like what was there, without discussing or consulting any other devs. Egos run very high.
Scrum is a joke. The points are pointless and they are always incorrect in relation to what was estimated. Stories stay on the board for sprints and sprints without being resolved. At the end of a sprint we look at the velocity charts but never really talk about how to improve them. The stand-up takes almost 1h because we are just so many developers.
Git usage is also all over the place. Pretty much everything is just committed into develop and hope for the best. There is no real git maintainer.
As you might imagine, the code base is a huge mess. The build system is broken and there is no proper architecture on anything, bugs crop up everywhere and it can take weeks to start a new feature because there is no documentation on almost 40 year old code...
Every year the company performs an employer's survey. The Groningen office has been getting a C rating for awhile now (the Dutch average, according to the survey company Cadmatic uses, is A+). We have a discussion about it but then nothing is really done to improve things. There are good people working here trying to improve things but they almost always hit a wall. As of now, I suggest not getting into this mess. Maybe things will be better in the future.. I have lost hope. If you really want to work in Cadmatic, apply for the Finish office. At least their survey rantings there are A++ :D
