ASML

• Experience working for an industry-leading (and the only one) semiconductor manufacturing equipment producer.

• Paycheck, if you're employed directly. It is much better than average in the region, and the company offers lucrative bonuses for fixed employees. Considering that you can avoid doing any real work for months, this results in quite questionable motivation. Motivation, nevertheless.

• Legacy code base that is more than 20 years old and was not written by professional software engineers.

• ClearCase version control system. Someone pushed this horrible system in decades ago and, apparently, was not thrown out of the window during the meeting the decision was made. It was end-of-life'ed by IBM years ago. Results in very convoluted delivery procedures and is maintained by a dedicated fleet of employees. True story: changing one line of code in a routine Bash script resulted in about three weeks of administrative overhead.

• Home-grown tools of highly questionable practicality and convoluted procedures for every single thing that are not owned by anyone, which would result in an experience not useful anywhere else.

• Abuse of flex employees. Quite a considerable percentage of tech employees of ASML are not on ASML payroll and are employed by shady consultancy agencies. You're completely disposable, not getting remotely the same salary as fixed ASML staff, no bonuses, and sometimes getting harassed by some toxic fixed employees for a good measure (more on that later).

• Harassment and abuse from some toxic employees. ASML puts on a dedicated show in the form of regular anti-harassment emails and even has an ethics department. I work in the tech industry for almost two decades and have never seen a company that needs to advertise this. Believe me, that's for a reason. I've seen tons of emails from their ethics department, but NONE of them have mentioned that any action was taken against offenders. It is my belief that ASML is aware of the abuse problem and is not doing anything to get rid of even the worst offenders. It is much easier to get rid of an agency-employed colleague than a fixed one, especially if offenders have been "working" for a company for more than a decade. Take this into mind before joining.

• Professional stagnation. In Software, you will be working with ancient frameworks and a code base with an extremely slow delivery process. It will be detrimental to your career in the long run, especially if you're a fresh grad.

• Unwillingness to change. Some legacy processes are fiercely protected by the fixed employees that introduced them years (sometimes even decades) ago. I've personally seen an improvement to one of such processes being authorized by the company to a flex employee, the result of which was completely trashed and not even looked at. Even if the success was questionable in the first place, the company should have spent a few minutes to look at the results of work that it had authorized, which could have saved hundreds of hours of labor and considerable funds in the long run.

• SAFe. Several weeks for changing a single line of code is a problem, obviously, so ASML decided to jump on the AGILE hype train in order to "fix" it. Needless to say, SAFe has a bad rep even among AGILE proponents. What the company has as a result now is essentially the same thing they had before, only with two-week sprints. The net gain is highly questionable.

Change. Starting S.M.A.R.T. (and other acronym-driven) initiatives are not enough if there is not an actual drive to change.

Clean up the ranks. Right now, the company is staying afloat mainly due to a luxury of not having any serious competition. Believe me, that won't be the case for much longer. Nothing lasts forever.