Vantaggi
Nicely renovated building to work in, good equipment, if you need something it will be on your desk before you can blink. Very culturally diverse team. Acceptable free coffee, sometimes free useful stuff on the desk in the morning (like lunch box or water flask). Free soup and fruit during lunch, cheap food available. Benefits were ok, some jobs have flexible hours. Initiative to change or improve things is not frowned upon. There were some free events. Manager made time for private conversation asap when asked for. Some people were very nice to me. When I asked to learn something more challenging I was assigned to help out another department for a part of my time. Management tries to help where they can.
Svantaggi
Management is trying to improve the dull spirit, but are doing it the American way because of the American company that bought Vanbreda. This doesn't always work and was sometimes laughed at (sometimes even by the management themselves). Very boring atmosphere, some people were very static (but did their job well). Communication between departments was stiff. Teamleader didn't seem to notice I was working for him, never had any tap on the shoulder or "well done" despite of a colleague with the same job processed half the files I did and made errors that I corrected, nobody cared. Unclear who in my team actually did what. Overall I must note that it was probably just me not belonging there. Conservative view on people: despite not working as a customer representative and 35°c outside I was not allowed to wear even decent shorts, while women could wear tanktops in the office. Not applicable to me but hearing "we prefer people without visible tattoos" on my welcome meeting while discussing the working rules sounded very short-sighted. Job content was very monotonous and repetitive and was insufficiently informed about that before starting. After a few weeks I asked "Where's the rest of the job" and then heard "What rest? This is it". Eventually they did teach me some other things because I said i was utterly bored. Sometimes very inefficient working procedures (like copying a paper and then having to send the copy to the scanning department, instead of just scanning and saving it myself in a certain file name format). Some procedures were unclear - the way a file was processed sometimes depended of who's desk it landed on - so sometimes I didn't know wether I was doing it right or wrong (nobody seemed to know for sure). Main software program looks (and probably is) over 20 years old and is very unintuitive to work with. There were a lot of IT software projects in the pipeline though.
