Zühlke Engineering (Austria) GmbH

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As a software service provider, Zühlke doesn't have 100% code ownership in all its projects. During my time at Zühlke, I was working with driven and well-educated engineers that valued concise and maintainable code.

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Since projects change hands frequently, as it is the case for basically every code base in a rapidly changing, project-based working environment, documentation is vital. The projects I've been working on have had documentation in varying degrees of quality. The best ones had every design decision documented in a central place. Some had only rudimentary documentation.

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Again, highly depends on project size and money spent by the customer. Zühlke always pushes to implement a process that fits the customer.

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True for greenfield projects.

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Haven't seen any open-source contributions in my time at Zühlke.

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This is one of the strongest points of the Zühlke company culture. Engineers are pushed to not be coding monkeys. Products are designed and developed in collaboration with the customer where the developer often takes the role of a technical consultant during exploration.

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I didn't have the feeling of wasting time in meetings. But the higher up you rise, the more your day will consist of meetings.

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Smaller projects are often handled mainly by the engineers themselves. For those project managers are just there to write invoices. The role becomes more present in larger projects, which, unfortunately, at my time at Zühlke, were quite rare. For larger projects, project management really works well and provides value.

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If you are motivated and you know what you want, Zühlke provides you with the possibility to do trainings and certifications. This has been better in the past, because a few years ago, engineers could spend up to a month on topics of their choosing. This has drastically changed and also caused a minor wave of resignations. Nowadays, your "growth plan" has to (somewhat) align with company goals, meaning, if the company partners with AWS, you'll probably be nudged to spend your training on becoming an AWS solutions architect. There is still some wiggle room there, but towards the end, I felt like the room for self fulfillment in my training became smaller and smaller.

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Depends. There have been cases where several Junior were thrown into a project and failed miserably. This happened more than once during my few years at Zühlke. But there was also instances where multiple Junior ran a project and it was successful, which happened to me on several occasions. I started as a Junior as well and both scenarios might happen. As for every software service provider, it's rolling the dice on which project you'll work on. Sometimes it can be the experience of a lifetime, sometimes it's a terrible experience. But I always found that Zühlke values their employees. So if you speak out about being unhappy in your current situation, people usually reach out to find a solution.

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You'll have insights into all layers of IT projects. You can easily transition between career paths, if you choose to do so.

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Top-notch Dell notebooks (priced at ~3000€) with Admin privileges (at my time, this might have changed)

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In my time at Zühlke, I've never experienced pressure to work overtime.

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Zühlke is a great employer and you will probably only ever meet nice people (in Austria and all other locations). This is part of company culture. But if you are after the big bucks, Zühlke is the wrong place. Directly after university, you'll probably start at around ~3k gross annual salary. It will take years until you grow out of this salary bracket. This is also a reason why most developers I've worked with left the company after ~3 years. It's a very friendly and growth-oriented place to start your career after university, but the salary just isn't enough to keep you there. I've moved on after approximately 4 years (not because of the salary, but it surely was not helping) with a 30% pay raise. This would have taken me ages to achieve within Zühlke.

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You'll only ever find friendly people at Zühlke. There is several events that keep you in touch with peers. The awesome people there is also what always made Zühlke a great place to work for me. My direct supervisor was more like a colleague and mentor.

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As in every IT company, engineers are mostly male. But this is also changing. I've had the pleasure to work with some of the most talented engineers there, some of which happen to be female.