- Legacy code base that is more than 20 years old and was not written by a professional software engineers
- ClearCase version control system. Someone have pushed this horrible system in decades ago and, apparently, was not thrown out of 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 a 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 a shady consultancy agencies. You're completely disposable, not getting remotely 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 a dedicated show in the form of regular anti-harassment mails and even has an ethics department. I work in the tech industry for almost two decades and never seen a company that needs to advertise this. Believe me, that's for a reason. I've seen a tons of mails from their ethics department, but NONE of them have mentioned that any action were 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 agency-employed colleague than a fixed one, especially if offenders were "working" for a company for more than a decade. Take this in mind before joining
- Professional stagnation. In Software you will be working with ancient frameworks and code base with extremely slow delivery process. It will be detrimental for 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 have introduced them years (sometimes even decades) ago. I've personally seen an improvement to one of such processes being authorized by a company to a flex employee, result of which was completely trashed and not even looked at. Even if success was questionable in the first place, company should have spent a few minutes to look at the results of work that it has authorized that could have saved a 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 AGILE hype train in order to "fix" it. Needless to say SAFe has a bad rep even among the AGILE proponents. What company has as a result now is essentially the same thing they had before only with two week sprints. Net gain is highly questionable