Warnung
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
It was a good place to work until around 10 years ago. Since then it got worse step by step and they are deteriorating it further - quickly.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
The EPO may still appear attractive to people with mid to low qualifications, even after the extreme cut-back in salaries and benefits of the recent years (don't get fooled by the high average salaries they publish: there is a very strong discrimination against newcomers; now you can hope for ca. 5k net / month as a newcomer (or less), not the > 12k net the average examiner receives thank to the old career system). However, if you do not have outstanding qualifications and talents, please consider that the demands imposed on newcomers are now higher than for very experienced examiners 3-5 years ago. And those were really high qualified people which the EPO was able to hire when they did still have an attractive package. Can you deliver > 100 searches and refusals/grants in a year? Keep in mind that for the average search you need to analyse about 200 prior art documents + the application itself, do the actual search and write the reports and communications. Considering all the other activities which also cost time you will have less than 1.5 days per search or decision. If you have the intellectual capacities to do this, it might be wise to consider a better employment.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
You should consider that the trend is a further swift deterioration of employment conditions. Currently, for example, so called "measures" are prepared to kick in in 2021 and applied at least until 2038 to save a further 5,8 billion euro (832,000 Euro / employee). One of the measures which are likely to be implemented is to reduce yearly salary increases to only at or even below inflation (compare this to the salary increases in industry and for national government officers, which are (necessarily) significantly above inflation, on average - e.g. +4.3% in the German Metallindustrie last year, goverment officers +3.09% this year). Another measure: a so called "solidarity tax" of 9 percent imposed on all salaries and pensions (even the low ones for newcomers). If this is what you like, the EPO might be the right employer for you.