Good Employer
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Innovative technology
Top management always looking for opportunities in the market
Management listens to your concerns/ideas and takes reasonable actions
The time allocation, possible changes for tasks and sprints are done together with the employee
Flexible working hours
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
1. No in-house canteen or nearby eatery (unless one is willing to walk a length; its difficult for overweight persons and also takes away time from working hours)
2. No inflation related incentives or counter measures.
3. Company is in Pfullingen, near Reutlilngen, literally a ghost town during broad day light and a forbidden desert after sun-set. There was barely any liveliness after working hours. The employer cant do much about the location, it is understood, but somehow this discourages people to work at.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
It would be more productive if the exchange of information is with the relevant persons rather than having a lot of "bureaucratic MSTeams meeting"
Including Prettl and Refu sisters, there are sufficient people in the vicinity and hence having a own canteen would definitely motivate people to work better in the afternoon hours.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
Professional and joyful :)
Kommunikation
Within team excellent level of communications but among teams, not so good :(
Kollegenzusammenhalt
highly skilled coworkers in their respective fields, respect each other's point of view and ideas :)
Work-Life-Balance
Sometimes workload is huge and frustrating, Mostly workload is low to moderate and plenty of time to relax. Usual story of embedded engineers :)
Vorgesetztenverhalten
Superiors always listen to employees' concerns and ideas, and are very encouraging. One can directly and frankly speak to Director/C.E.O. :)
The only exception is in hardware team where Engineers complained a lot about change in team lead. Due to awful and rigid behavior, out of frustration and suffocation few employees did quit their jobs.
N.B. :- 4/5 considering the hardware team, for the software team its 5/5.
Interessante Aufgaben
During my time, I was responsible for variety of tasks, most of which were interesting to me.
The best thing was one can ask for swapping tasks with other employees and with order of tasks depending on urgency, and it was positively entertained without any judgmental views :)
Gleichberechtigung
Just leave Employers for a moment; to be honest, so far in Germany I have not faced any discrimination. To my knowledge everyone was equally treated at Refu.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
During my time one coworker got retired and upon request he was given part time employment for one more year. Also I had seen a lot of employees working actively in their 50s and 60s, some sticking with Refu for more than 25-30 years of work.
Arbeitsbedingungen
Working conditions were excellent, but due to lab sharing sometimes it was difficult to get the equipment for testing. However upon raising the issue, the superiors intervened and things improved significantly.
I had observed one negative point that too many people attend too many meetings though most of the times, technically the meetings were meant for only very few people. This was counter productive, as sometimes my work needed some inputs from other teams :( Definitely, here Refu needs to improve.
Umwelt-/Sozialbewusstsein
Its a pioneer in the renewable industry, so environmental concern is out of question :)
Gehalt/Sozialleistungen
In solar industry standards salary is okay.
Image
more than 50 years of expertise in making solar Inverters/ converters itself speaks about the image among customers :)
Karriere/Weiterbildung
I learnt many techniques in both software and hardware during my 2 years of work at Refu; the benefit of working with experts of respective field.
Refu also encourages and pays to get training or to attend seminars/courses online but there is no in-house training program provided by Refu, other than high voltage lab safety.