Various stories but here's a compilation of some accumulated experiences in short:

- poor pay. here everyone parrots how Germany values engineers, but as an EE I was making less than a kid making mobile apps in a pure SW company. The finance controlling ladies were paid better than the engineers were. Basically in traditional German companies whoever is closer to the money gets the better pay, finance, sales, marketing, managers, etc. Those who actually have to do the engineering work are the lowest on the food chain as they're the furthest from the "money boys". The engineer-first culture in Germany died in the late '80s to early '90, then the bean-counters took over.

- archaic mentality, working conditions and micromanagement. Our boomer boss didn't want to use Jira so he had me send him emails every Monday describing the status of each task. Boss saw me a few times reading HN and said "go back to work, we're paying you to work, not to browse the internet" even though I was always in time with my deliverables. Also, company policy was everyone had to punch in and out exact times you come and go in the office, including lunch breaks, to make sure everyone was working their full working hours stated in the contract to the minute.

- huge focus on credentials, titles and certifications

- WFH is the devil. because the boss, who sometimes is a shareholder in the company, can't "see you work" and automatically assumes you're slacking off instead of working while you're at home, and can't come to tap you on the shoulder whenever he needs something because he wants to have the answer immediately and not have to type it in Slack and wait 5 minutes for a response. Also he disliked calls, and always wanted to have the meetings in person in the meeting room for the most basic things that could have been cleared up in a Slack message.

Pandemic dragged them remote kicking and screaming. Proffered to have us come to the office with masks rather than WFH. Before the pandemic one colleague broke his leg skiing and so he couldn't drive to the office anymore, and the company preferred to pay a taxi to drive him to the office everyday rather than let him WFH.

- extreme avarice on pointless things. I was printing plane and train tickets for my vacation on the office printer and the boss said to "stop using company resources for your own interest". Company was still issuing the same 100 Euro 1080p monitors and cheapo laptops with 8 gigs of RAM to engineers that they issued to reception lady in 2020 because "everyone gets the same period". I was laughed out for asking for a 200 Euro 4k monitor and a better laptop with 16Gigs of RAM because "why do you need it? everyone does their job fine with the older machines?". While the boss was buying himself the latest MacBook Pro, Apple Display, iPad Pro on the day they were launched.

- stupid rules for the sake of rules with massive double standards. The boss heard about companies getting hacked so se had the IT admin crank up the security nags to paranoid levels having us getting signed out of our Microsoft accounts every hour or so and phones being locked down. Then he got annoyed by those extreme settings and told the IT admin, "yeah, could you please remove the security barriers, but just for me, I know what I'm doing, I don't need them".

- nepotism. In Mittlestand companies, the workforce mainly consists of friends, former university colleagues or former acquaintances of the boss and managers working there, so such cliques are formed, around which the important information travels by word of mouth with everyone else on a need to know basis in written form. If you come from outside those cliques, especially as a non german speaking foreigner, you're looked at with suspicion and kept in the dark on many things which limit your growth in the company. Also, as these companies tend to be in more rural areas, people there tend also to be more rural-minded and conservative, with you being from the same village as the bosses, being important in your status in the company and you getting a warm welcome and not being treated with suspicion.

And with the cliques come the gossips. I had some periods when I kept getting sick quite frequently so I had to be on sick leave a lot, and everyone at the company was gossiping behind my back that I'm taking sick leave to avoid coming to work.

- did I say poor pay?