I was applying for a senior backend engineer job in this european startup in the healthcare sector.
I passed through 4 rounds of 1 hour interviews. Everyone was telling me this company is remote first, nobody works at the office.
Contract type is as remote on linkedin.
The offer arrived, 80k euros. They are very reluctant in giving the contract to me so I can proceed with the bureaucracy regarding blue card and job change before 12 months.
The contract arrives and it’s full of traps:
- They can require work on weekends and holidays with no notice
- There isn’t a single mention to remote working on the contract
- They can relocate me to any place with a 2 months notice
- HR refused to add remote clause on the contract
To make it even worse, they were processing my emails through an undisclosed AI tool using chatgpt, in which I’ve sent my personal documents.
Avoid these traps like hellfire.
Company name is Recare.
They dont care, they recare.
If you can, notify the manager you interviewed with that HR sabotaged this. At least where I work now, the tech teams are great but HR is a hot mess and we (sadly) have no idea what the hell they are doing.
It’s probably not worth your time or effort though.
HR put the head of engineering on the CC, while we were exchanging my private documents and sending me personal information back.
I sent a reply all explaining how stupid it is and requested a GDPR claim to delete all my data.
For what it’s worth, a case like yours was what I needed to get HR to clean up their act at my company.
I documented each candidate we lost, and I documented the increased job offer prices we needed as we ran low on qualified candidates.
Pretty soon, HR was on the same page, and this stuff stopped.
Anyway, who knows if their engineering manager will do the work to fix it, but at least you have them a chance.
Yeah, I’m in a similar situation. The way my organization works, each department gets assigned an HR rep, and is forced to go through that single rep for anything. And our rep is… Pretty awful?
She’ll randomly close job postings without notifying hiring managers, meaning they’re stuck waiting for applications that will never arrive. She’ll leave job postings open even after they have been filled, meaning managers continue to get bogged down by applicants who have no chance of getting hired. She’ll “forget” to forward PII to hiring managers for weeks, so they can’t reach out to applicants to schedule interviews. And she’ll literally deny doing all of this, even when proof (like screenshots of the job postings page) is provided.
The US Army’s “Simple Sabotage” handbook states that if you can’t overtly sabotage the enemy via things like bombs, you can try to covertly sabotage the enemy by getting a position in middle management and embodying the term “middle manglement”. Just be as useless as possible, all the time, to ensure projects get delayed.
We’re convinced that’s actually what she’s doing to us, simply because she hates our department. We’re an arts department in an otherwise non-artsy organization. Like three quarters of our department’s staff is openly trans, and we’re in the Deep South where that tends to be frowned upon; we used to joke that the one cishet white male part-timer was the diversity hire. She openly refuses to let our trans staff use preferred names on company-provided things (like email addresses and name tags) and her excuse is that IT requires legal names on everything like email addresses… Despite the fact that there is someone in HR who uses a preferred name for her email address.
We’re trying to get the organization to let us go around her or reassign us to a different HR rep, but gathering evidence is a sort of catch-22. How do you gather evidence against her when she’s the sole gatekeeper for basically everything that hiring managers would need to prove that she’s not doing her job? We’ve had a few applicants reach out directly to basically be like “hey uhh what the hell is going on” and those are the only real chances that hiring managers have had to bypass the HR rep.
Oh, it’s a Healthcare AI company that absolutely tracks.
I took part in a major cloud provider’s first AI/ML training program back in 23, and there were some hospital execs there too.
Those fuckers were absolutely giddy about the prospect of using AI to deny care to unprofitable patients.
Thank you for naming
A lot of these clauses might be illegal under German labor law. Check with a lawyer. Also ensure there is a clause saying they have to sponsor your blue card. Many countries allow employers to cancel residence to “fire” in violation of labor law.
If the clauses are unenforceable, my suggestion would be to take the contract, get through the trial period and then mention the unenforceable clauses. That’s to say if you really want to go to Germany.
First clause is for a fact illegal. They have to give at least 24 hours for a shift change.
The other three things though, are fully legal
So, weekends and holidays to be interrupted as desired by the boss, onsite. What rot.
That’s called “the United States white collar private sector.”
Coming to a European firm near you!
I read stuff like this and think “I would never supply my sensitive documents to an LLM!” But, like usual, I’m sure I’ll find myself without any other option in the near future.
Depending on where they’re based the data protection authority may act on complaints about this.
(Looks like they’re German, I don’t know if the authorities care about GDPR violations that much but if you feel like spending the time it may be worth it)
I think the weekends without notice might be illegal to under German labor law.
