European Southern Observatory Reviews

No career development, unless you do favors to management, and make them feel how special they are (all the time). Non-transparency in decision making, also in recruitment and advancement. Incompetent HR. Quite many incompetent middle managers. No respect to principles, no equal and fair treatment.

Despite the propaganda, their "clients" are not the scientific community, but the politicians that approve their funds and their exceptional prerogatives. From this basis derives all ESO traits: bureaucratic, avert to change and old-fashioned management style. Lots of exciting possibilities wasted by wrong appointments in upper-leadership positions. There is a high viscosity medium to exhaust anyone trying to do any audacious project; a few succeed after years of tremendous patience, once the idea became commonplace. If you want exciting challenges and frontier technology, go somewhere else.