I apologise if this is overly negative. It is based on my experience working as a soft money researcher (my own grants) at a Dutch university. My opinions may not be shared.

In my experience The Netherlands is a rather unsupportive place to do research. There is essentially no money from the government that will pay salaries in full, especially early career salaries (vini, vidi, vici). I have had friends win ERC grants (millions in euros) that were fired as a result because there was not a space in the department to hire them full time (Dutch work law requires contracts to become permanent after a certain number of years of working). Departments also seem to have glass ceilings for non Dutch. Researchers are often given large teaching commitments that cannot be bought out with grants. University incubators seem to be better suited to let professors pretend to be start up founders then actual innovation centers. I have tried on multiple occasions to engage the local incubator and have always been run around. Yet local Dutch have no issues. The rules seem to be different for Dutch than for foreigners. A foreign colleague was offered a lucrative consulting contract (a normal thing for successful professors at other universities). The Dutch university he was at refused to let him take it except under the understanding the money would be entirely consumed by the university and he would receive no compensation for bringing in private money even though he would be doing all of the work. Meanwhile the Dutch colleague in the next office was allowed to start a private consulting agency through the local incubator and spend as much time as he wanted working in the start up. The universities publish reports how progressive they are by evaluating professors on teaching and outreach meanwhile having internal department expectations of PhD students to publish at least four first author papers or are not allowed to graduate (on four year contracts with one year full time teaching commitment). In my experience it is rare that PhD students finish on time. As one adminstrator told me, “university promoters are more interested in promoting their careers then their PhD students” (promoter is the word used for the adviser). The universities also disallow working outside of typical hours and there is no ability to work in your own office on the weekends. Also, recently they defended against this, but it will come up again, the government has discussed changing the tax law such that startup shares will have real world value so new valuations become taxable events.

This all is not atypical to universities world wide. But in the Netherlands I have not found a place that made me feel like I could work to the best of my ability and at the cutting edge. This is unfortunate. It’s nice to live here but I’m leaving to go to greener pastures.