Pros
Some of the people are great, including both of my immediate supervisors that I had while there. Though that, too, was changing as they were selecting for a toxic culture, and those that could get out fast fled.
Cons
Place was going downhill fast. Even without any review from me, the place had been reduced to an average 1.6 - yes, 1.6 on a 1-5 scale, that's 15% - as a place to work, and even that was buoyed by prior reviews before it was terrible. Also, all these people claiming 'good benefits' are overtly lying. They hired an overt psychopath that made everyone miserable to oversee all the labs and the implementation of a poorly-conceived and destructively dogmatic version of '5s' that became '6s' and then '7s' because they wanted to give lip service to newer and newer rhetoric. Inanities therein included things like every tiny thing having to be labeled and in a certain also-labeled place - great to know where it is, but if someone came in while it was in use, the psychopath got irate (but one example of many of the kind - using things became unacceptable because that meant taking them from their colored-taped places). Inanities further included deliberate removal of all little humorous clips and thing (because - I literally quote the psychopath - "Humor doesn't belong in the lab") - and motivational posters or family pictures and anything slightly disapproved-of by the psychopath who himself was unwilling to have things like pictures of his family on his desk because that would be too human. He spearheaded the brute forcing an ERP system that was a kludge because they didn't want to pay the full price for a functioning system, but spent so much on IT in the modifications that they paid the same amount, and it was so bad it shut the facility down for months and had it at 1/4th capacity still when I lost my job - and everyone said it wasn't ready, but they were hellbent on doing it. They then punished IT despite the months of long hours they had put in to do the impossible, resulting in a flight of ITers. They obviously didn't care if we had anything to do or the resources to do it with, but you were judged based on numbers based on what you couldn't do with resources you didn't have. They got rid of all time off, and, without increasing sick leave, said that all time off was to be sick leave, causing anyone with ill family members to take care of, or their own illnesses, who already used normal time off to tend to these sick individuals, to have to simply leave or find other jobs - and they made this change without an increase in pay to compensate for the extra weeks or, for those that had been there a while, months of extra time on the job. They attracted me there with generous promises of tuition reimbursement, changed the policy to become less and less able to be used for anything three times in the next year, the last change of which occurred while I was taking a pre-approved class: they changed it so that you needed your supervisor's supervisor's signature and approval, while the prior - what I complied with - was just your supervisor's signature and approval, and then used that new policy that didn't even exist when I got approval to have the course reimbursed, plus the fact that the course I took was intended to expand my capabilities rather than something already specifically in my job description (and despite that I had already used what I had learned productively to help others in another department solve a large problem), to deny the benefit so that I had to pay the previously-promised amount myself without reimbursement. A coworker so toxic that people literally avoided training to avoid her, and because of whom I had to use alternate rooms to do my work, was constantly catered to due to seniority, to such an extent that she would target people for firing, get them fired, feel good about it, repeat - I was one of said targets, and I eventually was out of fight, and accepted the inevitable. Morale was so ubiquitously and undeniably low that they started trying to have 'pizza socials' and stuff as - without even beating around the bush - literally-named 'morale-building' - in a failed attempt to improve morale, after which everyone went back to jobs they were increasingly coming to hate - or didn't go back, if during the ERP shutdown, because there was no point. Pay was low for the positions - you could get paid over twice as much doing the same job elsewhere, or equal but without any degrees in a normal job, and the growth potential was near-zero: you had one function, and that was likely to always be your function, and they even briefly had a cross-training program but got rid of it in order to punish the community by switching the rhetoric to making them feel bad for the lack of productivity when the ERP system shut everything down, samples stopped coming in, resources went unordered, orders died on the loading docks because they couldn't ship them, and more - all problems that forcing people to sit in their labs with nothing to do and no way to do it cannot solve. And much, much more. The culture became one of fear, and the supervisors and departments who kept safe were those who kept their heads down. Turnover skyrocketed. Critical people escaped. You should just avoid this place like the plague. Part of why people are afraid of posting bad reviews now is that people are forced to sign 'non-disparagement' agreements. When I found out someone had been accepted, I warned them off; they were much happier where they got a job elsewhere than they ever would've been here.
