Great place to gain experience, thicken your skin, and see what a mid size growing company is like.
Pros
- The Market. It's 2022 and the market for biotech is through the roof, there are only a handful of CDMOs (contract development manufacturing organizations) so the ball is in Abzena's court. (Abzena is a CDMO). Not sure the details of their growth, but it's probably to the moon. - Great location. Sorrento valley, San Diego California, objectively perfect weather all the time, aesthetically pleasing, to me that matters. - Experience. Great place to gain experience, thicken your skin, and learn about all the facilities, material, and processes required to make antibody therapeutics. (Low key one of the most impactful type of therapeutic) - People. Lots of energetic and qualified young talent, lots of experienced PhD scientists, lot's of organized ex military program managers, lots of diversity, and in general some really smart cookies within the company. - Equipment. Abzena has state of the art biotech equipment for growing and harvesting cells. Seeing it for the first time feels like you're on another planet. - PTO. This company offers the most competitive PTO benefits I've ever seen. My entry level job offered 25 floating days plus 6 fixed holidays. There was also a paid shutdown for two weeks. (So 41 PTO days total, I'm not even kidding.) - Infrastructure. The buildings and the IT resources are pretty great in my opinion. Still trying to get an ERP system in place, so that's shaky, but in time it will come to fruition.
Cons
- Turnover. Turnover is horrendous because the management isn't established, (I think 33% annually). They don't pay highly, and the market is very competitive right now. - Management. Management needs to improve tremendously. This is the reason I'm leaving. This is also the reason my boss left. This is also the reason for the turnover. - Training. Non-existent for a lot of departments. Just hire a damn contracting company for like $200,000 to make a learning management system for every department and then push the hell out of it. - Nepotism, this needs to be addressed. It's uncomfortable to work around it. - Bonuses. They have controversy about when and how they give their bonuses. I'm not too involved, in a year being here I never got one. I don't mind, they gave the company two paid weeks off during Christmas.
