Pros
Bio-Rad's Cambridge office is an acquired former startup (formerly GnuBio), working on a single overarching product, with a diverse and interesting 'geekosystem' of biologists, chemists, mechanical engineers, manufacturing specialists and software engineers. This review is from the software team perspective.
It's an interesting, rewarding, and socially useful core project, with the software using widely applicable, generic, interesting stack of technologies. There is no unnecessary resistance to bringing in and using whatever tools and languages are appropriate. The atmosphere is very open and cooperative and self-driven, with strong support for following and refactoring towards best practices.
The software teams (Instrument Control and Bioinformatics) are high-functioning,
without dead wood, and with minimal political hassle. Take the one-star
reviewers here with a pinch of salt (they were fired for good reason) - it's a very cooperative and accepting atmosphere, though not hugely tolerant of incompetence.
Software management does a good job of insulating the team from bureaucratic entanglements.
Cons
Although a fairly young project, there is some technical debt from the early startup days to be overcome. Some management is inexperienced and wings it with mixed results, and there could be stronger leadership with better focus in numerous teams. Being a mixed discipline environment, there is some tendency to expect software to make up for the failings in other areas.
