Most glass door reviews are dismissed as sour grapes from disgruntled employees. And direct managers are usually blamed for disgruntled employees. For full disclosure, I want to say that I am disgruntled: but mostly I am reviewing a bigger picture: my small situation is too complex to describe, and I do not blame my manager for the situation, though I don't understand some of his actions.
I am writing because I found out yesterday, that people in an upstream group from mine are regularly working 12 hours a day. The most direct impact on me is that I am asked to make plans and requests for capital and FTE to do a world class job and to help other divisions in the company, but it is disheartening when there is a limited budget and an upstream group need the resources more just to have a regular life again. This is compounded by the regular expectation that everyone should fight and argue for their little empire in a company: which is regular business practice everywhere.
Meanwhile the company is hiring further upstream. Nobody in the European sites are working 12 hour days (it is illegal there as far as I can tell). BI had a big out-licensing deal, laid off medicinal chemistry in Ridgefield, but our budgets and headcount remain flat. Most of the equipment left from medicinal chemistry was transferred to Europe or sold at auction to support an upper manager's in-licensing ambitions. For pennies on the dollar, equipment that could be used by current BI employees was disposed at auction to try to bring in outside projects and the labs sit empty while the rest of us are still squished like sardines in our labs. If we had the capacity to finish those outside projects, why did we sell our best project to another company?
At the root of this, management says BI cannot survive unless it becomes first in class and more innovative and also at the same time reduces the percent spend on research to what some "consultants" said was the "benchmark percentage" of top performing companies.
My only conclusion is that deep down, they want the current scientists to leave and think they can hire better ones, or in-license better projects, or can not tell when an upper manager does only what she can claim credit for, not what is best for the company as a whole.
Business politics drives the company instead of science. I can't do my job if the group upstream of me can't do theirs. My whole larger group can't do their job is early research doesn't give us projects with good biology. And if people keep leaving, there won't be enough long-timers left to get anything done.
