Pros
The retirement plan is pretty good although there is a 5 year vesting period. Most of my coworkers were pretty easygoing and nice to work with. You get to make your own schedule as long as the work is done on time. It is rare, at least in my department, to work more than 8 hours in a day. You get an extra week of vacation at 3 years and 10 years of service. This is a good job for people fresh out of school, i.e. the Associate Biologist and Biologist level.
Cons
The vacation could be better. I was given 4 weeks of vacation and 12 holidays off (4 floating days) at my last job with 6 days of sick leave. Here it is 3 weeks of vacation, 12 holidays off, and 5 days of sick leave. HR is kind of abusive during the benefits meetings. HR acts like you should be grateful for the benefits you are getting and keep quiet, they intimidated the entire room into not asking questions at the end of the session too. The benefits are ok they are not on par with for-profit companies that I have worked for. The training is abysmal. I was chewed out on several occasions by my supervisor or trainer for forgetting a step that is not in the work instructions or SOP. They expect you to take extra notes that you are to refer to alongside your work instructions (which is against regulatory practices fyi). In a regulated environment, your procedures should be simplified and complete so anyone off the street could perform the task. I think it would be beneficial to educate staff as to why ATCC designs experiments the way they do, i.e. why certain controls are needed, what application the assay has in the industry, some extra scientific background on processes/assays that many people never see in school, etc. Instead of the supervisor getting in a huff that a Biologist doesn't know. Younger employees haven't read the same literature as the scientists or supervisors and it would help to select some journals or chapters in a cell technique book to read alongside their SOPs and work instructions. They let people go due to "performance," but don't actually give them any official warning they are just told to "do better," and figure it out themselves. If a supervisor or manager wants you gone they show you the door without much warning. The managers and supervisors that are installed seem to learn by trial and error and are left to their own devices as far as I can tell. There is no mentoring or leadership training as far as I can tell, they just promote laboratory staff into the roles that they see as mature or whom they see as having leadership qualities. It is very difficult to move up past the Senior Biologist or Lead Biologist levels. QA is pretty rigid and sends back batch records with silly mistakes. I came from a GxP lab and some of the quality decisions are very odd and aren't normal for the industry.
