Pros
Overall, corporate culture is good. Lots of transparency and communication from management, clear focus on business of serving patients. - Incredible 401k matching and company automatically contributes 5% for all employees - Decent health care plans - Subsidized meals at several cafeterias that serve excellent, healthy food - Frequent employee focussed corporate events
Cons
The problems start for those of us who are career technologists. Amgen simply does not value this skill, and is intent on outsourcing every possible aspect of technology. This would be ok if they kept competent, motivated technologists on staff to manage / develop the processes and technologies used. Too frequently, the only management left are those folks that came from pure technology roles, but many years ago. The result is a technology organization that looks very much like it belongs in the late 1990s. There are pockets of smaller groups where innovation and leveraging current technologies to achieve greater business value does happen, but the larger "IS" organization is not this way. The result is lots of fragmentation, no cohesive strategies to adopt new processes or technologies, and political in-fighting. To top it off, the greater organizations management is focussed on self-preservation through outsourcing, and have not had the experience that many of us have had that shows how outsourcing requires more discipline and costs than promised. The other aspect that is quite draining amount of time used by administrative tasks, unproductive meetings and so on. The organization is heavy with analysts and project managers that only know how to communicate via meetings. Limited growth opportunities due to the above establishment.