Unique company doing its best to become just another big business - Manager Amgen Employee Review

Layoffs and site closures causing talent to leave in droves. Executive leadership is deliberately ignorant of what it takes to deliver results in all parts of the business. Continual erosion of salaries and benefits are making the organization ordinary. Amgen's culture is one of blame and shame. Lack of career growth opportunities, the grade level and salary that you join with are both going to stay stagnant during your employment. Amgen does not promote its people, even more so in Information Services. If you are an IT person who is career oriented I cannot endorse working for Amgen. As an IT professional you will have better opportunities elsewhere. The organization used to be a good stepping stone to learn and train at, however now the opportunities to widen one's knowledge base are few and far between at Amgen. Be prepared for excessively long work days - 16 hours is the norm, plus weekends. As more people leave the ones that stay are expected to take on more and fall to their knees with thanks that they are employed. If you are a contractor be ready to be treated like a second class employee with nothing to offer. Don't even look sideways at a FTE or executive as they will remove you from the account for the most minor infraction, true or not. There is an acceptance of high levels of business risk across the organization, through IS, Information Security, product production, etc. There is a group-think strategy of running the entire company via Managed Services which I have never seen be successful in my career, and I don't foresee it being successful in this case either. Budgeting is penny wise and dollar foolish, with current financial processes that are so bureaucratic and antiquated as to be tangible business risk. The decision making process is a brilliant piece of process engineering, where responsibility of decisions are pushed to the line managers (with reference-able artifacts), yet decisions are truly made at the VP level. So, if a decision is incorrect, guess who is on the hook?