Pros
- When I started the people were fantastic. High quality education and experience as well as an overall social and lively work culture - this may come back but COVID drastically change the environment - Work was simple and manageable - Good place to supplement basic biotech industrial job skills in terms of project management - Flexibility in schedule with WFH capabilities - Certain executives and upper management truly have a passion for the science, which is refreshing to see
Cons
- The positive reviews are fake in terms of advancements - you are constantly denied promotions due to bureaucratic “HR” reasons, which is asinine in itself because the differences in job descriptions are incredibly minuscule and intentionally vague as to continue to deny promotions on the basis of arbitrary judgement of upper management. They will purposely delay reviews throughout the year as a reason why people cannot be promoted or get reasonable raises (in may: well technically we promoted you six months before the review (the reviews are due in January) - this happened to me twice working there) There have been numerous amazing talents that have left solely because they were not given the promotions they deserved or had been promised. - Positive reviews are fake on department transfers, especially if you work for assay services! They will never ever let you go, you’d have to quit first. Across the board it is notoriously difficult to switch teams let alone entire departments; I did both and each time it took an exorbitant amount of time and red tape - and I was lucky. It is entirely up to the managers and depending on how much help they need, they will absolutely deny your request. - The majority of the remaining upper management is completely out of touch with the labs. There is a complete disconnect that had started to fester before COVID but really seeped into the foundation during this time. When MSD moved their AD/AS workers to shift work including weekends that signaled the end for me - they claimed it was for safety reasons but nobody enforced that. Instead, what it enabled was a mass hiring to supplement both the severe turnover of disgruntled employees and the sample testing that they had found very lucrative during the quarantine. This hiring was not vetted as thoroughly as in the past, and the entire process of hiring to training was rushed and mismanaged. So now what you have is an army of fresh undergrads with minimal training. This is classic assembly line technique I’ve seen elsewhere in biotech and it’s a shady practice