Many interesting years - Anonymous employee Novartis Employee Review

As with many other pharmaceutical companies, you feel your job is at jeopardy because of the contant restructuring due to patent losses and outsourcing to contract manufacturing, R&D and moving whole departments to other countries with cheaper labor or less regulation, like China. Raises were getting lower or none at all in the last few years. Promotions were many times based on who you know, not what you know, which can severely damage the competitive future of any company, by placing incompetent people in critical positions and creating a hostile or un satisfying environment. The personnel review process was based on forced distribution, or bell curve. Therefore, they had to "punish" some for that sake.