Pros
Good place to start if you have no or little lab experience and want to obtain experience to take elsewhere to another company that will value you better. Don't expect to make a career within this company, they don't value their workers.
Cons
They expect so much from their employees while paying hardly anything worth while. I handled dangerous chemicals on a daily basis for 10 dollars a hour, never received a raise, and the performance reviews were a joke. When they asked me what was wrong or what could be improved, i told them to pay us more and that we lost a whole crew of amazing techs in the year plus i worked there. They blamed the workers for not giving out raises saying we dont make turn around time and that we cost them too much money in overtime. How could we meet turn around time with old equipment that breaks all the time. No service technicians to fix them but our selves, and being understaffed forced us to work long hours every day just to catch up when we could. I would work 55+ hours a week just to make ends meet, often times putting 110+ hours in on a pay check that NEVER broke 1000 dollars. Try taking care of a family on that. The work environment is that of high stress. Every time we got quality techs, they would just eventually leave due to frustration with the work environment, equipment failures, lack of pay and always getting the blame for things not going the way the people in Indy expected it should. There is a real disconnect between what goes on in remote labs and Indy. They do not recognize that they have quality workers who deal with problems on a daily basis, or maybe they do and just don't care because they just assume everyone is replaceable. Sure you can replace us, but to retrain people takes time, then turn around time falls apart, then over time comes into play just to catch up. The CEO has a real disconnect with his employees, to the point that it seems he just does not care about you period. I worked at the Atlanta Location with a amazing team of techs, a great supervisor and a great manager at the time. Slowly one by one everyone either left on their own or would get fired. Once we lost our Manager and supervisor things fell apart and the nails were put in the coffin for sure. It got so bad that we had temp workers thrown into the lab environment with little or no training. Half of them destroyed equipment beyond repair, and the situation continued to get worse. Now the CEO himself came down to the lab to tell all that remained of our tiny crew of misfits (in his eyes) that we are no longer needed and eating too much of his money up. He just build a new huge lab in Indy, it was only a matter of time before he axed the smaller remote labs i suppose after spending all that money on a new facility with tv's n what not. We have been having to ship samples out on a daily basis due to instruments being down for 5 weeks or longer. They rather blow the money on shipping fees than pay quality workers to stay. I saw first hand machines that broke in February and still remain broken to this very moment in November right before we close. Imagine what that tech goes through on a daily basis to try to meet his goals with broken equipment. What a message of "we care " indy is sending to our location. I digress; So The CEO himself came down to ATL to say, thats it guys we are closing up the lab on a Wednesday, Bye Bye Nov 21 last day for you. Then flys out on a friday without even bothering to say bye to his employees or even show his face to us. It seemed like he didnt even care about our well being , or concerns of being unemployed right before the holidays. He was more focused on getting back to Indy to go trick or treating with his family. He said it himself a few days prior before announcing the closing that he needed to fly back friday to do so. Well at this point it was apparent that we are the red head step child of the company, blamed for everything that goes wrong. He needs to take a long hard look at how he runs the business, because from what i see they are not going to make it too much longer. I see a downsizing for the company overall in the future. Many top players in the company have been leaving this year alone. Failure is in the air, its only a matter of time and they have them selves to blame. They know what the problems are, all their peon workers have been saying it over n over, but they just dont listen b/c they dont care at the end of the day. On a final note, All of us in the ATL location felt the final blow from polaris, when all they were concerned about on YAMMER , (much like facebook) was the customer and how sorry they were to inconvenience them with having to ship samples to indy now instead of to our ATL location. No mention about us the employees and how they were sorry to put us and our familys in a bind. Nothing at all. just a big Middle finger to us.