Disconnected Leadership and Slow Innovation - Senior Software Engineering Manager Roche Employee Review

3.0
May 22, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great mission and impact in the healthcare space. Intelligent and mission-driven peers in technical and scientific roles. Good benefits and work-life balance in most departments.

Cons

Leadership often feels disconnected from the realities on the ground, especially in software and digital health teams. Decision-making is bureaucratic and risk-averse, which slows down innovation. Engineering culture lacks the agility and modern practices found in comparable companies. Promotions and recognition heavily favor tenure and politics over impact and initiative. Cross-functional alignment is poor — silos between business, product, and engineering make collaboration frustrating.

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Roche Response
1y
Thank you for your feedback. We firmly believe that every employee deserves great leaders – someone who inspires and motivates. We expect this from all Roche leaders so that employees are supported with opportunities to continually discover, learn, develop and excel. We strive to hire and engage awesome and talented people throughout our company. We want our employees to be heard, challenged, and inspired every day.

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5.0
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Cons

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3.0
Apr 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Excellent Employee Benefits and beautiful facilities

Cons

As a seasoned quality professional I could not recommend enough that you stay far away from this company. The entire Global Quality program is run on gaslighting. Procedures are vague and cryptic and the management solution is always to just copy and paste from another site. You will be told to "speak up" and its an open and collaborative environment, but that could not be further from the truth. Roche is a toxic environment that is run by cliques that pick and choose who gets to succeed. If you dare to speak up you're targeted and ostracized. If you want to succeed there you just need to nod head in agreement and try to follow the cryptic task that is gonna set you up for failure anyway. Success is completely contingent on how well you gossip and politic. The "Branchberg Mafia" is run on emotions and direction will change day to day depending on how leadership feels that day. Again I recommend looking somewhere else if you're looking to make an impact and enjoy a challenge. If you enjoy being a sheep or like weak and emotional management. This is the place for you.

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