This is the worst experience I have ever had in my career, from start to finish. I should've known before I even accepted the job as the recruiter transformed from my BFF during the interview to a condescending adversary (who literally belittled my 15 years of work experience!) during the offer process. Lesson learned: go with your gut on these things.
GSK is a company in decline, where cutting pensions and laying off staff is a routine thing. As a result, you have people who are less concerned with quality than they are with "the numbers" and "driving results." In a design context, this is exceedingly toxic. Creativity is limited, company tolerance of failure vanishes, and the quality of outputs suffers as a result.
Compounding this toxic atmosphere is the the simple fact that GSK does not know what UX design even is in a modern context. Is it business analysis? Is it research? Is it coding? Is it prototypes? Everyone has a different answer, the company has no overall objective for design, and its job descriptions do not accurately describe the daily reality of its design roles. This might explain the heavy turnover among designers. Or it could be any number of other inane / insane things that happen on a daily basis.
The company culture prizes working yourself to the bone instead of recharging. There is no work-life balance here. Your work is expected to be your life. And if it isn't, there's a higher-up just waiting to thrash you about your priorities or outputs.
This is the first place I've worked where people were under such stress/pressure that meetings routinely devolved into a circular firing squad where everyone was hoping to blame someone else for a missed deadline or problematic feature. I thought this sort of thing was more legend than reality, but not at GSK. I've never been so stressed in my life. This is a big problem with the culture here: Everyone is already stressed about "driving results" and losing their jobs in the next reorg that they'll look for the nearest scapegoat and cling to it like the life raft that it is. If you're the scapegoat, good luck.
In the pandemic era, GSK is thankfully cameras-off in many meetings but very much mics-on. If you're not speaking, you must not be present. And that's a problem at a company that prizes "results." So even if you have nothing of value to say, or you're just trying to learn from the conversation, you must think of something, ask a question that sounds like it fits the meeting's script, and "show up." This is not adding value -- this is checking a box to soothe a manager's weird idiosyncrasies.
Avoid this company. There are other Pharma companies out there with better cultures, products, people, and processes. The industry has so many great opportunities and amazing products, there simply is no excuse to put your design pedigree and/or mental health through this meat grinder.
