Pros
I was grateful for the ability to work on multiple programs, with multiple organisms, and multiple processes. I worked with people who had spent years tweaking a process and scaling one organism. In my time at Ginkgo I worked with 5 organisms and too many processes to count. Really great for my early career. The speed at which we moved as a company was exhausting, however I learned valuable skills that will help me for the rest of my career.
Cons
Workload: Oh my god they want to do everything. It was preposterous what we were asked to do. It was a hail mary pass with every decision and every project. I was always rushed, always behind, always expected to do multiple tasks at the same time. Breaks? Nah. Most days I forgot to drink water because there wasn't time. There was this idea that you could work on whatever you wanted. Develop your skills an interests if you see a group doing something you like. Nope don't ask about that, Your team is over capacity and you need to grab this guy from another swamped team to help your team, The workload, the hours tracking, the nonsense responsiblities piled up. They over hired in all the wrong areas. My last 6 months at Ginkgo were atrocious. I was having serious mental health issues from my "responsibilties" and project expectations. I had so much stress to get work done and was onsite every single day. That was not the same for everyone else. I was practically catatonic walking into the pristine bioworks that were ghost towns. I would go to a bioworks at 8:30 am to start experiments and people wouldn't start showing up to the offices surrounding the bioworks until 10 am. People didn't enter the lab until 10:30/11. We weren't fully automated. Robots didn't replace people. Culture: If you peer back behind the curtain, you'll see its a boys club! Shocker. Ginkgo never grew up. Never became an adult company. It was overrun with a frat boy mentality which trickled down into chaos for tier 1. I started therapy 3 months in to working there and haven't stopped going. They way that the men discussed female managers was so inappropriate and childish. Just say you don't like women! It's better to say it out loud than be rude and aggressive whenever a woman is suggesting something to you. I was bullied by a manager on a neighboring team and I just couldn't understand why until it hit me that its because I'm a woman. The demeaning comments, saying that cleaning and organization was my responsibility alone (for a very large lab space), talking down to me. But he was safe because he was a pre-covid Ginkgo employee, so upper management loved him. That is the other culture issue. "New" vs "old" gingko. Anyone who worked at Ginkgo pre-covid behaved differently than any new employee. The weren't very accepting of newcomers and were a huge clique. Mind you, most of these people had never worked anywhere but Ginkgo, which they acted like was a super advantage (it isn't). The hiring spree that started late 2020 and spanned into 2021. Everyone hired during that time was pleasant, open and excited to help the company grow. Unfortunately, I think the old cult held the company back a bit. Too idealistic and less realistic.
