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Ginkgo BioWorks

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Ginkgo BioWorks reviews

3.0

28% would recommend to a friend

(189 total reviews)

Jason Kelly

30% approve of CEO

12% positive business outlook

Ginkgo BioWorks has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 189 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The Ginkgo BioWorks employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

189 reviews
2.0
Jun 14, 2025

Badly managed company with over worked employees

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great colleagues who want to get things done. Some have a lot of industry knowledge.

Cons

Bad management: the decision makers made all their careers at ginkgo, fresh from MIT. No strategic vision or focus for the company: it changes with every new shiny trend. Experienced employees are not recognized or listened to, so they leave… And there have been multiple rounds of lay-offs. So employees who are left have way too much to do and need to learn new skills all the time : deep experience and historical knowledge is lost.

2.0
Jun 7, 2025

From phenomenal to dismal

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Technical teams are exceptionally smart, humble, collaborative - Can vary team by team, but my team has good work-life balance and PTO - While the execution has been rough, I still feel strongly positive about the mission Ginkgo has pursued, as difficult as it might be. I think their "hearts" are in the right place, but they just don't know how to run a business that doesn't have a seemingly endless of VC money funding every whim.

Cons

- Executive team is looking at employee fob records to see how frequently people are onsite, before there was any onsite mandate. This does not seem like a good priority given our current need for more projects, not more time onsite, and it seems like a wildly impractical use of CEO time. - Executive team is full of people who have never worked anywhere else. They're constantly pivoting, trying to save a sinking ship, and we have to change direction with them every month or two. Then we get criticized for taking too much time to completely rework what we're doing to fit the new pivot/process. - Most people I know got <1% raises this year. Couple that with the low stock price, and our total effective comp is down significantly from a couple of years ago. - All promotions appear to be effectively on pause. - Leaders who made awful deals and acquisitions got a golden parachute, and we're left to deal with hundreds of millions in liabilities. There's no verbal acknowledgement that a lot of our current state of uncertainty is due to these deals we had no control over. - Project volume keeps falling, so management keeps pushing for more and more cost savings. I spend so, so much of my time switching to new systems because we've ditched old ones for cost savings purposes.

Viewing 25 - 27 of 189 Reviews

Glassdoor has 242 Ginkgo BioWorks reviews submitted anonymously by Ginkgo BioWorks employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Ginkgo BioWorks is right for you.