Illumina reviews

Unfortunately, not all groups have the leadership they need or deserve and Illumina does not recognize the problems it has. The entire manufacturing operations segment at Illumina suffers from postulating leaders, political hires, lack of onboarding, nonexistent recognition, and in the worst places: a psychologically unsafe environment (think people going around others until they get the answer they want, belittling people's work in front of them by their own managers, derailing meetings to avoid progress in projects management wants to cut anyway because they are too expensive, and a misproportionate focus on cost savings/avoidance over process quality). This includes equipment and process engineers, quality, validation. There is hardly any room for technical work that could allow for real innovation to come down the line because managers are pushing to save every bit of raw material from scrap. Manufacturing operations is often reduced to sitting in meetings with the same people going through endless loops of documentation, writing about technical work that could/should be done but resources are unavailable. Promotions are based on your perception with your manager and their managers, rarely on merit. On that note also, managers typically hire people based on unilateral decisions and bypass the entire interview committee. 50/50 chance it's someone qualified and ready to do the job. Take it to HR, and you get one of two answers: 1) what would you like me to do about it? or 2) this is terrible, but you can always leave. Escalate that further up in HR, and they talk down to you to explain that their job is to protect the company and not the employee. The company rewards and protects incompetent leaders that are good at talking to VPs, and acts like everybody below them is so lucky to work at one of the "best places to work". There are seriously some talented, smart people with the right values to make not only the product and business work, but the company as a whole. Unfortunately, 80% of the ones I know are looking to leave because Illumina has been on the downhill for some time, and stock is now finally starting to be impacted as well.

1. Base pay is very low compared to other companies like Qualcomm or ASMl. And I am not considering the SW companies. Performance is not reflected in yearly raise or bonus.You get the same pitiful 2 to 3 percent raise irrespective of your performance. 2. The biologist and scientists are paid less than engineers who are probably paid lower than the marketing folks. So priorities are messed up here. 3. You will not be paid bonus and end up with 0 pay because commercial could not make the right forecast. Even if the company makes profit you might end up with zero bonus. Happened twice in last four years. Assuming 2019 will be the same. Glad I left before that. 3. If you are a SW engineer you will be doing extremely low end and low pay job and be led by folks with no programming skills and background. Exit before you are burnt out. Much better salary elsewhere. 4. The quality team here is a joke. People are doing document control and do not get exposure in any real quality engineering work. For your own self respect do not join quality group at Illumina. Same goes for validation group. To be promoted all you need to do is carry a bag and jump from one meeting to another to make development team’s life easier. 5.The SD consumable and the instrument LCM team is mismanaged by the middle management to an unbelievable extent. The consumable managers have no clue on what they are doing and should be fired enmasse. Look at the current project and talk to engineers to gather feedback. The instrument LCM team on the other hand is not sure of its existence. The need of this group and the reporting structure and promotion and stock sharing plan needs to be investigated at highest level. The Hayward and Singapore LCM team is a competent manufacturing team. 6. Flexible time off is not really flexible time off. Different groups are interpreting it differently. 7. Power of i, career development plan and idp are all a big joke in most groups. Power of i is not actually anonymous and you can be hurt if you are very forthcoming. Be careful of what you write. However giving too positive feedback will just result in your manager getting promoted when he has no real impact. 8. Promotion in development and R&D teams is very slow compared to manufacturing and LCM team. 9. System integration team is overworked and are underpaid for the work that team is putting in. It is unfortunate that they are paid the lowest. Also you develop a lot of tribal knowledge than transferable skill set there.