Pros
The Broad is a large place. Most of it is organized academically, with PIs and post-docs. Some parts, including the Data Science Platform's method group (aka the GATK team) where I work, are more like a national laboratory comprised of staff scientists. Please keep that in mind when reading this or any review about the Broad.
The methods group is a great place to work. My colleagues are smart, motivated, and collegial and together we tackle the biggest problems in genomics. We take pride in developing high-quality software but at the same time we are at the forefront of computational biology. Although publishing papers is not the goal of our work, it is a byproduct.
A huge perk is that we have the weight of our talented and professional communications team behind our work, which means that everything we do is high-impact, as long as it's good, of course. It's really nice to have tens of thousands of users. Although computational biologists here are expected to be good programmers, we are not professional software engineers, but fortunately we have a wonderful staff of those, too, on our team.
We are part of a vibrant community of computational biologists, statistical geneticists, and others at the Broad. There are many statistics and machine learning experts to learn from around here.
The work-life balance is incredible. People in our group, including managers, have very flexible schedules. I personally arrive at 10 and leave at 4 most days, making up the rest on the train or at home. It's a really good environment for parents.
Cons
Because so many people at the Broad and elsewhere depend on our software we sometimes have to be conservative when making changes. It can take a while to prove that a new algorithm is better than the old one. For most teams within the methods group this is not a problem.
Also, like any non-profit we make less than our market value. We're paid well, but we could all earn a lot more.
