UC Santa Barbara reviews

Santa Barbara is small and there isn't a lot of room for growth for you and for your manager. Particularly management that gets into higher positions, there are not a lot of places for them to move up to and there is nothing in the surrounding small community where they could easily transition to. So for higher level managers if they need to impress a new boss or other higher level managers, to keep their job....if they are insecure or in a potentially insecure position...other people can become expendable to their goals and aspirations. This can be particularly true in a complex field such at TPM where there is a lot of complexity and jargon that people don't understand. X has the power to take something and make it into something else if X wants. This can be done as X likes because of x intelligence and how much time x spends advising executive leadership. x is trusted. So it is easy to say someone else is a screw up. Simply manipulate and exclude a few things here and there. And it is done. If someone admires and patterns themself after the character of Emperor Palpatine - you'll need to be careful.

The pay is terrible. I could have made more money working elsewhere. And plenty of academic workers are seriously underpaid for their qualifications. The management and leadership are terrible. I’m sure this explains itself with recent headlines. In addition, my observation is UCSB tends to invite situations where the kinds of people who seek management positions only do so to get a pay raise to afford to live in SB, not to actually lead or develop a team. And, like many other large-scale government universities, you are bound to hear of favoritism and nepotism, along with PIs not correctly managing grant funds. The culture is terrible. My observation is that elitism governs the mentality of UCSB’s leadership, and work-from-home was brought to an end. The vaccine mandate, and the prior mask and symptoms reporting survey mandates don’t help either. The resources are terrible. Insufficient training, poor WiFi, insufficient documentation, decrepit buildings, and incomplete or makeshift office equipment all weigh down on employees across the board. The opportunities are terrible. In many cases, you need to find another job in another department to get a raise and promotion, and the annual pay adjustments each June/July don’t keep up with inflation or the cost of Santa Barbara living.