Too many people without science background
Pros
Modern Facility: Modern facility and good location in Dundalk. Fantastic International Staff: The Chinese colleagues and international team members I worked with were incredibly competent, kind, and professional. They were an absolute pleasure to work alongside. Standout Training Support: While the overall system was disorganized, there was one particular Irish lady on the training team who was fantastic, highly competent, kind, and a true credit to the company.
Cons
Poor Recruitment, Onboarding, and Payroll Failures: My start date was pushed back by several months at the last minute after I had already declined other job offers, with severe communication gaps from recruitment. Furthermore, myself and two subsequent new starters from Northern Ireland were left on emergency tax for months. HR and payroll constantly gave false reassurances that it was sorted, resulting in prolonged, unnecessary financial strain. Deficient Peer-Training & Sign-Off Standards: There is a worrying lack of basic technical competency among the floor personnel authorized to train and sign off others. During a peer-led training session on critical process steps and equipment preparation, the analyst conducting the sign-off misread basic mathematical notation—specifically confusing a "greater than" symbol (>)—and gave instructions to limit a wash time to under ten minutes when the SOP required it to be a minimum of ten minutes. When corrected by a trainee, they argued before later admitting the error, but the correction was handled so poorly that international staff facing language barriers likely missed it entirely. Toxic Local Management & Hostile Site Culture: Management explicitly asked for feedback on training materials, but when I pointed out systemic errors regarding dozens of misassigned SOPs to new personnel, a local manager reacted unprofessionally, shouting at me in the office and making false accusations of gossip. (Management later admitted the SOP assignments were indeed incorrect). Hostile Local Team Dynamics: The workplace culture among the local Irish staff felt highly political and exclusionary. Rather than focusing on collaboration and performance, there was a tendency for local teams to be defensive, cliquey, and resistant to constructive feedback, with local management blindly backing group dynamics over objective facts. Uncompensated Mandatory Overtime: Management expects shift staff to arrive 20 minutes before their official shift start time to gown up and be ready in the lab exactly on the hour for shift handover. Because no time is allocated for handovers in the actual schedule, staff routinely have to give up to 35 minutes of unpaid time per day by arriving early and staying late. Operational Disorganization: Despite the high-tech setting, the baseline of technical structure and consistency across labs feels highly chaotic, creating an incredibly stressful environment for experienced professionals who are used to standard industry regulations.
