Avantages
- The sequencing technology is interesting and has potential to move personalized medicine forward in the future. - Free snacks and breakfast fare. - Work/Life balance is pretty good. - Roche appears to be centralizing all of their South Bay and Peninsula M&A targets at the Santa Clara site and turning it into an "Innovation Center". Could be a good opportunity to be able to transfer across many teams.
Inconvénients
- Toxic work culture and management. Employees are sometimes publicly berated in meetings. Weekly meeting(s) are masqueraded as somewhere to share data and information across groups, but actually function as arenas where groups face off against each other vying for power and recognition. Back-stabbing and back-biting of teams against each other is commonplace. Fear, competition, and mistrust permeate the entire organization. - Lack of concrete direction and strategy from executive and senior management leads to entire site scrambling for goals and direction every year. - "Innovate Now" and "Speak Up" are two of the cultural beliefs, but almost no one is allowed to do anything innovative or out of the box. Anything that bucks the status quo is immediately met with resistance. "We already tried that and it didn't work", and then not having any data to back up claims seems to be the default response. People catch on quickly, stop trying to contribute new ideas, turn on "coast mode", and become "yes" men or women. - Salaries are consistently below what other companies Pharma, Biotech, or Technology companies in the Bay Area are offering even though HR claims they are performing salary comparisons. People leaving for new opportunities regularly secure 30-40% compensation increases. Stock options are only offered to a select group of software engineers, data scientists or directors and above, good luck everyone else! - Contractors are treated like second-hand citizens, and I have seen many cut loose before their contracts are up. I even witnessed one case where the contractor was given only 4 days of notice before being told they were being let go. - Points above lead to a large number of disengaged workers that are trapped and looking for a way out. I have observed employees actively job searching in the open office environment and even in the middle of meetings that they are supposed to be engaged in!