Roche reviews

Leadership was incompetent, with many smokers, who with their smoker fan-group made gossips about the non-smokers, who worked while the fan-group had their smoking breaks - in addition to their normal breaks, coffee breaks, wellbeing breaks etc. Some TLs ran relationships with members from their teams, allowing them whatever these wanted, i.e. daily lateness, extra days off. Then somehow only these fan-group members (usually HR and QA colleagues) were promoted, and presented as top-performers, who even in their rare and short work intervals between the breaks and their constant meetings, with usually close-to-zero technical/IT skills were still allegedly the top-performers. Meanwhile the ones beyond the fan-group (usually the ones with high-level IT/language skills) had no development opportunities, and once having realized it, one after another left the company. Hopefully things have changed in the meantime.

- Lack of coherent strategy. There seems to be little intentionality and executive leadership in Sequencing that affects all levels. - Decision-making processes are extremely slow and inefficient. I would describe it as a Kafkaesque nightmare. Documentation and meetings are mistaken for actual work. - A few extremely rude apples ruined the barrel. A senior technical lead once started a meeting with "Show of hands for who thinks ____ is stupid?", a contractor once posted publicly on LinkedIn asking how to decrease the influence of my role, a scientist at the VP level chastised me after thinking that I gave one of his reports constructive feedback (I hadn't, and the feedback was valid). A colleague thought it was normal to go to her car and cry after work meetings. This was an extremely unhealthy work culture, and I still get angry just thinking about many of the interactions I had. - Absolute lack of knowledge about software and software development processes.