Applied Biosystems Reviews

Pros

excellent products that work well

Cons

customer service is limited to

Advice to Senior Management

become more customer focused
provide more technical content to sales reps
Increase benefits
Value the sales force
Contact list is needed

Pros

The benefits package is amazing. They offer Great health, dental, vision, disability, and 401k with generous matching. Performance bonuses are given annually and if you do your job even decently you should see something over 1k. If you really do a good job, it can be much more, but depends on current salary. They also have lots of activities such as a Health and wellness fair, fairly frequent cookouts, group rewards and lunches for 5S performance, and always cater any large meetings.

Cons

The company is great and the hours fantastic. The major problem is that Administrative roles tend to stroll in at 9 and somehow still leave around 4, like the lab employees who are there between 7 and 730. This varies from group to group, but it really lowers morale.

Also, overall head managers are great, but certain supervisors are unprofessional, rude, and very disloyal to the group. Loyal to the company but disloyal to their team. Ive worked for companies where the supervisor had his/her employees best interests at heart, and here you have to go to the higher ups to get any sort of respect. However, this offensive and extremely unprofessional supervisor did result in the whole group becoming much more close knit.

Advice to Senior Management

most of you are doing a great job. One supervisor specifically needs some sensitivity, stress management and sexual harassment training.

Pros

Market leader in real-time PCR and sequencing. Located in the dynamic Bay Area. Good Scientific community

Cons

Payscales run on the lower side

Advice to Senior Management

Raise pay scales and career opportunities

Pros

You can learn quite a bit in a short period of time and use your experience as a stepping stone to develop your career elsewhere.

Cons

There was little room for movement around the company. Once you become well-versed in a particular research line or product category, that's where you will be for a long time.

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees need to be recognized for their achievements, the constant changes need to be decreased in intensity, (i.e. less re-orgs, more stability, more foresight).

Pros

Leader in life science instrumentation; innovative technologies.

Cons

Too many changes and reorganizations occur with not enough communication from leadership team.

Advice to Senior Management

Improve communication and have clear explanation to set employees expectation.

Pros

Industry recognition, benefits, and technologies. AB/Life is embarking on some great intiatives, the company has focus.

Cons

People are dispensable. Anyone can become a manager, and the multiple layers create opportunities for those who are more focused on dirty politics can flourish than those who are sincere in driving the objectives of the organization and doing a great job. There are A LOT of management issues amongst middle management.

Advice to Senior Management

Acknowledge that there are some issues with middle management and create the opportunity for accountability with respect to how managers develop and treat their people. As of today it is the wild west, anything goes, and someone in management can do and say whatever he/she pleases.

Pros

The merge of Invitrogen and Applied Biosystems forms one of the best biotech company in the world. Now it has advantages in both reagent (cell culture, fluorescent molecule, cloning reagent, etc from IVGN) and instrument (Thermal cycler, real-time PCR instrument, sequencing instrument and mass spec from ABI). The company is also listed in NASDAQ 100. This company is a world wide company. If you would like to know the best biotechnology in the world, you need to come to this company. It is known as the Microsoft in the biotech industry. It is a solid

Cons

It is a big company, so advancement is not easy.

Advice to Senior Management

There are many talented people in this company. You need to think about how to keep the talented people around and help them to advance in the career.

Pros

401K matches dollar for dollar; liberal benefits and compensation, if you ask for it

Cons

Terrible hierarchy. Any complaints regarding the incompetence of senior staff, no matter how blatant, are ignored. Friends are retained, and people not part of a "clique" are somehow targeted for poor reviews. I've seen excellent scientists with high levels of technical skills at the same level as "buzz word" lazy incompetent workers. Go figure.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop promoting and trusting your friends and LISTEN to complaints. Stop kidding yourselves that you "take all matter seriously" when it's obvious that managers that have had complaints for years are still on staff and protected.

Pros

Constant new ideas and opportunities. The biotech landscape is changing so rapidly and Life Technologies is involved in many interesting and diverse business areas. There are plenty of opportunuties to define and creat your own nitch if it's not already there. There are lots of continuous improvement initiatvies going on so it's a good place for early career folks to learn some industry tools but not so mature that there isn't room for input from experienced hires.

Cons

For some the changes can be tiring. With the mergers and realignments it can be difficult to gett one's footing. Also this is a business and not an academic environment. It can be a big adjustment for academic science types.

Advice to Senior Management

Change management and soft skill development would help improve the perception of the independant contributors that things are sometimes a little too fast and furious to be in control.

Pros

I like the people and the work environment. The location is great and the work is not very stressful. The company generally works a 9 to 5 shift without too much deviation which makes it a very predictable environment - you essentially have a good life outside of work which is rare in Silicon Valley.

Cons

It's not very tech savvy. The business ends up running the technology and at times they are not the most inform when making decisions that should be made by IT. The budget was tight and didn't allow for as much training as was necessary but that goes with many companies.

Advice to Senior Management

Let technology run the business, not the other way around.