Bio-Rad Labs Reviews

Pros

Great family owned company
Supportive staff and managers

Cons

Needs better cafeteria. Large commons area

Pros

Good pay, excellent training, good inter departmental communications, reputable company, quality products

Cons

Lack of vision for the Inside sales. Purest form of micromanagement. Highest rep turnover I have even seen.

Advice to Senior Management

Consider re-evaluating management style. Micromanagement can offer some short term benefits but weakens the team and destroys morale. It reflects on the good reputation Bio-Rad worked so hard to earn.

Pros

Nice campus. Some inspiring leadership. Has gotten better over time.

Cons

Highly political. Under-compensated. Stretched way too thin. Over-worked. Do not feel valued .

Advice to Senior Management

Love your vision! Pay attention to the people who are working their hearts out. They need to feel valued and to be paid fairly. Some of the managers do not really care about the people in their group. The definition of success is not always clear as an individual contributor.

Pros

The people work hard and try to do the right thing

Cons

Management has small and short vision and are not strong at executing objectives - Everyone is allowed to do whatever they want with no accountability

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate vision and objectives down to all employees - ensure we are all working towards these objectives - not against.

Pros

Good benefits for all employees

Cons

Too many politics in the workplace.

Pros

Small handful of locations in California and the world. Make a wide variety of life sciences, laboratory, and diagnostic products.

Cons

Lack of resources for basic needs, failure of management to provide basic infrastructure required to work in a regulatory environment, unrealistic capital payback expected by top management - results in waste of time and energy to try to convince them to move forward on a project needed for manufacturing site to be sustainable

Advice to Senior Management

Don't be pennywise and pound foolish. Solicit your professional staff (supervisors, engineers, scientists) for their feedback to increase engagement at the sites.

Pros

They will hire you with little experience

Cons

They will hire anyone, management decisions do not make sense.

Pros

steady work but boring living

Cons

no prmotion and hard to get recongized

Advice to Senior Management

open mind

Pros

family and work balance is great

Cons

career progression average; could be improved if you qualify promote to a higher level regardless of pay level

Advice to Senior Management

mentoring

Pros

You can really skate along if you work there. Some people seem to do nothing but drink coffee and create PowerPoint presentations. But really, the people for the most part are pretty nice.

Cons

The ridiculous level of paperwork to get anything done is absurd. There are redundant levels of managers and procedures and accompanying paperwork. If you are not in their little circle of friends you will not get promoted.
Speaking of IT in particular, it is underfunded and not taken seriously; which leads to things like a half a billion dollar ERP program that has yet to show any progress. An ERP program after the company has been in business for over fifty years. Hmm.

Advice to Senior Management

Take technology seriously. You are a tech company, whether you want to admit it or not. Just buying other people's IP and throwing away their branding is not going to keep you going. Flush out the dead wood. There is a lot of it. And please, streamline your procedures. Just because you have multiple government regulations doesn't mean you need to be paralyzed by it. Your competitors certainly aren't.