DURECT – “Company is run with a very primitive management philosophy”

Pros

They give a lot of holidays

Cons

no matching 401k but they have money to give free lunches every week and all kinds of unnecessary company events
they're too intent on being like alza instead of being durect
competition between each product team leads to a whole lot of not sharing information
management is too intent on hiring people that they used to work with, instead of hiring competent people, ie if you worked at alza or syntex you can get a job easily even if you're incompetent
management's philosophy is ridiculously outdated, they don't think we need decent computers to do our work (by decent i mean at least a pentium 4, i had a pentium 3 for christ sakes), no computer documentation was done until a few months before their first NDA filing because they believed the FDA doesn't need to see any computer data, data has been falsified many times and led to some terminations but some people are still employed
What worked for Alza in the 70s-80s won't worked today, as shown by Alza's demise

Advice to Senior Management

The most stubborn habits which resist change with the greatest tenacity are those which worked well for a space of time and led to the practitioner being rewarded for those behaviors. If you suddenly tell such persons that their recipe for success is no longer viable, their personal experience blies you diagnosis. The road to convincing them is hard. It is the stuff of classic tragedy.-Charles Hampden-Turner and Linda Arc, The Raveled Knot