Lawrence Livermore Lab Reviews

Pros

Challenging projects that are fun to work on.

Cons

Hard to get ahead. Large good ole boy network.

Advice to Senior Management

none

Pros

Employees are mostly treated fairly and with respect, at least on the surface.

Flexible working time.

Lots of collaborations with other DOE labs and universities.

Competitive salaries due to the pressure from Bay Area IT companies. Maybe the highest pay among all DOE laboratories.

Benefits are also above average.

It is an OK place serving as a jump board to land better opportunities elsewhere.

Cons

No bonus. No real incentive to keep employees doing great job.

Layers and layers of intrusive security rules , no gmail, no facebook, no incoming email attachments.

Life for foreign scientists from sensitive countries can be tough. Too many red tags, no off-site email access to name the least.

Horrible immigration policy, HR forces new foreign national hires to take J-1 visas instead of H1-B visas. No sponsorship for green cards even for staff scientists converted from postdocs.

Facility is ridiculously aging, mostly shaky trailers not even with enough toilets for employees.

Uncertainty of federal funding makes most scientists spread across many projects to reduce risks (eggs in many baskets). But this causes too many context switches and work overload.

Overhead is so high that scientists cannot include each other in collaborative projects. They even outsource to universities or other cheaper labs as a workaround.

Absurd ways by management to cut cost by reducing A/C temperature during Winter, reduce water facet flow speed to save water, etc.

Advice to Senior Management

Please eliminate the layers of managers to reduce overhead

Pros

good pay
world class scientific resources
good cafeterias
plenty of interesting people
ability to help solve the nation's problems
good pay

Cons

Poor management, the overhead makes it hard to bring outside funding in
too many managers and support staff
run-down buildings
way to security and safety

Advice to Senior Management

decisions should be made by scientists, lay off half the managers

Pros

Livermore lab is an excellent place to work on challenging technical problems across many fields. The environment can be very academic. In the aggregate, the work environment can be very laid back and there is good job security (some exceptions, see cons). The management typically has a good technical background. The management as a whole acknowledge the need for a good work-life balance. Pay and benefits are quite good, possibly better than average if you take into account relatively low Livermore cost of living.

Cons

Many managers are promoted on technical merits, leading to some managers acting like technical team leads rather than managers. It can be frustrating when you need a manager to deal with a organizational issue, but they are working on technical work instead. While having a technical manager has its upsides, I sometimes think having the MBA without any technical knowledge would be better to have as a manager.

Although it depends on the area you work in, most science/engineering jobs at LLNL are classified in some manner. A number of the amenities you consider normal you may no longer have. For example, access to many websites such as gmail and facebook are blocked for security reasons. You can't bring your cellphone or ipod to work. Sometimes you can feel cut off from the rest of the world. If you interview at LLNL, ask a lot of detailed questions to determine what you can and cannot do in your position to determine if you will be able to handle it.

As I said under the pros, it's a laid back environment with good job security in the aggregate. However, some department's funding can be sketchy. Finding funding or being on projects with funding can frustrating. If you interview at LLNL, try to ascertain budgeting, liklihood of future complications, and weigh risk/reward appropriately. Due to budgets changing, there have been several layoffs in the last 5-6 years. In the aggregate, job security is better than industry, but it's not super safe.

Advice to Senior Management

Managers should be managers, not anything else. If they are doing technical work, they shouldn't be managers.

Pros

The work environment is quite flexible. It really is an academic job without the teaching responsibility. The pay is quite good for postdoctoral scholar.

Cons

Funding for project is always limited. You can do well one day and worry the next.

Pros

The lab is a great place to start out with lots of interesting problems to solve. It is a first class research facility with lots of actual computer science going on. If you're into parallel computing, some of the world's fastest supercomputers are housed there. It's a great place to kickstart your career.

Cons

As a software engineer, advancement is very unlikely. You're being compared to scientists who publish papers and speak at conferences and since you don't do that and you're being evaluated by scientists who don't understand what you do and your value, you're ranked accordingly. You can eventually move up to group leader for maybe 1% extra pay and twice the work or after 15-20 years perhaps a program manager. But there's nothing for you in the meantime.

I would start my career here and then within a few years move on to somewhere else.

Salaries aren't very competitive either.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide ways for advancement for software engineers. Pay market rates at least. You hemmorhage good engineers because you can't pay them comparable salaries and they have no vertical movement.

Pros

The opportunity to work with top notch colleagues on cutting-edge research in various physical science fields. LLNL offers good benefits, and you can't beat Northern CA weather!

Cons

Since the management transition from UC to LLNS morale remains at an all time low. Scientists don't need micromanaging, they need support ($$) and respect (what do you think?). The current "best business practices" management style is NOT conducive to innovation or collaboration. You can still find meaningful work, but it's no longer easy!

Advice to Senior Management

Accountability and best practices should be restructured so that they do not interfere with actual work being done. Monthly reports with milestones and specifics pulled out of the ether so that middle managers can feel important are a waste of my time and yours. Infrastructure investment means supporting development of innovative technologies and making sure the employees have state of the art instrumentation - not new landscaping. And how about firing a few managers and bringing back janitorial support? Which project am I supposed to charge for the time I spend vacuuming my office?

Pros

Wide range of research. Applied research and development. Teamwork. Convenient location for many activities, spousal employment opportunities. In future could become a great institution if management practices improved. Recent bonus program initiated to attempt to provide positive feedback to technical staff.

Cons

Org charts filled with morons with high salaries and scientists treated like expendable hired help. You could be a world-class acclaimed scientist and find you report to a chain of managers and "program leaders" who have never made any scientific contribution of note and also have no ability to help with any aspect of bringing in money, technical review or workforce management. In a nutshell- a large collection of parasitic managers results in excessive overhead. They never get rid of any managers, even the truly atrocious ones, they linger on and on and on....collecting their obscene salaries.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce number of managers in order to reduce overhead and improve morale. Get rid of Office of Strategic Outcomes. Recognize the true scientific leaders -- the project leaders. They are the ones who come up with the ideas, train the staff, report to sponsors. Without the project leaders, nothing can happen. In other research institutes, especially in universities, this is well-understood. A celebrity professor is heavily promoted. At LLNL, working scientists are second or third class citizens, not consulted for strategic planning and ignored by upper management.

Pros

The bikes are great to get around the whole lab - you walk around until you see a bike and ride it to wherever you need - you can also just leave it wherever. There are a lot of very smart people that work at LLNL.

Cons

Interns are used to do the grunt work of PIs - and in some of the cases I saw, were very limited in what they could research/explore on their own.

Pros

It's a nice work setting. People around are all very very nice. Quite place to live and low cost to maintain.

Cons

Maybe kinda far away from the so called city life. Not exactly what I am looking for. The culture life is far from enough

Advice to Senior Management

So far so good. I don't think there is any thing need to be done at this point. I will think about that.