100% Fire Fighting - Anonymous employee Merck Employee Review

3.0
Jul 29, 2011
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

People, People, People: Merck Hires The Best and Brightest; People are committed to addressing deviations; Great products that actually save lives.

Cons

On-going re-structuring; very stressed colleagues; expected to work >60 hours; forced ranking during performance reviews; impending layoffs; limited opportunities; highly inefficient business processes. Best and Brightest are not deployed to the best of their abilities.

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5.0
Jun 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Excellent company to work with.

Cons

No cons encountered so far

4.0
Jun 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great benefits like medical/dentist/vision, pension, stock option, 401k match. Co workers are excellent, pretty good on site symposiums, lot of diversity clubs/activities. Innovation is extremely welcomed. Diversity in research portfolio. AI/ML is heavily invested to make databases more efficient.

Cons

Micro managing, especially within the biologics department, potentially others. Promotions are limited, and pay bump is poor. Company invests too much in buying companies rather than keeping talent - lay offs let go of great talented people. Merck is afraid of investing into exploratory biology and doesn’t take risk - they even admit they would rather see other companies clinical data or R&D data rather than taking a risk. Although it’s slow going in building new software, current databases are slow and needs much improvement. Extremely poor work/life balance.

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