From a microbiologist's PoV - Microbiologist Siegfried Employee Review

I wanted to write this review to express my experience of working for over a year at Siegfried. Take note, this is from a Microbiologist's Point of View, so this might be different when it comes to Chemistry, Management, or Production. - The over-arching theme of Siegfried and a reason why I think it fails is because they lack a truly dedicated LIMS system (an interconnected computer database). This means that everything is written and recorded in paper and this causes massive issues as I explore the problems with the company. - I was recruited as a microbiologist, as I had a 4 year degree and a couple of publications under my belt. I assumed, as a "Microbiologist I", I would be carrying out experiments and testing samples. Sadly, while I did this - I also had a whole host of responsibilities that were not necessarily fleshed out in the interview or job description. I was told that glassware was "to be cleaned sometimes to help out the lab." In fact, glassware was from the chemistry department, not ours, and we were somehow responsible for spending hours washing dishes that we did not use. - You will be asked to participate in Environmental Management. This includes sampling air, water (come in at 4am), plating rooms, and plating production. While generally at other companies this is reserved for lab support, or lab assistants, people with degrees were taking time out of their busy schedule running experiments to wash dishes along with scribe production for hours on end. Not to mention the fact that production were uncomfortable working in a hot room all day and would relentlessly scream over the PA system and yell at you when you walked in after you sprinted down to the production area to gown up and proceed to plate. - On top of the fact that you are responsible for EM/dishes/media preparation (something that should be done by lab support, not a microbiologist), you also are responsible for various tests that will be products produced from the plant. This is expected, as you are a microbiologist, but an issue with this is that these are sprung on the lab manager quite quickly, meaning that protocols can be wrong, instruct the scientist to devote time to a test that has not been shown to work. While this is fine for a chemist who can easily run the test again with new parameters, bacteria takes time to grow - and a microbiologist cannot do anything about that. If your protocol is wrong, you will be behind an entire week and run over your promise date. These promise dates are also assigned by non-biologists, meaning most don't have any idea how long it will take you to perform an experiment which will eventually affect your "on-time performance", which suffers from others being incompetent. - Finally, it's incredibly common to hear officeworkers cussing and yelling at each other in front of their managers and everyone else in the building. Extremely unprofessional.