Review of Signature Science - Staff Scientist Signature Science Employee Review

1) Company Culture: The culture at Signature Science is unlike any place I've ever worked. The day-to-day focus at Signature Science is not on completing work for your/their clients; it's making sure that the people who are friends with the managers like you. *These friends are not peer-level within the company. The "friends" are select subordinates within the managers' groups.* So, while you should be working, you're trying to make sure that you're kissing the correct rears so that you have a job the next week. Managers host weekly video game parties at their homes for their group friends. 2) Management: Executive level folks constantly tell you that everything is fine within the company and jobs are secure. Upper level management constantly claims that money is short and projects need to quickly arrive. Which is it? Management knows very little about the projects. That's not to say that they don't know what's supposed to be accomplished, they don't know how to go from accepting a contract with a client, to delivering what was promised in the contract. This task is left, as it should be, to the senior level, Ph.D. scientists on the projects. However, if that senior level scientist's view of how the project should proceed differs from the manager, then many feathers will be ruffled. In fact, you may find yourself being yelled at during meetings by the manager because you disagree with him/her. But, you ask, if the manager doesn't know how to proceed, and leaves that up to the more experienced staff member, how can they accurately comment on the project? Exactly. This, coupled with extreme micro-managing are major headaches for senior level staff members and are the main reasons that projects are either unsuccessful, or people beg the clients for more time to complete the project(s). Managers spend a great deal of time outside of work with their subordinate friends. Most people would call this conflicts of interest, but it's a part of the day-to-day culture at Signature Science. 3) Hiring and Retention: In my time at Signature Science, I mainly saw friends, and former graduate school lab-mates of the managers being hired. It should be noted that ALL of the friends and former lab-mates of the managers made it through the lay-offs. The deck gets highly stacked in favor of the "friends of management" in the job application process. Certain positions were created for those friends, while others had laughable "mismatches" competing for the "open" position. In these cases, the friends of management were always hired. This is a micro-chasm of the nepotism seen at Signature Science. 4) Company Peer Reviews: Peer level reviews within the company are most peoples' favorite opportunity for backstabbing rather than giving honest feedback about coworkers. Again, the managers do not care how well you do your work or how well you know your field, they simply care whether or not their friends like you. If their friends do not like you, prepare to be yelled at during one-on-one meetings about needing to make sure "the friends" like you. Management bases your yearly bonus on these reviews. 5) Scientific Work: The work done at Signature Science is challenging, simply because management makes goals so difficult to achieve. In some instances, management wanted something scientifically impossible to be done for the project. They were less than thrilled when told that the "science" they wanted to perform went against all known chemical principles. Rather than hear someone tell them this, they switch those people onto different projects just so that they don't have to hear a dissenting voice. Projects "leaders" and project staff are switched from one project to another on an almost daily basis. The word leaders is used in quotes because there really are no project leaders. The managers are the ones running to project. If the project is successful, they take all the credit. If the project fails, which happens frequently, the staff take all of the blame. It's a marvelous system, if you're a manager of course. Illogical shortcuts are taken in projects which means that more money and time are wasted having to backtrack to figure out where, and what things may have went wrong. Management has a deep affection for instrumentation. Many expensive instruments were purchased/leased in my time at Signature and I very rarely saw these instruments being used. some would never work correctly, and most were not needed on any project(s). Why then was so much money (100's of thousands of dollars) spent on instrumentation? Because management liked saying that they had "X" in house....even though that piece of equipment was a fancy dust collector.