Illumina Employee Reviews about "fast paced"

Pros

Great infrastructure and events. Innovative and fast paced environment. Good company growth if R&D delivers

Cons

1. Below par base salaries 2. Bonus dependent on company financial performance. Bonus not tied to individual performance 3. Quality meltdown: Ops quality and validation teams are good inviduals but untrained and ineffective as the quality processes themselves have holes and are incomplete. For example- projects in manufacturing could be delivered by a functional group without quality or validation oversight. Once deployed there will be gaps attributed to quality but they get shoved under the rug till they become audit findings and then all hell breaks looks 4. Groupism is rampant and unless you know someone, you will be pushed and shoved around without a straight forward career path. Lot of intrusions in your work by people who have the ear of management but have nothing to do with what you are working on. People are looking to move up by playing the blame game and taking credit for other peoples work. Young engineers are sold a dream but are not aware of how their work fits into the whole scheme of things. This mafia mentality is leading to a lot of high performers wanting to change groups or quit the company. Add to this the blindsiding of the VPs by simply providing the info that they need to hear and not the bigger picture leads to a lot of projects delivering solutions that Illumina does not need or may even be against Illuminas best interest. 5. Finance cost centers are poorly set up. Even managers and ADs do not have control over their finances 6. Hiring for the sake of headcount accumulation is rampant. No clear understanding of Illumina needs when creating departments or resourcing leads to over hiring and subsequent layoffs. Lot of smart people working on pet projects which may or may not be in Illuminas best interest. Moreover hiring in plenty causes dilution of team performance and standards. As a result you get few mediocre performers against all high performers 7. Some managers have been promoted into positions in which they have no experience. These managers stall the progress of the group leading to attrition or a lot of unhappy employees 8. Common for some employees to be working 12 hour days while some employees show up to work once in a blue moon. 9 Management wants to preserve status quo rather than make effective changes to benefit the company and the consumers. No appetite for out of the box thinking or using industry best practices. A lot of times you hear " This is how Illumina works" 10. Too many resources are spent on events and non productive activities. Though attractive for a lot of young professionals this causes lack of concentration 11. Bureaucracy and politics: Never before seen level of politics here. Honest employees beware. You are being made use of as pawns for others career growth. Of all the workplace issues, this is the worst. Mutiple people will be working on the same thing. Teams are created and set up only to further peoples influence rather than solving actual issues.

Pros

- Very innovative work that has a clear positive impact on human health. - Colleagues are intelligent, driven, and hardworking. Almost everyone has great pride in working here and believes in the mission. - Career development opportunities are available (if you loudly fight for them). - Senior management appears to be doing a good job of prioritizing the promising projects. We always seem to come up with something that makes the company keep growing. - Decent compensation for San Diego (when we hit our revenue targets). - Fast paced.

Cons

- Compensation is highly variable. Low base salary. Benefits and 401k match are sub-par. - Some managers are extremely stingy with promotions. - Some teams have much better work/life balance while other are perpetually stressed out. - You have to be assertive and drive your own career, or people will take advantage of you. - Fast paced. Summary: If you are driven, self-motivated, assertive, and enjoy fast pace and constant learning, you will love it here. If you are not these things, or you have a bad manager, or you want a tech-company salary, you will probably be unhappy.

Pros

Great campus, great mission

Cons

While there are lots of good reviews on the site but either these are from handfull of groups that have good leadership or from the HR itself. There is no shortage of smart people at this company, however some of the departments are disorganized. Positions are created to get more ownership in the project rather than on the company need basis. The blame game is intense. You will hardly receive credit for your hard work but people will not take a second to point fingers at you. Some of the engineers who are currently responsible for the development of a very critical product are incompetent both technically and professionally. They feel proud about the chaos and call it " This is Illumina". The whole team is in a rush during the project, which is understandable due to the fast-paced environment. However, they do a poor job in evaluating the product and then spend double the time fixing it. They tend to easily miss critical things which I believe is a result of the incompetent engineers leading the project. Pay is average, bonus is pathetic.

Pros

- Motivated and friendly coworkers - Great sports and employee appreciation events - Fantastic mission and contribution to the world - Competitive salary and benefits -Unbelievable time off 30+ work days off per year

Cons

Work is fast-paced and you can get lost in it. You will always have more than you can do in one day.