Invitae Reviews

Pros

Management is hands off, you are given room to grow and thrice but you're supported when you need it

Cons

None that I've found yet

Pros

- Work/life balance is okay if you can handle the constant fear of losing your job.

Cons

- Completely clueless middle-management, the worst I've seen. Ever since the stock price tanked and they brought in some scary C-suite sharks, the managers are running scared and trying to protect themselves to the detriment of everything else. - If you are rank-and-file, you can expect layoffs to be a constant fear in the back of your mind. If you are management, you have nothing to worry about, the entire company apparatus is set up to insulate you from accountability. - The company has no formal performance management, or even performance tracking. They randomly do leveling assessments that are retroactive and punitive. You will find out in Q3 of 2021 that your performance was "just okay" in Q1 2020. - There is no training, you are just expected to know things. - Extremely contractor-heavy development teams. The contractors are generally pretty good, but that says more about the agency that employs them than Invitae. This is a rare company where the contractors actually pity the full-time employees. - The company's outlook is abysmal. They acquired a bunch of companies during the peak of the market valuations, which every employee thought was crazy, they're barely able to keep their own product together, much less integrate other companies' products. Listen to the earnings calls! They are a total bloodbath!

Pros

Amazing benefits Interesting data being worked on Great engineering management and team members

Cons

Some engineers are very underpaid. Compensation adjustments were promised as a part of releveling literally months ago with barely any updates. The kicker is the geniuses in HR implemented a maximum raise cap of 30%, so if you’re someone who is lucky enough to be that underpaid then guess what, you get to continue being underpaid. The differential ended up being so big that they didn’t budget enough money for the raises so they don’t know what to do, but they also don’t want to tell their employees that so they are keeping silent. Communication from management about everything has deteriorated over the last year and it is incredibly frustrating and disappointing

Pros

Colleagues are supportive, collaborative, and have a great understanding of what it means to work as a team. The office is located at a convenient area for before/after work outings.

Cons

Your colleagues are possibly the only thing that will make the job tolerable because the company will be constantly pushing you to your limit and actively trying to keep the morale low. Despite the number of work doubling within the past year, the resources and number of employees have remained the same or lowered due to lay offs, reorgs, budget cuts, etc. The employees are constantly voicing concerns and asking what is going on as there is no transparency below leadership position. Upper management shows very little concern to the well-being of the technicians that perform the services for the patients and fuss over the production numbers instead. It is a constant battle of frustration and exhaustion with management ignoring the needs of the lab and creating more questions than answers in every meeting.

Pros

No accountability. None. Get promoted and them just do whatever you want. Rise over their IC role and do whatever you want, even if it costs the company a ton of cash which they are currently bleeding a lot of right now. If you get higher up, you'll never be held accountable for any deliverables. Look at their Oncology and other projects, just rest and vest :) Once you're above the IC level, you can pretty much take as much vacation time as you want. "Leads" often take 3-4 MONHTS of time off per year.

Cons

Lots of lip service to patients and healthcare but you also have the CEO, Sean, telling people "Covid isn't as bad as the flu" and they haven't changed their posture since. Employees don't wear masks indoors or even test. Recently things are toxic and the leadership is not paying any attention. We are losing so many programmers and QA testing people that I donno if the software is going to be fine. Sean doesn't realize he's leading a Healthcare company and keeps all the medical advice at a minimum and I am making the very deliberate point point of naming the person that is Alex Furman because his software they called "org one" has stomped the advancement of the careers of lots of people, he is a hated human I say. Why is Invitae bleeding money? I sure hope the investors look into what Sean, Alex, Karthik, Ken, and Eric are doing....

Pros

Good place to work if you like to coast and not do any real work. Cool swag

Cons

I've worked in the Life Science industry for 30 years and this company really baffled me. I was part of an acquisition , I would not have willingly joined this company. Shortly after the acquisition, my reports were taken away and I was put into a very obscure role that had nothing to do with my skills or career goals. It wasn't just me, they just dispersed the entire team they acquired into open roles they had. the most shocking thing was that the person they assigned as my LEAD because they "don't have titles" (which sometimes they do, sometimes they don't??) was a very junior person with no science background at all, the person was from consumer goods industry. Reviews at this company are done in a Facebook like feature manner which is just bizarre. You get likes and that's how the determine your performance.... no info, no feedback and no way to know who gave you a bad review unless they sign their name. Leadership, esp in Boulder has no idea how to develop products nor do they anything about Oncology. All the people that knew the science and the Oncology space left... It's very scary honestly that they are developing IVD tests. I'm not sure how this company stays around.

Pros

Benefits at Invitae are great. They do care about the mental and physical well being of their employees.

Cons

Wasted my time. Since the time that I joined the company went through a few "re-orgs" (fancy term for layoffs). The original position that I was hired for no longer exists at the company and I kept being moved to a new team every two months. I was unable to find stability working for Invitae and when it came down to it, they relieved me of my duties as they could not find an opportunity for me within the company. I spent the last month learning and proving my worth just to realize that my lead had already made the decision for me to longer be a part of the company and that the tickets that I closed were just overhead and by having me do it, they didn't have to worry about wasting another's time, since I was already fated to leave the company.

Pros

- Freedom to choose the right tool for the job - Unlimited PTO - Remote friendly - Good people that are easy to work with

Cons

- The software systems are way too complex and poorly built. I attribute this to a lack of talent (the CEO said he won't pay competitive salaries) and the complex genetics space that software engineers don't really comprehend. This leads to massive tech debt. - High engineering turnover as engineers quickly get overwhelmed. Probably the highest engineering turnover I've ever seen in my career. - Engineering leadership laid off the entire production support team and expect the remaining engineers to pick up their difficult job.

Pros

Great team because it was so small so there wasn't any miscommunication and all our issues were heard. Good benefits. Great stepping stone into biotech industry.

Cons

Toxic lab environments. No one listens to people working in the lab, including our own leads. No sympathy or respect for employees off/outside time. They'd rather ask people to come in early or stay later and come in on off days working 6/7 day weeks than hire more people. And then have the audacity to tell us we aren't working hard enough or that we lost sight of our company's goal.