Roche Employee Reviews about "senior management"

Pros

Science driven environment, e.g. focus on novel therapeutics rather than generics. Lots of career opportunity. Clear vision and strategy by senior management. Many nice colleagues.

Cons

Big company environment prohibits rapid change. More diversity needed in middle management. Culture is still too hierarchical in some departments.

Pros

Free breakfast, Free chocolate milk every Tuesday, Generally friendly co-workers,

Cons

Clueless and unethical senior management. Treat contractors like disposable tools.

Pros

Working space as an individual

Cons

Politics and senior management is not great

Pros

excellent supportive staff, nice offices, resonable pay and benefits,

Cons

Diabetes care is a disaster zone at present, wholesale redundancies (50+ out of 140 staff) jobs awarded without due process to whomevers face fits, very poor staff moral due to uncertanty of role and financial situation, appaling behaviour by some senior management who are rude, conceited and incapable of perfoming role, ( or just unable to perform their role). senior management who boast about their salaries and the value of their expense account whilst people are being made redundant. very slow to market, new services and offerings 2-3 years late, massive market errosion, not a place to work at present, steer clear as you wont/cant make a difference

Pros

- The sequencing technology is interesting and has potential to move personalized medicine forward in the future. - Free snacks and breakfast fare. - Work/Life balance is pretty good. - Roche appears to be centralizing all of their South Bay and Peninsula M&A targets at the Santa Clara site and turning it into an "Innovation Center". Could be a good opportunity to be able to transfer across many teams.

Cons

- Toxic work culture and management. Employees are sometimes publicly berated in meetings. Weekly meeting(s) are masqueraded as somewhere to share data and information across groups, but actually function as arenas where groups face off against each other vying for power and recognition. Back-stabbing and back-biting of teams against each other is commonplace. Fear, competition, and mistrust permeate the entire organization. - Lack of concrete direction and strategy from executive and senior management leads to entire site scrambling for goals and direction every year. - 'Innovate Now' and 'Speak Up' are two of the cultural beliefs, but almost no one is allowed to do anything innovative or out of the box. Anything that bucks the status quo is immediately met with resistance. 'We already tried that and it didn't work', and then not having any data to back up claims seems to be the default response. People catch on quickly, stop trying to contribute new ideas, turn on 'coast mode', and become 'yes' men or women. - Salaries are consistently below what other companies Pharma, Biotech, or Technology companies in the Bay Area are offering even though HR claims they are performing salary comparisons. People leaving for new opportunities regularly secure 30-40% compensation increases. Stock options are only offered to a select group of software engineers, data scientists or directors and above, good luck everyone else! - Contractors are treated like second-hand citizens, and I have seen many cut loose before their contracts are up. I even witnessed one case where the contractor was given only 4 days of notice before being told they were being let go. - Points above lead to a large number of disengaged workers that are trapped and looking for a way out. I have observed employees actively job searching in the open office environment and even in the middle of meetings that they are supposed to be engaged in!

Pros

Good benefits for all Roche employees. Highly competitive salaries with bonus and depending on your level, stock options. They do a great job of providing top notch healthcare, dental, 401k matching and so forth. They value personal time and all the managers I had were great to work for except one (he is no longer with the company). I would still be with the company if they didn't shut down the location I was at. Each time I was impacted by a restructured job, I was able to get a 10% retention bonus for my stress (you would get it if you stayed to your end date as well). Very good severance package when large groups are impacted.

Cons

I worked for Roche for 14 years and other than the last 5-6 years it was a great company. My advice is if you are working for Roche in the IT area, you are at risk of yearly stress of losing your job due to restructuring and sending jobs around the company/world. In the past 6 years, my job was impacted 4-5 times. I had to either apply for a new job or take a package and leave. All of these were due to OPEX realignment of personnel. Senior management would move head count from one location to another without always understanding what they were doing. The latest push in the US is to send IT to Genentech in CA, Madrid, Spain or back to Basel, Switzerland. The Nutley location was closed down after 100 years of service and the US headquarters shifted to Genentech. The merger of Roche and Genentech has not been the smoothest. Each company is still a separate entity and supported by different IT departments. Genentech has not experienced the headcount loss experience as of my last day. They are in for a shock once it does. You have to keep in mind that Roche is the typical Swiss based company, and Gene is the typical San Francisco company. They are on completely opposite sides of the spectrum. Roche is extremely process driven, cost conscious (with regards to IT) and doesn't like to deviate. Gene is agile and flexible with the mentality of 'get the work done as quick as possible.' They don't let cost act as barrier necessarily. Gene is able to bypass process and make their internal customers happy with rapid turn around times. This is the direction Roche is trying to go but with processes still in the picture.

Pros

Great talent, opportunities to meet with senior management on a regular basis, can grow by taking advantage of different job opportunities internally

Cons

Lacks innovation. Senior management does not consider the amount of great talent available within the organization when making strategic decisions. Also very politically driven.

Pros

Solid Company to work for. Nice compensation package with great benefits. Working environment has a lot of flexibility. Great people to work with. Overall experience was very positive

Cons

Lacking in advancement in opportunity. Feels like the vision communicated from senior management and the day to day activities are somewhat misaligned.

Pros

Good to work nice place

Cons

Pressure and bad leadership of thr senior management

Pros

Large company with plenty of funds available for investment or acquisition. Drugs will receive national and international attention - even if that attention is primarily negative in recent years.

Cons

Senior management (NAOC) has very little idea of how to actually run a successful sales organization. They get bogged down in the task-oriented society where everyone at Nutley is busy CYA. I can't believe more heads didn't roll after the horrid way they handled Cera in the United States. Plan B? No, we don't need a Plan B. If Actemra hits a few snags (and why wouldn't it?) plan on Roche NA being significantly smaller in 2010 than it was in 2007.