Roche Employee Reviews about "senior management"

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 Intern projects. They'll give you amazing responsibilities once they see your interests and determination. Great Mentoring Amazing easy going people Good work culture Great intern events such as intern workshops, outings, volunteer events.

Cons

Getting converted to a full time employee is extremely difficult Getting work done takes time as it needs to be approved by many levels of management. Slight hypocrisy noticed with senior management

Pros

No accountability for job done, if you like to slack off this is the place for you

Cons

Senior management sacrifice employees for their own gain

Pros

The salary and benefits are quite good. Roche enjoys a good reputation in the IVD. The jobs are interesting and challenging.

Cons

Roche is a very political organization with very few experienced people in mid- and senior management level positions. Employees are not judged on their contributions; they're often judged based on who likes whom resulting in significant amounts of mobbing (bullying). Consequently, top talent frequently leaves the company and this is weakening their sales and marketing strength. And if you're a woman in the organization, your chances of being promoted to a management position are slim. This is a company that actually has an MBO to promote women into management roles. What does that tell you about how women are really thought of at Roche? If you're a man and you know how to mob your staff, your chances of getting ahead are far more increased. Treating your staff fairly just doesn't seem to be the real Roche way even though you will read that 81% of employees are happy working at Roche. It's rubbish! Don't believe one word that Roche employees are so satisfied with working there. If you are considering a position with this company, don't walk...RUN in the opposite direction!

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

Located in San Francisco Bay Area

Cons

Senior management is terrible- employee reviews are terrible and highlight significant issues. Most employees are afraid to speak up out of fear. Zero work life balance.