Pros
Illumina has very very good at externally marketing itself as an employer. Media publications, in particular, tend to herald it as the "Google of biotech" and for better or for worse the recruiting team tries to play up this image. A couple pros I found: - Brilliant people. Like, really really smart. A lot of PhDs, MDs, dual MBA/MS degrees walking around. A lot of folks with very in depth knowledge about a relatively novel and admittedly complicated field. I was particularly impressed by the bioinformatics folks as well as some of the more seasoned process engineers. - Beautiful campus. Lots of well-designed buildings, coffee bars, koi ponds, an onsite gym. This was very much a pre-COVID perk, but for aspiring applicants it should be open as time goes on. - If you're in HQ, then you can live in San Diego. People really like to ham this up when getting folks to join. It's true, San Diego is very nice, but the location can be a double edged sword. More on this later. - Working for a "winner". Remember that board game you played as a kid, the one with Boardwalk and Park Place? Yeah, that's Illumina's market share in the industry. It's not a surefire protector against layoffs and the like, but it does help a bit with job stability and gives you a "brand name". - Vacation benefits. I have some issues with the entire comp/benefits package (more on that below) but the vacation benefits are amazing. 2 mandated shutdowns a year + FTO. FTO is also a double edged sword as that depends a lot on your management/org structure, but I was fortunate enough in my Illumina experience to have management that was supportive of vacation and wellness.
Cons
A lot of my downsides aren't new: they have been expressed in multiple reviews here and both in internal employee surveys. - Lower velocity & higher bureaucracy: The company is growing, and with that comes layers upon layers of bureaucracy, multiple reorgs, and a lack of clear vision from upper management. Everyone is trying to do everything at once, there's not enough high visibility projects to go around, and everyone wants a piece of the pie. - When Everything's on Fire, Nothing Is: This has been mentioned in previous reviews, but there definitely is a culture in the GQO org of "I need this, and I need this now." Priority is not assigned, and if it is then it is always at the highest priority. Not only is it exhausting and a lead-in to burnout, it also numbs the employee to responding to an issue if it actually *is* high priority. "Oh this request is high priority? Yeah, so were the last 5. Just throw it in the back of the queue." - Meetings: Everything is a meeting, and maybe about 50% of these things need to be. Everything needs to be thrown in a PowerPoint, and maybe about 50% of these things need to be. - Compensation: I said in the Pros that vacation is nice, but compensation is anything but. I actually debated putting this one here because, if you work at Illumina and are reading this, odds are you already know that compensation is poor. And by "poor" I mean something else but I don't want this review to get banned from Glassdoor, so I'll settle with "poor". That's why you see it plastered all over these glassdoor reviews. I know this, you know this, honestly HR probably know this. This is the thing: I'm not really sure if it will change. You know what I said about Illumina's recruiting being good at marketing? Yeah. Why compensate your folks more if you're "the Google of genomics" and people are clamoring to get in?