Illumina reviews

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?

A coworker was verbally abused by our manager. After the coworker brought the case to HR (as per illumina's own training), HR squelched the case and exonerated the manager. And once the dust settled, the manager quietly moved to retaliate against the coworker, giving him/her tedious work unrelated to software development, and eventually putting him/her on a performance improvement plan (PIP). Of course, this had nothing to do with performance, but rather with personal animosity for daring to expose the manager's bad behavior. HR decided to do nothing, and even reprimanded the individual for bringing it to their attention. Taking no action in such a situation is bad---it's worse if you profess certain values about a non-hostile work environment and don't take them seriously. illumina eventually gave the manager a promotion.