SHINE Technologies reviews

3.4

57% would recommend to a friend

(70 total reviews)
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Gregory Piefer

56% approve of CEO

50% positive business outlook

SHINE Technologies has an employee rating of 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 70 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The SHINE Technologies employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Pharmaceutical & Biotechnology industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

70 reviews
1.0
Aug 9, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Flexible, understanding lower level managers who are willing to help work around any personal or professional issues. Unfortunately, this is overshadowed by upper management's unrealistic ways of managing money.

Cons

They are extremely reckless with money to preserve their 'image' to the public, regardless of whether or not it has any real benefit to the project as a whole. We in engineering were excited as we had many pending contracts that required payment to get a substantial amount of equipment that could really move the project along. Instead, when the next large investor wrote a check for the company, it was spent on huge flashy signs and extremely expensive warehouse features when the current ones worked just fine. This led to running out of money and bringing a mass layoff of many people just yesterday where it is now a ghost town in here at the HQ site, and all of the contracts are now approaching their final dates to be paid - which they won't, and we will probably be sued. It is okay though, we are plenty busy as engineers - engineering designs for sign holders for their new circular logo they want to put on everything. Greg Piefer is essentially the company cheerleader/spokesperson and has no real technical knowledge of the challenges we face, it is just offloaded to the next senior engineer to figure out. When the project is abandoned entirely due to lack of funds, the building may deteriorate and have moss growing on it, but I know all these flashy new signs and paint jobs are engineered to last a lifetime! I should know, I am helping with it.

1.0
May 24, 2019

Cliquey and Abusive Employer

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I worked here to make a difference and feel like I was part of something revolutionary. This rings true. I loved every assignment I was given and the work was enthralling and fresh from standard industry engineering life.

Cons

The communication between the management is not the best and it causes many miscommunication problems. The aura of this entire company is so toxic that if you miss a deadline by one hour, you will be gravely talked down to the next day. (This happens frequently however because the schedule is impossible and the CEO impinges the funding on the schedule itself.) Altogether, hours of working time are taken away from management and the workers for past deadline disciplining. Every time I performed well, I was praised with zero positivity and a request to work longer hours. I cancelled many family events and plans because Shine would tell me I could not take a vacation because their deadlines are important and I would be possibly fired if I did not work harder. My wakeup call with them was when I worked weekends racking up 60 hour weeks and nothing satisfied them. I can confidently say that my mental health deteriorated from their work culture, so I seeked psychiatric help. I was swiftly disciplined for not taking my job seriously because I had a monthly appointment with my therapist. One of the main issues the company has is funding and the CEO is unable to make convincing deals with investors without promising bigger better technology, a shorter schedule, a new facility, or a new isotope. The business moves they are making are too farfetched for the reality they are in. They have not been able to produce a single dose of a radioisotope to be sold on the market to hospitals and people who drastically need it. I used to believe in them with my full heart, but their clique of first employees and inferiority complexes made me see the reality that they are not shining on anytime soon. Also, here's the thing: They don't even pay their employees a decent salary to deal with all this negativity.

1.0
Feb 6, 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I learned a lot about my field. I gained valuable leadership and management experience. Hard-earned but necessary cynicism about the motives of executives.

Cons

It all starts and ends with the executive management team. To say that the executive team is out-of-touch with the rank and file is a massive understatement. The leadership team have consistently mismanaged resources and now they've run out of money. For a long time there was no contract management or vendor management to speak of, leading to huge costs and delays. Until the last couple years the CEO was skeptical that Project Management was even a profession, so engineers were forced to be their own project managers, with predictable consequences. A healthy skepticism on the part of the CEO about the inertia of the nuclear industry warped over time into a pathological distrust of experience in general. When experienced people made it through the hiring process and questioned the base engineering or scientific assumptions undergirding the project, they didn't last long at the company. They weren't "a good culture fit." The upshot of all this mismanagement and lack of experience was that a first of its kind, cutting-edge medical isotopes plant was mostly designed by inexperienced junior engineers without experienced oversight or mentorship. They designed without sufficient resources and working to an unrealistic timeline sold to investors. Once construction started, the work was barely keeping ahead of final design. No one should have been surprised when the project became hopelessly behind schedule and over budget. As things spiraled out of control, panic set in and the blame game started. It was the pandemic, it was work from home, the staff are lazy; everything was wrong as long as it didn't hold a mirror to the executive team's own behavior. Expensive executive management consultants came through, but nothing changed. The board should have replaced the CEO years ago, once it became clear that the project was failing. Instead, senior leadership became paranoid and shifted blame to the workers instead of reckoning with their own failures. The culture quickly became toxic and paranoid. What had been an admirably flexible work culture evaporated as the executives started equating productivity with the amount of time people sat at their desk in the office. When the layoffs finally came in August 2023, none of the people actually responsible for the failures was let go. No consequences for them, but a lot of good people who believed in the project lost their jobs. The moly plant project is basically mothballed. Several hundred million dollars worth of building is collecting dust because they don't have the resources to redesign all the components that didn't work. Instead, the company is trying to convert their Therapeutics R&D process into a commercial product on a timeline that is, wait for it, hopelessly optimistic in a bid to bring the company to solvency. Add in a "Phase 3" project for which there is no actual business case and you come to the sobering realization that the company's much-touted "sustainable path to fusion" is a stillborn joke. Frankly, if you need to deceive investors with an overly rosy budget and timeline in order to obtain funding, was there ever really a business case in the first place?

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SHINE Technologies Response
2y
Thank you for sharing your feedback on your experience at SHINE. Building a first-of-its-kind company with an ambitious vision like ours is challenging. It requires constant adaptation and innovation to drive progress in markets and technologies. While you may perceive certain outcomes as failures, from our perspective, they represent strategic decisions made in response to evolving market dynamics. Our decisions are guided by a focus on achieving success amid challenging market conditions and long-term projects. We respectfully refrain from commenting on hearsay. Our focus remains on objective facts and evidence-based assessments. The best proof of our success is our long-term and committed customer base in imaging, the commercial launch of the biggest lutetium-177 facility in North America in less than a year, and a new radiation effects testing business serving a market need with fusion. We are proud of the significant milestones we've accomplished, many of which of which have broken new ground in the industries we serve. Again, thank you for taking the time to write. We sincerely wish you well on your endeavors.
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Glassdoor has 73 SHINE Technologies reviews submitted anonymously by SHINE Technologies employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if SHINE Technologies is right for you.