Mission-driven work but plagued by bureaucracy and bullying - Bioinformatician Genomics England Employee Review

-Smart, capable colleagues -Good work/life balance, with some managers being very good at accommodating flexible working arrangement -Nice office with great views & AC

Working at Genomics England was honestly the most professionally disappointing experience of my entire working career. The vision and mission are so exciting! But the whole things fails in a tangle of needless bureaucracy, top-down decision making, poor processes, tech debt, and increasingly toxic culture. The c-suite leadership are well intentioned, I believe, but are not experienced or strong enough to fix the issues plaguing the company. A few more specific complaints: -Someone needs to take a look at Genomics England's relationship with Ben Davidson & Axiologik. For a while, Ben was interim CTO whilst his own consultancy was doing work at GEL. Several recent hires are friends of Ben's. Axiologik also has placed contractors at GEL. The whole thing just stinks. -Bullying is tolerated and indeed even seems to be rewarded with promotions and more responsibility. The "no a*****s" rule definitely does NOT apply here. -For everyone else, there basically is no career progression. Getting a promotion is nigh impossible, thanks to the red tape and poor processes in the People Team surrounding progression. -Poor performance seems to go without consequence for a long, long time. -There have been several redundancies in recent years, wherein the people being made redundant were treated shockingly poorly. For a company that's supposed to care about its people these actions speak way louder than words. One final word... so many people have quit without having anything lined up afterwards, preferring joblessness to working at GEL. This speaks volumes.

Work life balance is good, minimal requirement to be in the office The mission is genuinely meaningful. Genomics and rare disease research is important work and that does lend a sense of purpose that you don't get in purely commercial environments The business attracts smart people and many colleagues are a delight to work with Good holiday allowance

If you're joining for the money, don't. Pay awards are a joke, routinely failing to keep pace with inflation let alone reflect actual contribution. Don't expect to be rewarded for impact. The ceiling is low and the appetite to recognise genuine performance is lower. What makes the pay situation even more galling is the process used to determine your meagre award. Line managers have so little visibility of their team's actual work that performance reviews appear to be little more than a Copilot-generated summary of peer feedback, dressed up with a rating and called a review. Vapid, hollow, and devoid of any genuine managerial insight. Your career trajectory is effectively determined by someone who couldn't pick your work out of a lineup without a chatbot summarizing it for them first. Progression? Technically it exists on paper. In practice, when your annual review is essentially conducted by an AI proxy, the idea that this process could meaningfully support your development is laughable. If delivering real change is what motivates you, look elsewhere. Any meaningful progress is suffocated under an ever-expanding blanket of unnecessary red tape and process theatre. The organization has wholeheartedly embraced the flat Spotify model, which in practice means an endless parade of people who feel thoroughly entitled to an opinion on things they neither own nor need to understand. Decisions that should take days take months, derailed by loud, performative objections from people whose primary contribution appears to be making themselves visible by blocking others. It's a culture of look-at-me-ism masquerading as collaboration. People exist not to deliver, but to be seen objecting. The path of least resistance is to do nothing, and the loudest voice in the room is rarely the most informed one. The talent will leave. The mediocrity will remain. And Copilot will give them all a glowing review.