Pros
The people there are really nice, I quite enjoyed working with them and do miss them. It is a friendly and understanding environment, I was never afraid to call off when I was really sick
Cons
I will go in order of importance in terms of reasons why I left: 1. This is a very low volume laboratory. Only during certain months did I consistently have a lot of work to do. It was really hard to find ways to fill my time here, and I always ended up endlessly cleaning or reading SOP's until my brain went numb because I just didn't know what else to do with myself. If you really like doing nothing but spinning in your chair all day this is a great job for you. 2. There's one person in the quality office who is extremely difficult to work with. Environmental chemistry has a lot of requirements in terms of OSHA standards and I understand following them, but the training procedures in place because of this are just ridiculous. Get ready to take weeks to learn the most simple test possible because you had typos on your training packet or something stupid like that. They are extremely condescending and acts like you're an idiot all the time. Passive aggressive and unprofessional in their emails and not really correcting things in a way that's actually helpful or productive. It's just nitpicking, and not only that but you can't even use other training packets as examples because a packet that passed before no longer does because of yet another nitpick. I almost quit far earlier than I did because it was starting to get excessive. 3. There is no upward mobility or learning. Once you learn a test it just becomes a repetitive task. Not a lot of critical thinking, and the highest you can do is Senior (insert role here) and then you cap out unless you take a supervisor or VP job. 4. The CEO really only cares about money and turnover, they do not get their equipment properly updated and maintained and then expect us to waste hours troubleshooting the same issues that are only occurring because we're never able to get proper maintenance. They take safety pretty seriously but a lot of the issues I pointed out were kind of pushed to the side. I regularly tripped over a chunk of floor that's been eroded that they haven't fixed. One of the instruments was on a plastic picnic table and was tilting. 5. Upper management doesn't really understand the day to day problems we deal with in the lab. We got talked down to a lot and major issues were disregarded and put to the side. When I brought these things up during my exit interview I was kind of just brushed off with excuses. Also, there are 3 vice presidents. For a company with maybe 50 people employed at a time. Basically, I really disliked my time here. I would highly recommend you trust the low rating that this company has on here and look elsewhere. You won't really gain much of value during your time and will likely end up with a lot of frustration and long days.