A bad place to work if you aren't a sociopath or a coward. Especially bad if you aren't incompetent. Bad for minorities - Senior Software Developer Royal Pharmaceutical Society Employee Review

Cons

I worked there back in 2019 because I thought the fact that they were paying a higher salary than I'd asked for meant that they might not hate black people or women. The salary was actually very low for the position itself but at the time I would have been under-qualified for the role in a normal company. I quickly learnt that the pay was little more than hush money and that there'd be plenty of hate to go around. I had to endure verbal abuse from a violent, misogynist and probable-narcissist in the department (he was also alleged to have hit a member of staff half his size and was apparently a gun enthusiast). Later I suffered physical abuse from a white woman on staff who seemed to resent black team members, particularly when we were half-decent at our jobs. It wasn't unusual for managers to do next-to-nothing when their staff were abused in front of them or even go as far as to help cover up such incidents. I considered taking the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to court over the way in which repeated abuse and discrimination was handled there (long story short: if you complained about abuse, you could expect HR to make you a target and eventually treat you worse than they treated the aggressor). All I'd really wanted was an apology and some sort of commitment to do better in the future. The problem is, I think a lot of people at the RPS lack self-respect which is why they enjoy working in an unsafe environment with bad people who mistreat them. A lot of the staff there *were* the bad people. I used to feel a little sorry for some of my colleagues because they were so servile - back when I thought that they didn't know any better. But it isn't simply ignorance that keeps people at bad companies like this. I dropped my Employment Tribunal case in the end, in part to focus on more interesting pursuits. Being the only person willing to call out bullying and discrimination in an organisation that already selects for cowards who will defend bad behaviour can be quite tiresome. The legal team at the RPS foolishly made a costs order after the case was dropped. When this failed and the judge sided in my favour, a number of pharmacists within the membership body found out just how poorly the RPS had behaved up until that point. An article in the Independent Community Pharmacist magazine was even published about their failure. During negotiations, the RPS demanded that I agree to waive my right to a subject access request in order to obtain an apology. As demanding this of me was borderline illegal and the case was eventually dropped without a deal anyway, I made the subject access request. This revealed that the RPS was probably aware of some shares I owned in another company. I believe they'd acted in an inflammatory way towards me in part because they had overestimated the value of said shares. If I'm correct, their reliance on litigation as a source of revenue seems quite risky as some of the other data I found in the DSAR suggested to me at least that I probably would have won that tribunal case had I gone through with it. Funnily enough, had they not insisted on asking me to waive a right that I'm entitled to under GDPR, it wouldn't have occurred to me to request this data from an employer in the first place! When the RPS lost their costs order, a sick individual (or possibly a group of such individuals) mysteriously started posting libel about me on social media. This individual(s) claimed to work for the RPS at one point but also claimed to work at my previous employer. I suspect it was someone either employed by the HR or Legal teams or with close ties to them as they retold details of the abuse that I had suffered whilst working there (abuse that HR and Legal were informed of) but then pretended that I was the aggressor. Often this was done in ways that didn't make much sense. The trolls claimed that an incident in which I'd suffered unprovoked verbal abuse from a colleague was a story that I'd somehow fabricated at a previous job even though a number of RPS staff had witnessed the incident and given evidence to HR. The RPS has not officially denied that I suffered discrimination on that occasion, I suspect because it was not a first-time offence for the misogynist at the centre of it and he was likely fired as a result of his actions. The troll at one point regurgitated my own accounts of when I was targeted by a white woman in the team but because their intention was to present me as the attacker (and it should be stressed that, in reality, I was the victim), they produced a bizarre story in which somehow a black woman on staff was the one physically attacking other women of colour. It's worth noting that, quite on the contrary, a number of the other people of colour that I'd worked with at the RPS are on record as saying how sorry they were about how I was treated when I left. Attacking other members of staff isn't in my nature and the person who wrote those posts, most likely knew that at the time. Of course the Royal Pharmaceutical Society denies posting the defamatory messages. However, this actually isn't the first time something like this has happened there. I've heard of a similar harassment campaign launched against a pharmacist in the membership body after she'd spoken out against the bullying she'd experienced. Earlier this year I was in touch with a pharmacist who was accused of all sorts after he'd tried to draw attention to financial irregularities within the organisation. The latter case is interesting in that its conclusion actually called into question whether the RPS should retain its chartered status. I believe that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society has hired a company (or multiple companies) to stalk me online since then, specifically on LinkedIn where increased traffic from dodgy marketing companies is most obvious. I've seen evidence of a fake news peddler swarming around the scandal though whether that individual was also employed by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society is unclear. Pretty unfortunate that they would waste their members' money in this way if this is the case but perhaps anyone paying the RPS more than the absolute bare minimum just deserves to get scammed at this point. The ultimate joke is that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society is a nothing company that doesn't really need to exist in its current form! From an engineering perspective, the tech team is mostly selected for perceived incompetence. The objective isn't so much to get work done as it is to maintain the appearance of work so that senior management can say that they have a tech team. On the off-chance that they ever needed to do anything, they knew that they could just hire contracting agencies or buy software off the shelf. Waste of time as far as career progression is concerned because no-one there actually knows what they're doing. You really are just better off working for a real tech company. As for the rest of the business, I suppose the publications themselves are useful to medical professionals. I'm unconvinced that they made enough money to be sustainable however which at the very least would explain the doomed costs order. It's hard to believe that the poor management within the Pharmpress team isn't reflected in the product itself. Indeed, knowing what I know, it genuinely wouldn't surprise me if those things were littered with mistakes at this point (though I'll concede that I'm not a pharmacist and so couldn't say one way or the other). All in all, I suspect that they'll struggle to find talented people willing to work with them in the coming years. The membership body isn't a regulator like the GPhC so it mostly functions as a talking shop for credulous liberals (you know, the sort of people who lack substance but think "representation matters"). I didn't see many born-leaders or innovators at the RPS either so it seems laughable that one would look to them for any sort of leadership. Just another waste of money from that perspective. So to conclude, I would say that if a disillusionment with your industry has led you to consider working for the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, it's definitely not worth it. It is a miserable, stagnant, place to work and ultimately none of the people there will be worth your time or patience. Whilst there, I remember feeling really hopeless about finding another job and worried that there just might not be anywhere in the tech industry for minorities unwilling to completely sell-out. Then I found my current job. I have to say that after dealing with the awfulness and the violence at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, it felt good to finally work somewhere where people not only treated each other with respect but actively looked out for one another. I hope to write more about that experience soon. Good companies are out there, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society just isn't one of them and it never will be.