Freenome Reviews

3.2

37% would recommend to a friend

(90 total reviews)

Aaron Elliott, Ph.D.

22% approve of CEO

30% positive business outlook

Freenome has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 90 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Freenome employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

90 reviews
4.0
2 Mar 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Very promising technology. We can save many lives if we are successful. Company puts heroic effort into keeping morale up during quarantine including monthly presentations by people on their hobbies and fun forums where people share recipes, activities, and places to go during quarantine. Company has attracted a lot of remarkable talent. There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity right now. We have added more than 100 people in 2020 alone. Life is confusing growing this quickly and working from home on account of quarantine. Most people have never met in person and it is difficult to keep up with all the new people and structures. Fortunately, management and HR are aware of this and are really doing their best. Management is generally good regarding work/life balance. Life at Freenome is tiring but can be fun.

Cons

There are two significant problems that need to be addressed if Freenome is going to survive. The company does not yet understand what it means to be in the medical device space. Most employees are fresh out of college or have only worked in consumer tech. There is active resistance to performing the additional tasks required to work in a regulated industry. This could prove catastrophic down the road. The company is openly political, including having the word "woke" (!) on some of their corporate clothing. Company stresses its self-defined special culture which is 50% of the selection process. They (apparently) perform periodic cultural fit reviews on employees so you might lose your job if you are not "woke" enough. Some employees obnoxiously virtue signal their preferred pronouns in their signatures and on Slack. HR really stresses the seven protected classes, and they seem more focused on their program of equity and inclusion than on hiring for ability. We all know these are activities and code words for antipathy toward certain ethnicities and genders viewed as being some kind of oppressor. This makes the well-intended "special culture" feel oppressive and distinctly unsafe.

2.0
20 Oct 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The culture used to be really good, and there are people in the company who still behold these values. Always a pleasure working with such individuals. The benefits and comps are good. Great mission!

Cons

From people leaving left and right to people being let go, the general sentiment across organization is fear, as high performing individuals are being let go & underperformers are not held accountable. Everyone is just trying to save themself and not the product, and there is real fear if we will make it to the end. This is creating unnecessary stress and instability amongst employee which will impact delivery of the product. Unrealistic timelines or constant pushing of timelines.

2.0
18 May 2022

Freenome: an example of a very bad biotech company

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Always something going on: - There is a lot to do all the time so there is plenty of opportunity to get involved in a project somewhere Recognition within the Development Teams: - The engineering org does a good job doing call outs and providing recognition when someone does something good. You get mentioned in the Kudos channel or get a ++ You meet some really great people: - there are some unicorns out there

Cons

I guess it all depends on your team (maybe that makes a huge difference, i don't know) but this is what I experienced: Always something going on: - There is literally always something going on. Management will find a way to pile it on someone and then keep piling things without taking the time to make sure the employee has the bandwidth or adequate support to succeed. - Understaffed teams Work Culture/The Blame Game: - Toxic work culture/ environment - especially under the Business org - management in this team seem to always be trying to find someone to blame when things fall through rather than taking accountability or providing support to overcome challenges. - Everyone is overworked and exhausted - burnout everywhere every team. The problem that this introduces is that people start making mistakes, which causes issues and then at Freenome this usually ends in a blame game. Ick. Most of my colleagues and former Freenome employees have expressed feeling burnout and/or receive inadequate coaching and support from managers. Management: - The story here is that there has been some longstanding history of "problems with management in the Engineering department", which has supposedly been fixed now so there should be no manager issues. I don't know if it was intentional for Freenome to point the finger at Engineering as having "bad" managers, fixing this, and then use it as a story to say that they do resolve issues with management. With all this going on it really would have made sense to give all of your managers some training. All I can say is there still are still management issues that get swept under the rug - typically in the clinical lab, business org, and quality dept. - Leadership and management don't actually practice the empathetic values that the company preaches Petty Drama - The odds of the person on the left of you on zoom having beef with the person on your right are pretty high. There's a lot of petty drama between people here. - There is this superiority complex that some departments and teams have, which has led to drama (our team is important so our requests need to be serviced first - i want a pony!). -I always thought this was a bit weird, but in larger meetings, management would occasionally boast about gathering together at each others houses (probably to gossip about coworkers). Unequal treatment and support for all employees - People with special needs/disabilities tend to get treated as a burden and swept aside and don't usually get support from their managers. It's likely because managers don't have the right type of training on how to support all types of employees.

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Glassdoor has 100 Freenome reviews submitted anonymously by Freenome employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Freenome is right for you.