Inspiring vision, but disconnected management
Pros
- ambitious mission and high-level future plans. - decent comp. - top talent. - hierarchy is nearly flat, colleagues are mostly very approachable. - cross-functional environment with a number of opportunities to learn more about drug discovery and its foundations in chemistry and molecular biology. - company secured massive funding and has top-tier partners in big pharma.
Cons
- unclear career progression. no formal promotion process. occasionally individuals get promoted for good work, but the bar for the next level isn't clear. - sudden group dismissals. you can get out of the company within 1 day if someone in the management decided so. - "volunteering-based engineering culture" == "you may be expected to work on things other teams don't want to". - significant effort is spent on maintenance of internal services, where multiple teams contribute to, as some prefer "move fast, break things" approach in production environments and don't care much about dependencies. as a result, outages of various services happen every 2-4 weeks. - work-life balance isn't great in the company in general, as people tend to work long hours and weekends to meet their deadlines (less the case for the engineering teams, but pretty much a norm for chemistry/biology teams). - people at director's level and above don't seem to have a coherent vision for the tech part of the company. many critical architecture decisions are taken by individual engineers/teams, and they don't necessarily take other teams into account. - CEO seems to be extremely busy with other Alphabet stuff, rarely in the office, appears once a quarter at town halls.
