Pros
- free lunch and (used to be) goods snack selection - majority of the people around are smart and really want to innovate and work on something cool - technology is still great and sometimes the work you do can be impactful - pay is good most of the time (at least the base)
Cons
- Clueless high-level leadership. As another reviewer put it: “We’ve just gotten started” has been repeated for the last four years. Meanwhile, the stock price keeps dropping—this isn’t just “market conditions.” Stock bonuses were eliminated, budgets slashed, and now 10x is doing layoffs for the second time in three years. If the goal quietly shifted from becoming a market-dominant research platform and conquering the clinical eventually to just surviving or getting acquired at a better price, then all of this makes more sense. The company tried to be profitable for multiple years, but failed to do so while loosing the market and lacking any clear path on how to turn it around. In the current political and economical climate in biotech this goal is just delusional. So it is not clear what leadership wants or told to do by the board. - New (in the last couple of years) corporate-style lower level leadership focused on arbitrary metrics, not people or actual results. Department leads tend to praise those who cause problems and clean them up, while those who deliver consistently from day one get ignored. - No clear career paths. There are no defined metrics, no deliverables, and no transparency on how to advance in your career. If you do your job well, you just get more work—without clarity on what’s required for promotion. If you struggle, you’ll be told you’re lucky to still have your role. At one point, the CHRO even said there was “too much fat around the middle,” meaning too many mid-level engineers/scientists, while “directors” fill their time with pointless meetings. It’s a convenient excuse to stall promotions and push mid-level talent out. Unfortunately even that was not enough to avoid layoffs across R&D.