Pros
-Paid on time -Friendly coworkers -In the city
Cons
Every single bad review on this company is true—I don’t even mean this in a hyperbolic way. If I could give this place zero stars I would have done it beyond a shadow of a doubt. For starters, almost every leadership position here (especially on the production side) is filled by an employee from their Nanjing headquarters, and despite promises that you may or may not be advanced to a supervisor, your chances of getting promoted to one is zero to none, simply because they’ll just find someone in Nanjing to fill in the needed leadership position. Career progression as a Biotechnologist is severely stunted here; even if you’re promoted to a senior Biotechnologist, your day-to-day duties remain exactly the same. Maybe you’ll just get added responsibilities for a slightly higher pay, but other than that the only thing distinguishing you from a new Biotechnologist is the ‘Senior’ in your title. Because leadership is predominantly Chinese, communication naturally defaults back to Mandarin most of the time, be it on Teams, Outlook, or even in-person. For Mandarin-speaking employees this isn’t a problem, but it becomes almost insensitive when you communicate with them in English and they respond to you in Mandarin, or when they expect you to understand the complicated scientific jargon in Mandarin. On their webpage for career opportunities, Genscript claims to be “a proud equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to attracting, retaining, and maximizing the performance of a diverse and inclusive workforce”, but I can count with one hand just how many non-Chinese employees there are working here. Furthermore, the work culture here is abysmal. There are periods where you can be severely overworked and consecutive days where you have to work overtime just to clear the workload for the day. The main reason why I believe the working culture here is appalling is the heavy blame culture being cultivated here, even if the higher-ups don’t realise it. When you make a mistake, be prepared to explain your actions (even if it is an honest mistake or a slip of the mind—in their eyes EVERYTHING is preventable and it is entirely your fault for screwing up). They’ll just come up with some corrective action that does zilch to solve the problem; on the contrary it just creates more steps for you to perform when you carry out your duties and make everything all the more vexatious. Naturally, clocking-in and out is a must here, and you have three strikes per month. Once you use up all your chances, you have to email a whole group of people just to have it scratched off your record. Honestly there’s just a lot of red tape involved for something as simple as attendance. The only silver lining here are your colleagues, everyone seems nice and friendly. Oh, and turnover rate is SO high that I barely see anyone who has stayed here for more than two years.
