Helix reviews about "people"

Weird job leveling for new employees.

Because it is a fairly small company, there isn’t a ton of room for advancement.

After a decade, many basic processes are still not standardized. Simple tasks that should be easy elsewhere take unnecessary effort here. Mid-level managers form cliques, handling conflicts by forcing the more reasonable side to back down. Double standards are everywhere. People who don’t do the work tend to oppress those who do. Managers have a shallow understanding of both the work and people, resorting to bullying those who are kind while avoiding confrontations with the strong or rude. There's a constant manpower shortage, and higher-level issues are often dumped on lower-level employees, but salaries and promotions don’t reflect this. Meetings are mostly for show—employees are only allowed to ask trivial questions or praise each other. If you bring up real issues, they’ll either ask you to fix them yourself or tell you to stay quiet. Layoffs have been frequent over the past year, mostly targeting decent employees who won’t cause trouble or those who dare to speak up. The company is rigidly hierarchical, both in title and race. Middle managers give speeches as if they’re important figures, which is laughable. The quality of employees has dropped, and management is full of holes. Issues in old negative Glassdoor reviews remain unresolved to this day. The tolerance for toxic employees and the chaotic management have left good employees discouraged—they either find excuses to leave or simply cut down their productivity. As one one-star review said, this company needs a complete overhaul, not just minor tweaks.

The commercial team leadership does not listen to employees and is driving the company towards failure. Aside from a select few who are more autonomous, most of the team does not seem actually interested in working together to make the company a success. The culture rewards selfishness, and it seems most people are only concerned about making themselves look busy and blaming others for team shortcomings. If you are ambitious and excited to be a part of a positive team, look elsewhere. Your ideas will not be listened to and any attempts to be proactive will be undermined. It also feels like there is little to no room for individual growth with a very top-heavy team. The company is not performing well, and they are firing people without warning instead of layoffs - I believe in an attempt to avoid paying severance and unemployment benefits. Based on the bizarre interactions and complete lack of ingenuity I witnessed, I don't believe the people leading this business will be successful.

Brainless, repetitive work, you basically babysit a machine operating. For me the worst part was the people and the management, it is so many young kids who it seems like it’s their first job ever so they don’t know how to behave in a professional setting. I was 25 and I felt ancient in the lab. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have, you will be doing something that requires so knowledge of biology. A BS shouldn’t be required for the covid lab. Most importantly, they promoted the most toxic person in the whole lab to manager, the only person in the room without a BS only got promoted through toxic nature, picking out person after person to turn the group against and then soon get them fired. It was like an angry mob every week turning on one person at a time!! One coworker went around to every girl standing within inches of us, so far within our personal space and putting his arms around us, telling us that he’s looking for a woman to dominate him. Management thought this was funny when I spoke up about it, even though it was plainly obvious and gross. I’ve barely scratched the surface, I really feel bad for the few friends I still have working there.

The biggest con is that Helix is forever and always running on overstretched staff. The depth chart is super shallow, so that experts burn out pretty quickly. It results in perpetual cycle of building MVPs and never moving past that. Everyone has the ability to do better, but they suffer from simply having an unrelenting flow of tasks that dampens creativity and limits the heights to which the company can reach.

Usual growing pains when you're experiencing huge growth. Lots of new faces, and onboarding for remote people is never easy.