Pros
There is an onsite deli that offers pretty good food at a reasonable price and there is plenty of on-site parking. You get to learn a lot on the job which is good and I really like working with my team, especially my manager. There are also a lot of cool people that work at this site.
Cons
Oh jeez where do I start? Well for starters, upper management makes all of the money period. They are incompetent and they basically have zero accountability of their employees. At the Santa Barbara office, most executives are rarely in the office which begs the question: how can they be effectively managing their employees and how can they be monitoring employee progress? The answer is actually quite simple- they aren't doing any of these things. Furthermore, pretty much all of HR is useless and extremely difficult to work with... I cannot emphasize this enough. The general rule of thumb is, if there is work involved than HR wants no part of it. What makes matters even worse is that Bruker's HR is more like a litigation avoidance department than a true HR department- all they care about is if a former employee is going to sue and that is about it. In terms of the actual office, the building is huge, but it is more like a ghost town than a fully functional office. After years of downsizing and employee layoffs, roughly only a hundred people (give or take) occupy a building that could easily house 500 employees. The morale is so low here that I am afraid that some disgruntled employee is going to come in with a sub-machine gun and blow us all away. This is actually a legitimate concern because HR has the final say in everything (they are very rude about it too): they dictate who gets hired, who gets fired, what employee salaries will be (they exclaim that salaries are "non-negotiable"), what the final say is in corporate and department policies, and they ultimately decide what the annul budgets are for all departments. In my professional career, I have NEVER seen an HR department that holds this much power. They treat all employees like dirt and they burn so many bridges that I am shocked that there aren't more lawsuits or "incidents", but it gets worse. As many know, most corporate positions include great benefits or perks, but you won't find that here. The benefits while good are just too expensive for a company that "supposedly" makes over a billion dollars in revenue every year. The place is just overall lacking in perks: no holiday parties, no employee appreciation, no BBQs, no luncheons, no corporate discounts, no profit sharing, nada and because of this they have a huge employee retention problem. In fact, HR has made it verbally clear to all employees that if they want "perks" that they need to find job somewhere else. Seriously what kind of tyrannical mentality is this? This ridiculous notion absolutely blows my mind- maybe you can treat employees in Germany like this, but not in the United States. Did I also mention that no matter what your position is, you will most likely be getting paid 20%-35% less than companies in the surrounding area? All and all it is evident that some serious upper management and departmental changes need to be made before Bruker can even be considered a "decent" company, but as it stands, it marks as the lowest point in my professional career. It might be a good resume builder, but beyond that it is a terrible company with a very dim future.
