Friendly colleagues overshadowed by poor leadership and instability - Anonymous employee GeneFab Employee Review

Friendly colleagues at all levels. Many people were brilliant and extremely hard working. Get to work on a variety of projects that are at the forefront of medicine. A small company so there is a lot of room to get various types of experience, beyond what one might normally have in a given title. Good lunches provided 5 days a week (necessary, because Genefab is quite a ways away from any restaurants).

High rates of turnover. The quality leadership has turned over several times over the last two years, and another round of layoffs in the last year across all functions. Here's my theory: executive leadership promises clients the moon, asks everything of the employees to meet the unrealistic timelines, then when the clients are dissatisfied, the managers are forced out. "Don't worry clients, we solved the problem." But the issues are more systemic. CEO lives in another country, completely absent, yet reversed a pretty flexible hybrid policy to mandate that all of employees had to be on-site? Same story for some of the other C-level staff. Money for lab materials is always in short supply, with bills to suppliers unpaid (hundreds of thousands of dollars) and requiring emergency meetings with finance to get the supplies. Employees can not manage their own POs or see the status, even my manager couldn't see them. Everything has to go through supply chain, causing a lot of inefficiency. C-suite seems to want this level of non-transparency to obscure the issues with unpaid bills. I can corroborate that management stopped contributing to the employee 401ks and did not tell employees.

The mission of the company was a positive one and there were pockets of talented and hard working colleagues. You had good opportunity to work on interesting projects.

CEO is totally absent, living in a another country and never showing face. It wasn't clear what he was doing and he certainly never shared a vision. The company was littered with managers who were totally out of their depth. The quality group cycled through 4 department heads in the span of 2-3 years. The BD team had cycled through its entire staff multiple times due to lack of sales. There were very few projects to work on and the company has a very limited amount of cash and very few clients. At one point, the CEO made the decision to secretly stop contributing to the employee 401ks, which is illegal but seemed in character. It only came to light when an employee called out management, and all we got was a half hearted apology (given by the COO, not the CEO). Everything about what was communicated by senior leadership to its employees just seemed sketchy. The company was bleeding talent. I would urge to reconsider this company.