Toxic Culture, Chaotic site - Manufacturing Biotech Associate MSD Employee Review

2.0
Mar 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The overall corporate (global) portion of the company has a lot of money which masks a lot of issues at site level. MSD has a good reputation in ireland in most other sites than here.

Cons

The Dunboyne site has been completely miss-managed by the SLT & HR from the Takeda days - through covid - and up until relatively recently. There has been a small improvement after former SLT were "quiet-Fired" and rotated to irrelevant positions. American legacy directors have arrived to replace the older irish ones and they seem to have the right gusto. After years of stagnant outlook -people who deserve to be fired have been. Regarding the manufacturing dept. , Due to bad resource management and terrible hiring regimes (I.E the 2023 drive to replace the young energetic staff with incompetent, technologically & scientifically illiterate older people for less money) change in manufacturing has been glacial and thwarted. Adversarial mindset of supporting depts means no real change has occurred in years which drives high MFG staff turnover. Would not recommend the MFG dept, other dept possibly. 5 year outlook will not be good if a keytruda replacement is not found

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5.0
Jun 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great team to work and grow with, also good learning enviroment

Cons

My entry time was not the best timing, during the middle of the war wirh Iran, so work was slow and over 200 people from that site were let go, including myself

1.0
Jun 13, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Benefits package is good, looks good on a resume. That's about it.

Cons

I worked at Merck for a few years. While it wasn't the worst job I've ever had, it's pretty high up on the list. The company culture is best described as corporate hell. Everything is also extremely political. If you aren't someone who really buys into that and is willing to play the game, then you probably won't be happy there. My team also had an extremely toxic dynamic. One senior member was a notorious bully and mgmt did nothing. Several members of my small team were let go for seemingly political reasons. Very odd/suspicious. Our senior managers were a group of bitter older women in their 50s and 60s who behaved like high school mean girls, while the C suite was just incompetent. They wasted many millions of dollars attempting to develop an AI tool that turned out be a total flop, and then announced that 10% of the company was going to be laid off. Which of course just lowered morale even further. While Merck does look good on a resume, the actual job experience isn't that great because everything is very siloed so you don't have the opportunity to really develop new skills. Work life balance is also very poor. I will say that the pay and benefits package was good. I took the job as I had some financial goals to meet, and I was able to meet them thanks to the bonus, stock units, pension, etc offered by Merck. As soon as I hit my savings goal I gave notice. I've moved on to a new job that is low drama and values my contributions, and I feel extremely blessed to no longer work at Merck!

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