My experience on my immediate team was utterly broken due to a single senior teammate. The most optimistic interpretation of this person's behavior toward me is that they decided, after getting to know me, that I was not the right person for the role: I am an energetic, imaginative person with a drive to deeply comprehend the fundamentals and improve the processes of my work, and it seems they wanted a pliable, teachable person who could learn to work with their extreme expectations on details without being too meta-analytical or process improvement-oriented. They then behaved pretty absurdly in an effort to get rid of me (nonstop nitpicks that did not, separately or together, measurably improve the quality of the final product). I was holding up well under this onslaught, doing my job well and making sure my actual boss knew it, but it made me miserable to be there so I quit. I don't want to speak too broadly: it is possible that in their next hire attempts, this person may find exactly the "moldable clay" person that they're looking for, and it could be a match made in heaven. But it did not seem like my teammates particularly enjoyed working with this person either, so I don't think I'm crazy to note that a) I was treated pretty poorly when I should have been treated as a talented asset that perhaps belonged in a different role, and b) relatively few professionals would enjoy this person's approach to editing.
The work processes of my team did not use the most efficient, modern approaches, probably a function of this person's contentment with the status quo. The deliverables of my team were focused on measures of quality that were both superficial and obscure. A lot of time was spent dotting i's that I was not convinced mattered much to the client or regulators. It was frustrating how often we had to swallow the best actual products of our team's expertise due to the extreme narrowness of our scope.
As to the center at large, it is mostly doing incrementalist rather than transformative work. While this has proved a solid strategy for it to get grants, it feels like opportunities to study the most pressing human factors concerns in the healthcare system were not always being seized. The center was strong on getting human factors research dollars and serving external clients with medtech innovations, but its mission of championing both medical innovations and human factors safety principles in its own healthcare system seemed pretty moribund.
