Promising company but mixed feelings
Pros
Very promising technology. We can save many lives if we are successful. Company puts heroic effort into keeping morale up during quarantine including monthly presentations by people on their hobbies and fun forums where people share recipes, activities, and places to go during quarantine. Company has attracted a lot of remarkable talent. There is a lot of work to be done and a lot of opportunity right now. We have added more than 100 people in 2020 alone. Life is confusing growing this quickly and working from home on account of quarantine. Most people have never met in person and it is difficult to keep up with all the new people and structures. Fortunately, management and HR are aware of this and are really doing their best. Management is generally good regarding work/life balance. Life at Freenome is tiring but can be fun.
Cons
There are two significant problems that need to be addressed if Freenome is going to survive. The company does not yet understand what it means to be in the medical device space. Most employees are fresh out of college or have only worked in consumer tech. There is active resistance to performing the additional tasks required to work in a regulated industry. This could prove catastrophic down the road. The company is openly political, including having the word "woke" (!) on some of their corporate clothing. Company stresses its self-defined special culture which is 50% of the selection process. They (apparently) perform periodic cultural fit reviews on employees so you might lose your job if you are not "woke" enough. Some employees obnoxiously virtue signal their preferred pronouns in their signatures and on Slack. HR really stresses the seven protected classes, and they seem more focused on their program of equity and inclusion than on hiring for ability. We all know these are activities and code words for antipathy toward certain ethnicities and genders viewed as being some kind of oppressor. This makes the well-intended "special culture" feel oppressive and distinctly unsafe.
