Rockville Vaccines - excellent new place to work
Pros
an excellent place to work with an excellent mission - to provide the best new vaccines to as many people as possible at the most reasonable prices possible. GSK is the polar opposite of Martin Shkreli-type pharma in every conceivable way. I came to GSK as my first for-profit job after a career in non-profit humanitarian work, drawn by the potential for helping their new vaccine pipeline save far more lives than my career in humanitarian work was able to achieve. I was very suspicious of what working for GSK would be like, but have been pleasantly surprised in every way. In some ways, it is even more of a positive, nurturing, "do-gooder" environment with people even more committed to making the world better than most of the NGOs for which i had previously worked. Leadership on site is open and accessible and committed to doing good work in the world and maintaining a really positive work environment. the new R&D center is in an innovative and newly renovated complex in Rockville, and they make open space working an excellent experience from the very top to the very bottom. No one has an office and people are incredibly friendly and make the open space a real pleasure. I used to have a really nice corner office suite downtown and I like this new situation far more than that.
Cons
It is still part of a big multinational company, and while even the CEO is fully committed to the good work and to transparency, integrity, respect, and patient-focus, it still comes with a slow and somewhat dysfunctional corporate bureaucracy. It can take days to get a computer, weeks to get access to critical systems, and months to become fully productive because of this, but at least upper management is aware of these problems and trying to fix it (but turning a ship this size takes a long time, even for the captain).