Narcissists and manipulators thrive here
Pros
- Laboratory work is so easy that anybody -- I mean anybody -- can perform it. - Free snacks. - Nice building/location (at least until the casino and amusement park across the river are completed).
Cons
- Because the company predominately hires recent college graduates (i.e. pandemic-era grads), employees are managed and treated as children. Because nobody has any real experience, social skills, or professional skills, management and HR have an incredibly easy time manipulating the existing employees into hunting each other for sport to maintain their place at the company. - As a result, the laboratory culture has become so juvenile, tribalistic, and toxic as to completely flip the discrimination paradigm onto the few mature adults who happen to find their way into employment here. Knowing that they have no abilities warranting actual merit-based promotion, most employees resort to forming high school-esque cliques and "ingroups" with the corrupt and cronyist management to get ahead. Those few employees with the integrity and maturity to resist this -- the "outgroup" -- are relentlessly targeted for bad-faith gossip, eavesdropping, bonafide cyber bullying (the workplace unfortunately uses Slack as its collaboration platform of choice; get ready for a deluge of custom emojis that further reinforce ingroup/outgroup paradigms), and baseless complaints to HR and management. Frivolous HR complaints have become so rampant that HR has resorted to an algorithmic, automated ticket submission-based platform to track them -- and genuine complaints are lost in the din. - This dynamic is mostly spearheaded by a handful of cronyist company "lifers" whom management and HR are powerless to touch (a la "prison rules" style). - There will be no advancement opportunities if you do not play the game, regardless of your credentials and experience. There quite likely will be no advancement opportunities even if you *do* play the game, because management, supervisors, and company leadership at large are so itinerant, disorganized, and oblivious that performance reviews and promotions are ostensibly little more than a coin-toss. - As such, this really isn't so much a professional opportunity in the biotech sector as it is an exercise in group therapy, brain-rotting reality TV-caliber mental gymnastics, and babysitting. - Upper management/C-suite could not care less, and in fact condone and encourage the churning of the revolving-door model of underpaid labor the company has flourished on. - Thankfully, there has been increasing market awareness/media attention paid toward the company's -- and particularly its CEO's -- unscrupulous track record. The multi-billionaire CEO and former Groupon co-founder has a history of starting buzzy companies, inflating their performance, cashing out, and leaving the companies to die. This company changed its name from "Tempus Laboratories" to "Tempus AI" in early 2024 as a blatant "AI-washing" maneuver, despite only 2% of the company's revenue actually being attributable to AI operations. (In reality, the company is primarily a genetic information data broker -- really no better, and potentially much more insidious, than online traffic data brokers). The company has recently been all over the financial news for alleged large-scale and systemic securities fraud.
