Pros
- Awesome mission - Making a difference for so many cancer patients - Free snacks, drinks, barista when we were actually in the office
Cons
All of the horrible things you read in these reviews are definitely true. For starters, you'll be paid well below market value, no 401K match, benefits not up to industry standards, despite the fact that Tempus is extremely well-funded, valued in the billions, and the billionaire CEO continues to significantly increase his net worth. This is unfortunately not passed on to the employees in any way, shape, or form. And trust me, you can not drink enough free coffee or eat enough free snacks to make up for the difference (especially working from home). Next, the management issue - it's ridiculous. So many people in management positions that have no experience at all. This of course depends on what team you are on, but is a widespread problem. Managers (even low level) have no accountability and can get away with whatever they want. Some managers have integrity and work hard and support their teams and do a great job, and I really enjoyed working with them. Others take advantage of the lack of accountability and contribute very little, constantly take ridiculous amounts of time off, and get away with doing the absolute minimum. This was the case with my manager. From the time I started, they removed themself from working on any of the key deliverables, saying that managing me and one other junior team member was a full time job, so they couldn't contribute to key deliverables anymore. This turned into me consistently working 50-60 hour weeks (and sometimes more) to complete all of our overlapping projects, while they never even worked 40 hours a week, and never offered to help. They also took more time off than anyone I've ever met (like 8+ weeks/year). And spent months traveling both nationally and internationally (yes, during the pandemic) in which they took off 4 weeks, and the rest of the time only worked about 2-3 hours a day, just long enough to show up for meetings in which senior leadership was present, so they wouldn't know any better. The difference in work ethic became untenable, and it became more and more clear my manager was only interested in how they could use me to promote their own interests and career, while continuing to get away with the bare minimum. I tried multiple times to move to a different team where I knew the workload was shared and they had a similar work ethic to me, but my manager blocked that from happening because they didn't want to lose "the most talented member of their team," so instead my role was continually expanded to take on new roles working closely with the teams I wanted to join without actually ever moving out from under my manager. So left with no options, I moved to another job with another company that actually values hard work and experience. Finally, the CEO - I'll never forget the way he handled the George Floyd murder and subsequent protests over the summer. A simple letter to the employees letting us know that he cares and stands with all of our employees who were hurting would have sufficed. Anything at all would have been better than his silence. But instead he said nothing, and the longer he went without addressing it or the protests and riots happening all over Chicago, the louder and angrier employees were becoming on Slack. Finally after mass outrage, he scheduled an All Hands to address it. But instead of apologizing for his silence, or letting our BIPOC employees know that we stand with them and support them, or even just acknowledging these are hard times, he told all us to stop getting distracted or we were welcome to leave. After that people started resigning via Slack. Shortly after this, they removed the "general" channel on Slack and reorganized it so that employees could no longer have these sort of discussions. There is no diversity in leadership and very few BIPOC employees company wide - this needs to change.
