Structural Biology, Abingdon - chaotic, stressful & byzantine. - Scientist Evotec Employee Review

Those people get crushed in the chaos. You learn those skills by being thrown in at the deep end, and there isn't usually a lifeguard. Minimal commitment to training - everything is done on the job by the people doing the job, which should be good for the trainee, but everything is under intense time pressure, so having to train people on top of the job leads to mistakes. Plus a lack of appreciation that lending "an extra pair of hands" only works if those hands are trained - if you have to train them as well, the job will done slower, not faster, and the quality will be lower. Lack of communication at all levels - projects are taken on without checking whether the technology or the skills to do them are in the company first - leading people to be landed with near-impossible tasks. People are taken on to work in one team, and then find themselves in another - conversely teams who are stretched (that's all of them) are told they will be getting a new member, only to find that the new person starts in another team. There's no appreciation of how destructive this is to staff morale. It creates a corrosive atmosphere, and utter distrust of management. Total lack of transparency - change happens on a "We've decided this" basis - staff, especially at Scientist level, are treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark and occasionally fed bull****. Those two points in particular are why the staff turnover at Scientist level is so fast. You can add to that no understanding between levels of the processes involved - eg requesting half a days extra work on the morning of the prep - creating unrealistic demands on those at the brown end of the stick. Regular equipment failures, contaminations, etc as there is never downtime for care, maintenance, cleaning. Each failure, and there's plenty of them, makes timelines tighter and leads to more stress. Opaque promotion process - seems to be based on "if we don't promote them they'll leave" rather than merit. This also leads to team leaders who don't understand what needs to happen in the team outside of their own speciality, leading to unreasonable demands, often for things that have been already been promised to a client without understanding what needs to be done first. Gossip and backbiting in the StrucBio section's management. Pay not worth the night-sweats that earning it leads to. It's hard to have a work-life balance when you have to be militant every day to stop them working you hours beyond your allotted time, and when you can't sleep for stress. This should be a good place to work. There's amazing people from all manner of backgrounds, and the opportunity to work on cutting-edge projects, but they just get sucked into the Charybdis of chaos that the shambolic management produces.