Pros
The pay is average for the area and the health insurance is mediocre, but the additional benefits for food and transportation are nice.
Cons
1. Repeated failure to meet technical goals, with no clear evidence that the goals are attainable in the first place. The claims they make to can't be demonstrated in a Petri dish, much less in a scaled-up facility that can compete with conventional agriculture. They vastly oversell their abilities to investors and potential clients, often with misleading figures and outright lies. 2. Wasteful decisions. Instead of building up its own capabilities, the company spends huge sums on technical consulting, in the hope that throwing enough money behind a bad project and outsourcing the work will somehow make it a success. They leased a shiny new lab space in a very expensive area that they can't afford, which probably contributed to the most recent layoffs. 3. Toxic work culture with poor work-life balance. In a startup, it is expected that you might work longer hours or irregular hours to meet goals. But it's disenchanting to put in the "startup"-style effort and still have nothing to show for it because the technology doesn't work. Management will demand that you work "at least 40 hours a week" and be an "A player" (not with an A player salary, of course) because, as the logic goes, there's a linear relationship between how hard you work and how successful you are. If something doesn't prove successful, it's because you didn't work hard enough. There are "motivational" phrases painted on the wall meant to stir ambition in the mind of the lazy worker. They give out baseball cards with every employee's face on them, along with attribute ratings. I'm still not sure what purpose they serve exactly, but it's very transparently some kind of industrial psychology gimmick dreamt up by a grad student somewhere. There's not an ounce of charisma in the ranks of upper management. They fancy themselves "innovators" but it's obvious that it's all window dressing -- they're poor imitations of the dime-a-dozen "tech startup guru" clones. They know little to nothing about the science and don't value the input of those who do. 4. Poor project management. Project goals and strategic decisions in pursuit of goals are often unclear, poorly reasoned, or contradictory. All R&D projects are organized into two-week sprints, which means you have to plan, execute, and analyze your experiments and be prepared to present on a two week timeline. Management doesn't understand that R&D projects often take much longer than two weeks to accomplish. I tried for a long time to be optimistic about the company, but I quickly ran out of reasons for doing so. My time at GALY always felt very fleeting. The problems seemed insurmountable, but instead of succumbing to self-delusion I decided to face reality and simply enjoy it while it lasted. Please think twice before joining this company. Many have tried, many have left.
