BenchSci Reviews

- hired ridiculously fast for a year only to have lay offs (except they don't call them layoffs at this company because the media might catch wind of it). It's called restructuring at BenchSci - went from a team of 20+ individuals down to a fraction - let go of 7 individuals coming back from Christmas break back to back while promoting the remaining team - seems they needed to free up some budgets - tried to convince the remaining bunch of us to give higher reviews on glassdoor to proactively combat the negative reviews and post all of our promotions so that the posts from individuals who had been let go would be drowned out - blew through so much money in 2022 - mismanaged - buzzwords are incredibly popular here. The newest one seems to be "servant leadership" - nepotism - people are treated like they're replaceable - if you don't agree with the senior leadership, they get combative

The company spends more time advertising its culture than it does actually living up to it. A lot of what you see in the culture slides is not or no longer true. The company is heavily marketing themselves to attract talent to rapidly scale up and make up for people leaving. Do not ignore the red flags you see during the hiring process. There are a lot of aspects that may have been true when it was a smaller start up that are no longer true. In general, I feel that upper management uses the "start-up" mentality to excuse bad behaviour and practices. You will not have time to have a work-life balance and complete everything that is expected of you. In addition to this, a lot of the tasks you are expected to complete are done for the sake of doing them, because that's how it's always been done. Contrary to their culture slides, you usually do not have an input, to me it seems they are looking for workhorses and hiring at much too fast of a pace to rapidly expand their platform. Another large problem to me was the lack of teamwork. Although they advertise that everyone is united and working together, I did not feel this was true. A lot of people are too busy and will not be able to help you if you feel it may be required to complete something that is asked of you. Better solutions that require some team input will be shot down in favour of worse solutions that require less team input. The scale-up environment also results in a large portion of the employees being relatively new. This is resulting in a lot of confusion, and if order and structure is important to you, you will likely struggle here. Although the provided benefit plan is good, the pay was also fairly low, I was paid more at my previous role where I actually had work-life balance respected and where my input was actually valued. Be very careful when negotiating your salary if you choose to accept a position here.