Genomics England Reviews

Working at Genomics England was honestly the most professionally disappointing experience of my entire working career. The vision and mission are so exciting! But the whole things fails in a tangle of needless bureaucracy, top-down decision making, poor processes, tech debt, and increasingly toxic culture. The c-suite leadership are well intentioned, I believe, but are not experienced or strong enough to fix the issues plaguing the company. A few more specific complaints: -Someone needs to take a look at Genomics England's relationship with Ben Davidson & Axiologik. For a while, Ben was interim CTO whilst his own consultancy was doing work at GEL. Several recent hires are friends of Ben's. Axiologik also has placed contractors at GEL. The whole thing just stinks. -Bullying is tolerated and indeed even seems to be rewarded with promotions and more responsibility. The "no a*****s" rule definitely does NOT apply here. -For everyone else, there basically is no career progression. Getting a promotion is nigh impossible, thanks to the red tape and poor processes in the People Team surrounding progression. -Poor performance seems to go without consequence for a long, long time. -There have been several redundancies in recent years, wherein the people being made redundant were treated shockingly poorly. For a company that's supposed to care about its people these actions speak way louder than words. One final word... so many people have quit without having anything lined up afterwards, preferring joblessness to working at GEL. This speaks volumes.

-Far far far too much management. Any piece of work has to climb a mountain of bureaucracy before it can actually get done, and this is made worse by the barrage of middle management who’s only ‘input’ is to slow things down so they can look like they’re involved. -Related to above, too many meetings. But the company is taking steps to fix this. - Bullying and, to a lesser extent, sexual harassment are known issues that are not being addressed. - No career progression. Internal promotions based on favouritism. Criteria to get any substantial pay rise are not clear. Annual pay rises barely cover inflation. - Redundancies have been happening over the last few years. Entire teams let go and told to reapply for ‘new’ positions, which are essentially the same role. - The ‘corporate’ culture often feels like it dims any sort of scientific spark or fun ‘blue sky’ work. This is probably very team-dependant - Not much socialisation, doesn’t help that the office is in Canary Wharf, so everywhere nearby is expensive and full of obnoxious clientele. -A non-profit, government-funded organisation is extremely vulnerable to political change. In three years Prime Minister Farage could call the organisation ‘woke nonsense’ and shut it down. But I suppose many people would lose their jobs under a Farage regime so that’s not a GEL-specific con.