Illumina? How's it like working at Illumina?
Can you please share your experience working with Illumina in San Diego? How is the tech, growth, compensation, culture, life in San Diego?##health #healthcare #illumina #illuminacompensation
I have friends that work in marketing there but it’s different working for tech support vs R&D vs marketing. I can put you in contact with them if you want. You can message me.
Geez, I thought they are good - some other Blind threads have them very positive 😂
Hey it’s a great chapter of your career to work there if you want to touch sequencing. But don’t expect a career path or growth in a lot of areas. That said, they are starting to let better leaders (from acquisitions) have influence, and they are slowly getting rid of the most terrible ones.
Yup... Ditto what others have said.... Management is an awful inbred, politically motivated group. Frances & Jay at the top seemed good but all of management in r&d and tech research from top down to first level are really bad and protect themselves. Consider the number of 'former' Illumina employees and you'll have corroboration. San Diego is an awesome place for biotech and is way nicer than the rest of California. Stay away from Illumina if you can.
San Diego is great.
😅
Hi, would you recommend the company?
I feel like I would have enjoyed Illumina a lot more if I joined later on in my career. I really like the culture and have become good friends with my colleagues, but I imagine that's a bit more org-specific. Like other posters have said, San Diego is wonderful and before COVID the campus was really nice as well, probably one of the nicest corporate campuses in SD. Compensation....leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe it's because I joined as a new grad and didn't have enough leverage, but it really does feel like they underpay you and get away with it because of the SD sunshine tax.
Compensation around San Diego is total garbage for the most part. It's not quite Bay Area/LA/OC expensive, but you get 1/2 the salary for 3/4 the living costs.
Amazing place to work, no doubt! I have been here for more than a year now & this is probably the best start to my career. Tech, growth, culture, life all top notch! I have had 2 promotions in 16 months. Compensation, well, I think I deserve more. To be frank, ask the compensation question to any non-FAANG employee & most of them’ll say the same haha I neither agree nor disagree with what all the Dexcom folks say but one thing I’ve always noticed (not just here but in all other threads) is that Dexcom-ites are always throwing punches at us. Has anyone observed that lol. I have a few friends at Dexcom & I love em all. Amazing peeps there aswell!
It’s not “dexcomites” per se. it’s people who were there in the last few years and had to put up with some of the most bizarrely bad engineering and software decisions and architectures, and also see people who tried to speak up get sidelined or worse. There are people in that camp who went on to servicenow, Amazon, google... just wait. I’m sure more will pipe in over time. Check out the “dungeon master” development anti-pattern. https://medium.com/@ziobrando/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-dungeon-master-c2d511eed12f The leader of the Instrument SW (somewhat recently fired, finally) let this one stoner guy (Illuminati will know who I am talking about) have essentially 75% of the say-so on everything. The net result was, aside from the development of a rancid but “you have to use it” interface between the SW modules and the embedded boards, further entrenchment of a tech stack that prevented using modern hardware at all efficiently. When the NovaSeq instrument launched they were able to brag about getting so much more throughout out of the computer than previous machines. They didn’t mention that that was because they finally pushed the stoner out of the way and used “unsafe” C++ code that let them actually use the AVX (vector math) units on the processors. Stoner guy (the dungeon master) was convinced that when you hire an army of ‘tarded UCSD factory programmers you have to make them use C# or else you’re boned. Because of that one guy (and the boss who kept him propped up, and the Kodak leaders who could not recognize this anti-pattern for years) illumina took 15 years to finally have someone who knew how to properly use an intel processor have enough architectural influence to make a design that looks like something a competent company would come up with.
And like I said before—I’ve heard the Kodak people are finally letting the competent people from the acquired companies stay in charge. Very, very smart move. Probably demoralizing to some of the cloud or fpga devs who don’t like hearing “we finally know how to do cloud and fpga” but over all it’s a much better outcome than continuing to turn all the projects over to Nokia, Microsoft, and Kodak failures
Good wlb and culture. Pretty chill and friendly
Not worth
Worst place I’ve ever worked.
Engineering is run by people who drove Kodak into the ground before somehow being given a life boat. The culture is very political and reflects what you’d expect, being led by people who didn’t create success in their previous several roles.
Yikes
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