What's it like working at Illumina? There are so many positive reviews on Glassdoor, are these reviews true? What are some of the issues you have? How's career growth?
Shit company for tech.. !! Too many legal barriers for product development.. example hippa compliance .. there’s are dozens of such compliance related formalities which hinders the speed at which the product evolves.. stay away if u want to crank out a lot of code and want to work on cool tech.. if U want a 9:5 job , it’s a pretty good place
Or you want easy life with stock doing work for you!
I recently went out with someone from there. They seemed super happy and pumped about it!
Only because their stocks grew 300% in the last few years .. doesn’t mean it’s great company for tech ..
I did mean they seemed super happy about the work itself. But of course, I don’t know what specific factors fuel that. You may be right or it may just be that they enjoy the work.
Their employees are known as the Illuminati.
Lots of teams are simply lazy when it comes to adopting best practices and newer ideologies. Too many older employees who are too comfortable with their jobs who just assume things rather than question themselves. In terms of culture though, I would say people here are very friendly and not toxic at all. Most people try to help you and you don’t get a feeling like you’re bothering them. It’s good if you want a stable and easyish career. Salaries are one of the best in San Diego but still not that great compared to real tech companies.
Join intuitive surgical instead
The positive reviews are probably mostly shill posts from HR. Read the ones about the same terrible people getting put in charge of projects despite a track record of failure. Illumina is a place that works really well for a tiny number of people, and they aren’t going to let go of that.
Any thoughts on the foster city culture?
I have no idea about what it’s like up there, but one of our new software VPs who is from up in that area loves to talk about software as a “factory model” and seems to like how Boeing writes software.
These are all very valid points :) Life at Illumina really does depend on the team/product - like everywhere else. Tech is very immature across the board though. Lots of quality rot from old timers in positions of power. Life in SD is 100x better than SF tho. Still unsure why anyone works in the FC office. From what I can see, the pay is only ~15% higher than SD??? Can make 250-300k in SD with a few years experience. The tech talent pool is much smaller than at a FANG, so if you are good, career growth can be explosive. But you need to be willing and able to navigate poorly designed systems with little to no documentation. All in all it’s not that bad. Lately senior leadership has seemed willing to fix many of the larger issues (competing agendas, silly projects, direct overlap). I am hopeful.
I would say the works at illumina definitely feels meaningful and living in SD is also a plus. My colleagues are nice but the politics range from none to pure chaos depending on the projects and teammates. I suspect that we inherited this problem from academia and the pharma world where some folks can say random bull shit and get away with them by brown nosing. Also this is probably a bad time to join considering the recent layoffs.
Is illumina hiring?
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Avoid teams with only Chinese or Indians especially with a Chinese/Indian manager
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Worried that our top performer is an attrition risk. How do managers handle this?
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I haven’t done shit today!
Happy! It’s in their DNA!