Pros
My coworkers were some of the best people I have ever met, both professionally and personally. Though I have left the company I am glad that I still get to call many of them my friend.
Cons
This review reflects my personal experience during the time I worked at Abzena.
When I started in 2022, I genuinely thought this was going to be a great place to build a career. Unfortunately, over the following several years I watched morale steadily decline across the site. By the time I left, it felt like a completely different company than the one I joined.
The biggest issue, in my experience, was leadership. There seemed to be a major disconnect between the people making decisions and the people actually doing the work. Time and time again, employees would raise concerns about staffing, timelines, workload, or equipment capacity, only to be ignored, dismissed, or labeled as “difficult.” It often felt like employees were expected to make impossible deadlines work through sheer force of will, and when that didn’t happen, the blame somehow ended up falling back on them.
One of the most frustrating parts was watching leadership talk about becoming a top pharmaceutical organization while it appeared that basic systems and infrastructure remained severely lacking. For example, during my time at the company, we were repeatedly told that a LIMS implementation was right around the corner. Every year it was supposedly a few months away. Yet every year we were still relying on paper records and Excel spreadsheets to hold everything together. As of my leaving the company, there was still no LIMS.
Management was another major problem. Professionalism was a constant concern throughout my time there. I regularly witnessed managers communicate with employees in ways that I found aggressive, disrespectful, and inappropriate for a professional workplace. I personally experienced managers communicate using profanity and personal insults towards employees. I witnessed coworkers from across the site become visibly distressed after interactions with management. It was not unusual to see people in tears and seeking support from their peers as a direct response to how they felt they were spoken to. Concerns about management behavior were raised repeatedly over the course of several years by multiple employees, yet many people, including myself, felt little was ever done about it.
The workload only made these issues worse. I watched people work nights, weekends, and holidays simply because they cared about their projects and didn’t want to let their teammates or the clients down. Some of the same employees who sacrificed the most for the company were the ones most often criticized when unrealistic expectations weren’t met. I watched some of the hardest working people at the company get rewarded with more work instead of meaningful advancement. Talented scientists took on responsibilities well beyond their job descriptions, worked long hours, trained others, fixed crashing instruments, communicated with clients, and kept projects moving, only to be told that promotions were in the works behind the scenes. In many cases, those promotions never materialized. And in some drastic cases, I even saw the most talent members of a department be demoted for "restructuring" purposes. Over several years, I watched genuinely dedicated employees become frustrated, burned out, and discouraged with the jobs they were once so passionate about.
What makes all of this particularly disappointing is that some of the smartest and most dedicated scientists I’ve ever worked with are still there, keeping the lights. I firmly believe they deserve better support, better leadership, and more thanks than they receive. A Christmas party at the end of the year is not adequate appreciation for how much stress these people are unnecessarily put under by poor leadership.
