A giant flaming dumpster fed with dysfunction - Anonymous employee Abzena Employee Review

1.0
Sep 21, 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Decent benefits. Enough brown nosing or losing the company millions of dollars in product down the drain can get you promoted. Some people are really nice and fun, others are extremely condescending and refer to themselves as cheetahs or oak trees. Also nice Nespresso machine and cookies in the breakroom.

Cons

Do you like dumpster fires? Do you like being in a dumpster on fire? How about being the dumpster on fire that Abzena keeps feeding. Coming into work everyday is like Sisyphus eternally pushing a boulder up a hill that never ends day after day but, the boulder is covered in spikes, filled with broken dreams and promises, and on fire. Upper management enjoys dangling rewards and promotions, promising a bull market, but really is just a load of bull. The lack of integrity makes a multi-level marketing pyramid scheme look like Mother Theresa. I would rather trust a rusty needle off the street than believe what the company tries to project. There are no morals to be found here - going so far as to forcing new employees on orientation day to sign up for glassdoor to write good reviews about the company. HR is unavailable to employees unless HR needs something, just impossible to get ahold of. HR also has a history of sexism, favoring males over females in disputes and neglecting the needs of employees and equality. I cannot rate CEO performance since he has been pushed out but the C-suite refuses to release any information regarding that. I have seen several other leaders get scapegoated and forced out to protect the board's interests. The company does not understand the importance of building decent systems and teams of quality FTEs, every employee is just another number. They would rather pay millions for band-aid solutions than to trust their own employees, then realize they overspend and have to rip the band-aids, slowly bleeding out every employee they have left. It seems the only way to get recognition is to be problematic enough where attention is needed; setting the bar low is the key to advancement at Abzena. Working here is much like the Good Place, it seems nice at first, glossing over the cracks in the system until they become too large to cover up, breaking all pretenses of niceties and dropping you into the toasty pits of the Bad Place. Upper management loves to spy on employees instead of trusting them to do work on their own. Imagine sending a return to work memo with no preparation for everyone to be back on site. Not enough seats, not enough space, not enough desks to work at, not enough parking spaces, no safety protocols but oh wait! We have a new security team on site and speed limit sign in our parking lot and that should make us all feel so much better! The insistence on keeping up with training documents but not providing any real practical training is befuddling until you account for the fact that the outdated electronic records reflect poorly on upper management. Leadership should be playing the world series of poker instead given their ability to lie through their teeth to protect themselves. It was not enough to run one location to the ground, it seemed to the c-suite that the next logical decision was to allow another location to be run into the ground, and then bleed that site's resources dry to get another site up and running. The recent town hall meetings show the company as the dog in the burning building saying everything is fine. There is no war in Ba Sing Se.

Explore other reviews about Abzena

5.0
Jun 22, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great work environment, great place to start your career!

Cons

I do not have any

1.0
Jun 29, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

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.

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