Pros
solid paycheck, vacation, benefits, good science probably due to the strong investment in their biology department (surprising with all the terrible management), the people doing the actual work are mostly quite nice.
Cons
- Sycophantic management. I liken it to the movie "the human centipede". - From what I've heard all around the bay (and have experienced), they have a bad reputation of burning their employees out. Which is why they are always hiring!! - The constant shift of blame top down. Top management tells middle managers to do more, middle managers push people to work faster, produce more, to work harder until most inevitably crack or at least hate being there. - It seems that some of the managers exist solely to tell others to work hard while they sit around, do bureaucratic nonsense, gossip, and make your life more difficult. They often lack technical skills, so they have no idea how long certain tasks take but are willing to tell you that you should do it faster. - Seems like there is NO career development unless you are willing to be a sycophant or at least refrain from going against the grain. Don't expect to be able to speak out. Expect frequent disrespect from management. - Learning science here could be difficult. Some departments are strong, others are treated like factories. - An incredible amount of bureaucracy. Departments are always listing the number of targets that they need to meet. There are meetings upon meetings to discuss resourcing because no one has the bandwidth ( ... and the finger-pointing continues). The departments function very poorly with each other. Virtually no collaboration between departments. Bad vibes all around. - They have terrible systems of deciding how many tasks one person should be able to do, and they tell people how much work they are assigned to. These are time-sensitive tasks, so if something goes wrong due to technical issues (which are endless), etc, people frequently do overtime (if they are the ones doing the actual work). Seems like management has a relaxed time though, not helping (truly terrible). - I don't even know what to say about the way that Amyris does business. Just read some of the other reviews. - They're always asking hardworking people to "prove" that they don't have the capacity to take on additional work. That is insane. That should be punished.