Good company, some trust issues - Software Engineer Genentech Employee Review

Upper management has gotten more and more detached from the company over the years and seems to be stuck in generic corporate culture. For years we were told that flexibility would be an important learning coming out of the pandemic, yet leadership bait and switched employees in September 2022. Prior to the pandemic, Genentech was a very forward looking and progressive company. Despite the company operating quite well during the pandemic now employees no matter their role must be on campus “the majority of the time”. It feels as though leadership may have forgotten that fundamental to our culture at Genentech is that we trust our employees. Going all the way back to Art Levinson haven’t had a command and control culture. We’re non hierarchical, we agree on a vision and those who work for Genentech come together to make it happen. I’m hopeful that upper management can figure it out before it’s too late, but I fear that the lack of trust that has now emerged between employees and upper management may hurt this great company. In addition, for several years there has been a big focus on cost cutting, largely due to biosimilar competition. While some of this was healthy there seems to be an overly optimistic view on outsourcing processes, particularly in the IT space to the lowest bidder. I don’t think that we can claim to be an innovative Bay Area company when our IT stack is from 1998 and maintained by consultants from India.