Ginkgo BioWorks Reviews

Many of these problems got worse during 2020 covid pandemic and leading up to IPO. To average 3+ years of work is difficult because sometimes it was amazing and sometimes I wanted to throw myself out the 8th floor windows. -Forget a work-life balance, this job is now what you live for. -Pay was low, esp for strain engineers. Balanced by equity so might be different now -Mediocre onboarding. Little training. Often “the way” to learn a new protocol is doing it on the fly on valuable customer samples. Pushes to improve training get shot down. -Junior scientists, esp w/o PhD….good luck. Hard to find mentorship. Not that people don’t want to but they don’t have time. Many left 50K+ of equity on the table to go to grad school. Getting promoted to OE is a long and difficult journey. -The dumbest performance review system I’ve seen. -Many might be turned off by the DIE and social justice initiatives. Culture can be very political and it’ll be tough if you don’t share those beliefs. Some “out-of-the-closet” Conservatives claim they were treated very poorly, some fired or quit. -No moving bonus, visa/customs is a nightmare for internationals. -Some projects feel like a CRO work. Other projects are done for the revenue instead of feasibility. General success rate on projects is still low unfortunately. -Reshma. She can be…difficult. -Very obvious and fundamental RD work to improve Foundry or technology is continuously pushed off, much is done “just in time” or a process is barely functional -HR is not there for you, it’s there for the company -Circumstantial evidence of firings/layoffs done as retribution, especially people that criticized certain things like circular revenue, politics. -If you do get fired, it will most likely be 2 weeks severance, immediate lockout from email and slack, and they will not sign the form from Dep Unemployment Assistance. Nobody who got laid off pre-IPO has gotten any unemployment benefits. DUA incompetent or backed up from covid, but process made even longer because HR didn’t have sh-t together. -Can feel kinda..culty? Startups do need some of that unshakable optimism, but not at the expense of addressing and solving real problems. -Teams change with projects, so it can be hard to establish relationships, constantly going through “new team phase”. It’s hard to summarize everything succinctly. When I joined in 2018, Ginkgo was a startup and felt like one. Now, for better or worse, it’s a corporation. Many will tell you, even now, there are many many worse biotech companies you can work at. Also, many of the issues I pointed out are specific to the Organism Engineering department, may be different in Foundry teams or Software. Ginkgo is well funded, has excellent people, great projects and I earned a lot of equity. If you want to risk the Cons I mentioned or think it won’t apply, I think you should go for it. But you know, keep your resume current and always be interviewing. Good luck.

Benefits are okay. Pay is below average for the market -- a lot of people have left finding better pay elsewhere. Interns almost can't accept the position because it's barely a livable wage in Boston. Since announcing going public, Ginkgo has become very corporatized. It's is becoming a lot less about the people and a lot more about the company and dollars. Examples include terminating contractors after telling them their contracts were going to be extended, firing people with no notice, GGP (Ginkgo' version of a PIP), or real reason because of team restructures. They maintain a "increase efficiency without increasing headcount" mentality and it is driving a lot of good people into the ground with burnout. A good percentage of the population is fresh out of school. This in and of itself is not a con, but there is a good amount of hand holding that needs to be done because it's a lot of employee's first time in a "big kid job". Not a lot of clear career development. They haven't been promoting from within much recently. They cite unlimited PTO but I know whenever I took PTO I was still checking work messages so I wouldn't be underwater when I got back. Work/life balance doesn't really exist here.