BD reviews

Did not feel welcome. The first week in San Jose for new hire orientation was a nightmare. Running around campus looking for cell phones, looking for IT people to configure my laptop, looking for HR people to take my taxes out right. Everyone has a job and it seemed like every time I needed someone they were impossible to get a hold of. Management is totally clueless. I worked at BD for 3.5 months, and talked to my manager exactly 2 times. He had no idea how anything was going, and when I called him to tell him I was resigning he was shocked. The technical leadership is awful. My team lead berated me in front of customers, hardly answered any questions, and cursed at me often. Training was impossible. They stuffed a 3-4 week training class into 2 weeks, often going 11-12 hours a day, and the trainees shared instruments that were just totally junk. So class was shortened and hands on time was halved. Oh yes, and there was an 8 hour practical at the end! If you fail, you're fired! This do or die test was not disclosed during the interview, and when I called HR and asked about it the class facilitator lied and said that was not true. Lastly, there are hardly any SOPs. Everyone does everything a different way; so when one person tells you to do something one way and another person watches you do it the way you learned, that second person tells you that's wrong and shows you their way. When you ask for the manual reference to determine what is called for, there is nothing there.

The company has been going downhill a little bit for several years. It started out with layoffs only taking place as a means to make up for revenue shortfalls, but then even if a business unit met the projections of corporate, there would still be layoffs every year in September. They tended to be held very badly too. Like calling everyone in a department into a conference room and telling them that they should "be ready" for a meeting where they might be told they're being laid off. Stress levels are off the charts during those times and morale is basically zero for a good month or two beforehand as everyone knows it's coming. Rumors spread like wildfire and operations within the company practically grind to a halt. This is also around the time performance reviews are done, so that adds a whole new level of masochistic timing to the mix. The company uses a kind of stack ranking system where they expect a "normal" distribution of ratings between 1-5 for every department. So even if every person in a department did truly exceptional work, only 1-2 of them could get the top ranking, and then lately management has taken to retroactively lowering those top reviews so they don't have to give out as many of the top merit raises. It also means that every year there are employees who get a lower rating than deserved simply to "make room" for someone else. In my department, there was an employee who was friends with my boss' boss, so everyone knew that person would never get a bad review and it meant that some of the rest of us had our reviews lowered to make room for that person. About a year ago the company tried illegally cheating every employee out of a week's worth of pay by claiming they were "harmonizing" their payroll schedules. They weren't fooling anyone and there was massive backlash over it. The company has also started getting really stingy with the benefits. When I started, they were not great, but good. Then over time they slowly whittled away your choices, and when I left they were on some healthcare savings account thing, where the company chips in $500/year to cover any medical expenses, and the rest is on you. Only saving grace seems to be that you can roll that money over year to year. The company has also lost the ability to innovate. A project to get into Genomics was abandoned after management made a huge push to get it released. There was another product where we were all expected to get it ready for release within like 2 weeks, and we just barely made it, only to have the company more or less abandon the product about a year later because they focused on a testing method that was scheduled to be phased out by the WHO. Management also pushed to have clinical instruments be released with known design defects, despite the engineers protesting until blue in the face about how it wasn't ready. The company just buys up smaller competitors to take control of their products. Then they usually bungle it like they did with the Accuri acquisition. The HR and Ethics Department at this company are a complete joke as well. I had a coworker who was constantly harassing me. I reported it to my manager, and he retaliates against me by giving me a written warning because this person is good personal friends with his manager -- who arranged for this person to get a job in the first place, so add nepotism to the list of cons. I complain to the HR department, and they basically try to scare me off from pressing the issue. Finally I go to the Ethics Department, and I am treated like scum. They try to get me to answer questions in a specific way so it can be thrown back in my face later. They had also violated their own rules about confidentiality of complaints, because within a week of my having made a complaint, my manager knew about it and was retaliating against me for it. Despite a promise of investigating the situation without preconceptions, it was clear they had already made up their mind by the time they got around to talking to me, and they were just trying to get me to say something they could twist to be incriminating. My first promotion took almost 3 years. The friend of my manager's manager was promoted in about a year and a half, despite doing considerably less work than me by any objective measure. The company likes to talk about career development, and maybe once upon a time that was true, but the "promotions" you get will be doing your job, plus the job of someone they laid off, for no extra pay or even a new title. I think it was put kind of well by one of the former IT VPs, who once said how he wanted to know why BD couldn't be a $200 stock company. That says everything you need to know about where the priorities of the top management are.