Ventajas
As with any job, experiences are going to vary based on location, direct coworkers, etc. The company itself does offer pretty good PTO time and a good host of third party services that can be taken advantage of. The health insurance options are not great, but they aren't terrible either (yet, as I will explain). They also offer a stock purchase plan, which is nice. They will also hire people with science backgrounds but no ASCP certification and train them as techs, which can eventually lead them to being eligible to sit for the certification exam. Its a decent place to to get your foot in the door in the med. lab. field. The pay from what I've seen is a bit on the low end, but not really immensely so. I am sure they would call it "comparable," although some of that also depends on your negotiating skills at hire. They also do seem to value diversity and inclusion. They also raised starting pay to $15 last year and have offered several (very small) monetary bonuses to all staff
Desventajas
This place will burn you out, and fast. Volume is ever increasing and staff turnover is pretty high, which leads to forced overtime, high workloads, and general frustration. Upper management does not appear to care about "ground level" concerns or issues. They are slow to respond, if they do at all, to any issues staff is having (ie: the need for more instrumentation, issues with labeling, LIS and software concerns, etc). There are also a host of logistics issues that frequently cause late shipments and an inability to finish within normal shifts. In over 10 years here, we have not once gotten a cost of living increase and no one who made over $15 saw any increase in their pay when they raised the minimum. They have been actively making our insurance worse, even despite the pandemic. Since the new CEO took over, our deductibles and OOPs have doubled, and they decided last year to spend billions on stock buybacks and dividends. Our stock price has since dropped about $70 or so per share. The old CEO at least made an attempt to appear to care and keep a semblance of balance between shareholder and employee priorities. All we hear about now is about all the great things our shareholders are getting. There are yearly raises, but they are middling and if we're lucky, they may cancel out the benefits cost increases, but certainly not inflation. They also rolled out a maternity leave plan, which is still better than none at all, but it excludes the partner not giving birth and requires one to use part of their own PTO bank before it kicks in. There is also little to no room for advancement, there are no Tech I/II/III, etc positions. The only real way to move up is for someone in a higher position to quit, and even then there are a limited number of these roles to begin with. If you do manage to move up a job grade, you do not enter a new pay grade, you get a raise based on your current salary. The also recently started giving supervisors and above unlimited time off, which is great for them, but now they are never here and it has lead to resentment and everyone beneath them having to pick up the slack of them being gone all the time. Doing work "above your pay grade" is commonplace.