This place used to be buzzing with excitement and potential. We were all motivated and loved working hard together. It truly was about the science and making the world better. Now it's just any other public company trying to squeeze their employees for everything they got to make that money. Things are getting lost in the shuffle, but the leadership has no idea.
Schrodinger culture was wonderful, and now I'm watching it slowly fall apart from all the hiring that we cannot keep up with. This is a company that has only known slow growth. None of the leaders have experience in how to deal with this rapid growth, most of them don't even have work experience outside of this company. Turnover is increasing and nobody seems to be acknowledging it. For every company going through an increase in growth, it's common to see strains on systems, processes, and culture. Schrodinger is no different, except they aren't doing anything about it. They continue to hide behind the "Schrödinger is an amazing place to work" excuse and do nothing. They don't recognize that it takes effort to maintain an "amazing" culture. If you do nothing, you are putting the company at risk to slowly teeter towards a toxic workplace. Yes, I am saying that this company is starting to become toxic. It's not enough for people to notice it right away yet, but it'll get there if it continues to go unchecked. There are a few key indicators of this: first, I started noticing when all the good employees began quitting and the toxic ones are still here. We do nothing to the toxic ones except let them thrive. Nobody does anything about them, and if they do then it's only after really good people have left. I really miss a lot of my colleagues who have left. The teamwork felt good. Now it's all about hierarchy, status, competition, and the big one - favoritism. Secondly, it's never a great sign when you see a high turnover in your HR team, especially when you see the types of people who left. I used to think our HR team was different, but after all the turnovers I guess the rumors were true. Yes, there are a lot of rumors about that team and none are good ones. I'm too scared to write them down here in fear of retaliation. They do nothing to give me any hope or security anymore. Thirdly, there is no actual manager training here. It's all in some google folder for you to read and useless monthly meetings with the head of HR. Managers get zero support here and if something goes badly they get blamed for it even though they were never trained on how to handle people issues to begin with. I also wish I had managers and leaders who were trained in bias and being able to recognize their own favoritism. I work a lot, take on different roles, and I even pick up my team's slack. All this goes unnoticed though because managers only sees the people they like. They don't realize they are giving better opportunities to those they favor instead of doing it equally throughout the team. They could easily offer similar opportunities to the rest of the team to help them in their role and career. Nope, they do nothing for the people they don't like. So why do I even work so hard then?
