Although BIIB is a good company, the politics and lack of personal responsibility of managment is frankly insane. There is an incessant need to make your manager feel great about themselves which stiffles inovation. There is little focus on what you actually accomplish. After a managment change it was apparent to me they had promoted a great individual contributor to a management role and it was not good for anybody. To give a view on the insanity, my new boss flew from MA to our site to "support" us for the transition where we were required to show up the next day to work to get the critical news on the move forward. The boss expected all of us to stay out until 6AM drinking. This ended up being a vacation and drinkng visit, and not at all about the transition. We never discussed the transition with our new boss. Needless to say the majority of us couldn't make it to the most critical meeting of our working lives and frankly it was embarassing that our group didn't show up to get the information. This was not the only time that we were expected to drink until we passed out when she was in town. I am not a square, but would have like to use our time with the boss for something other than huge drink-a-thons our touring her around the country for her vacation at least once in a while. When I finally said I can stay out but need to get back by 1AM since I have a family and need to work the next mornings, I was immediately thrown out of the inner circle. It was the same picture for the team in MA. They were expected to go on vacations and drinking with the boss and if they ever said no, then they were also thrown outside the inner circle. At the end the only people getting promotions were the single team members. Having said all that, I do not begrudge the single team members who recognized that this was the only way to get promoted and there are always bad managers but the experience at BIIB overall was good. Now that I am not in the situation at BIIB it is clear to me that there were a lot of good people BIIB, along with some poor promoting practices that allowed peple that should never manage people to direct their careers. In the last two years since leaving BIIB, I have been promoted 3 times and work for a great company now, however still feel loyalty to BIIB, but do acknowledge there is room for them to mature the managment.
