Pros
Strong commitment to bringing important medicines to patients. Outstanding expertise in neurology. Hard work is often rewarded. Potential for productive collaboration within and external to the company. Strong biologics research and development. Excellent clinical development "engine." Depending on the department, career development and support can be very good. Although work at Biogen can be quite intense, it is also invigorating and often rewarding. Excellent compensation and benefits. Although some very tough decisions were made (recent round of layoffs and also the previous closure of the San Diego site) and were quite painful, the business need for these was made clear. Overall, George Scangos has been an impressive CEO.
Kontras
On the development side, there seems to be a disconnect between business needs and the capacity of clinical development to support multiple registrational filings. This results in a rugged workload to meet regulatory deadlines, and subsequently throws work-life balance completely *off* balance. On the research side, although biologics research is strong, small molecule research is relatively weak. The company culture is a weird mix of a smaller biotech and a mid-sized company. Although Biogen has "corporate values/behaviors," these are not consistently enforced, and as a result, there are some bad behaviors that are tolerated, which is not acceptable for a company of this size and stature. Biogen also needs to realize that, as strong as it is, it may be in need of improvement in certain areas (submission quality, for example).
