Vantaggi
They will hire basically any new grad with no experience, and you can learn a lot here. You will trauma bond with your coworkers over how awful it is to work here so the lab technicians are often very close, so you can make some good friends. There were periods where everything would be fine and management was in a good mood and wouldn't bother you much, but those usually don't last too long
Svantaggi
Cell Applications is so disorganized, almost everything is communicated verbally and is therefore misconstrued, and communication is unclear and inconsistent. There is no real quality control for a lot of the products, so basic human mistakes don't get caught in time, and then it's a disaster when it's already reached the customer. Techs are also just generally very rushed because they expect you to send things out super last minute, leading to mistakes. The company is so small that you will have to do the jobs that would be handled by many different departments at a larger company. The company size also means there are literally no opportunities for promotion or other career advancement, besides becoming a lab manager (i.e. becoming management's punching bag for everything that goes wrong in your lab). The biggest problem is management, namely the couple who own and run the business (CEO and President). The main issue is the president. She is extremely temperamental and unprofessional. This company is her life's work, so she is understandably very invested, but this means that she has a visceral reaction to everything that goes wrong. She is constantly overreacting, to the degree that sometimes it felt like working for a toddler the way she would have temper tantrums about unreasonable things. She would regularly get into verbal altercations with employees who wouldn't just shut up and take it and spoke to people in an incredibly unprofessional manner. She is also just generally hard to communicate with because she often misunderstands what you are trying to tell her or is very unclear in her responses/instructions and changes her mind a lot. And if she wasn't yelling at you, she was constantly lecturing you about the same things over and over like an older family member would. Management is also out of touch about the reality of the cost of living in San Diego, not offering competitive wages and being reluctant to give significant raises even when you can barely survive off of what you're making. They also refuse to pay employees for overtime hours. Many of the technicians are forced to work overtime multiple days a week, every single week, because their workload is too much to finish in normal working hours. They are well aware of this and even expect these employees to be working past 5:00 (or else they don't think they're working hard enough), and still don't pay for overtime or pay a salary that is at least 2 times CA minimum wage (the minimum requirement that employees must be paid in order to legally not have to pay them for overtime). So actually, this violates labor laws and is one of several illegal practices I have seen or heard about at the company. Also, there's no HR department to report this stuff to or discuss other workplace problems. Overall, an incredibly toxic work culture and I cannot recommend that anyone works here, unless you are just desperate for a job to pay the bills and gain experience.
