I worked for Roche for 14 years and other than the last 5-6 years it was a great company. My advice is if you are working for Roche in the IT area, you are at risk of yearly stress of losing your job due to restructuring and sending jobs around the company/world. In the past 6 years, my job was impacted 4-5 times. I had to either apply for a new job or take a package and leave. All of these were due to OPEX realignment of personnel. Senior management would move head count from one location to another without always understanding what they were doing. The latest push in the US is to send IT to Genentech in CA, Madrid, Spain or back to Basel, Switzerland. The Nutley location was closed down after 100 years of service and the US headquarters shifted to Genentech.
The merger of Roche and Genentech has not been the smoothest. Each company is still a separate entity and supported by different IT departments.
Genentech has not experienced the headcount loss experience as of my last day. They are in for a shock once it does. You have to keep in mind that Roche is the typical Swiss based company, and Gene is the typical San Francisco company. They are on completely opposite sides of the spectrum. Roche is extremely process driven, cost conscious (with regards to IT) and doesn't like to deviate. Gene is agile and flexible with the mentality of "get the work done as quick as possible." They don't let cost act as barrier necessarily. Gene is able to bypass process and make their internal customers happy with rapid turn around times. This is the direction Roche is trying to go but with processes still in the picture.
