Avantages
The location is great, and the people are great. The last few years there has been an effort to grow organically, and hire new young talent. There used to be a pension, but they discontinued it for new hires. It is one of the biggest pharma companies out there, and they are partnering with many small biotechs to bring exciting new medicines to market. Unfortunately, all of the compounds discovered at Roche (that are not from Basel) get killed the slow death from lack of support, delays and fear of the unknown. There are very few people left in big pharma who actually know what it takes to get drugs on the market.
Inconvénients
The Genentech buy out will close my site in Palo Alto. But worse than that, our pipeline is completely inverted, and has been for 5 years. We have more phase 3 and 4's than we have new molecules. That is very costly, and the highest levels of management have not let good molecules go forward due to lack of funds. This will kill the company before 2015.