Hi all,
I am writing this with extreme fear.
I am a Science graduate and I worked for an up and coming company in the cellular agricultural space. When I used to read the news about this company, I thought this was my chance to be involved in a field which can potentially disrupt how we consume food.
So, i jumped on the opportunity and joined this company. This is the end of a good part of the story.
After I joined, I was really excited to work for this company. The first few weeks were like a breeze. I came to the office to learn about different aspects of this field, attend meetings, go for lunch in this ulu place with one hawker centre with colleagues and also observe people do work. When I got my opportunity to do hands-on work, I was ecstatic.
After a few days, I started to get frustrated as I was not able to get any cool results , whereas others in the meeting were discussing how well their experiments worked. After a few months of frustration, I started to ask for help with my experiments and materials from my reporting officers and colleagues. They will give me some materials and when I redo the experiments and fail again. Then, I started asking some more detailed questions and I got the statement ” I don’t have access to that information”. But in the meantime, some people in my group revealed that they just say whatever the boss wants.
That’s when I started to talk to more people from other departments and realised that we don’t have anything that has been claimed by the boss in the media. For example, our company revealed that they had successfully created a shrimp cell line (we didn’t have any working cells), company mentioned that we had successfully reduced the cost of cultivated shrimp meat production. No one in the company knew how to achieve that. We inaugurated a production plant. After that, no one has used it for any purpose (A big expensive bioreactor, except for photoshoots). With all these falsehoods, I dawned on me, i had joined a company that looked more like one of those companies in the US (ther-o-anus) where everything is mired in secrecy but in reality they didn’t have anything.
To add to my research frustration, our boss used to hold a company-wide meeting to publicly shame departments who didn’t have much progress. And will tell us to give 200%, make yourself useful to the company and all those Bullshit. Then she will be vacationing in some exotic location. We had an inside joke. She was always on vacation, but stated that she was at work. yeah right, 2 months vacation for work and post 2 meeting pictures. Come-on, lah, you think we all don’t know what it means.
Our boss runs the company like a friend and family business. At one time, her husband, her sister-in-law, her previous lab mates, previous room mates, her previous institute mates, all mates were in the company. After so much complaining about the uselessness of these people, the company fired a few of them.
In the beginning, i mentioned that I was scared to write this. It is mainly because our boss, like all other dubious companies, goes after people with legal sticks using company money. So, i am writing here.
Hope this post encourages people who are working in this company and previous employees to come forward to expose this scam of a company.