Pros
Great pay, great benefits, pension plan.
Cons
I worked at CROs for over 10 years and decided to try pharma as Merck was builiding its own oncology clinical teams and I believed that it would be an exiting time to join the company. Merck is new to oncology and the middle managers don't understand the complexity of oncology trials. I was assigned to so many sites and different protocols, that it was hard to keep up, even if with working 60-80 hours a week. I worried about the quality of the research, as systems were very old and the way of conducting the research was old as well. Sites I took over from other CRAs had huge data backlog. Instead of managing the sites and doing quality research, I was reviewing data from the past months and was resolving old issues. I brought this to the attention of my manager, and what bothered me the most was indifference. The supervisor of the managers had the same attitude and during the calls was more concerned about keeping the agenda than answering questions from the CRAs. This is the company where the CRAs were treated with the least respect. I left the company in less than a year. Quality of the research was my main concern.