McMaster-Carr reviews

McM is currently (and has been for a long time) a completely top-down environment where you will have minimal opportunity for career growth. It’s RARE that a “regular” office worker gets promoted into middle management. Regular workers will NEVER be promoted into upper management. As other reviews state, McM hires management trainees directly upon graduation from Ivy-league schools. You’ll have people in their early 20s with no corporate experience who are now managing regular, long-tenured employees who have been in the same position for 10, 15, or 20+ years. I mean, what could go wrong with that situation? Business decisions are made at a high (Director) level and you'll have little to no input for process improvement or process development. McM truly operates on a caste system. Additionally, they use proprietary legacy software that is a complete nightmare to use, and they have people in their Systems/IT department who were liberal arts majors in college and have no previous Systems experience - no joke. Turnover is nonsensically high, both voluntary and involuntary. Overnight, you can go from being a highly-regarded, exceptional employee to someone who is endlessly criticized over things that are non-issues in the real business world. Management plays favorites, and if you’re not a favorite it’s only a matter of time before they find a reason to fire you. I saw good, intelligent, and hard-working employees get reprimanded at annual reviews and eventually fired because they did something “wrong”. Alternately, I saw highly-favored employees who would do little else other than showing up on time be rewarded with a glowing annual review and pay increase. Your ROI upon leaving McM in regards to transferable skills is a joke. Hope you acquired a useful degree on their expense, or saved enough money from your annual bonuses to go back to school to acquire new skills and experience.

• Your job will probably be extremely boring, repetitive, and automated out of existence within 10 years. • If you work in the office: you don't really get opportunities to get to know anyone in the cubicles around you (if you're an introvert, this may be a Pro). • Career advancement decisions are made far removed from your own management team, and you don't really have any input. You may be spontaneously moved (horizontal "promotion") to a different department with 2 days notice. • You may have skills that the company needs, but they'd rather promote one of their management trainees (1st class McM citizens) into the role, rather than waste a good job on an office drone (2nd class McM citizens), or a warehouse worker (3rd class McM citizens). • The class structure mentioned in the above bulletpoint exists.