Pros
-High salary for the level of work you’re doing -Excellent of profit sharing benefits -Free healthcare - 100% tuition reimbursement with zero commitment to the company. This is by far the best benefit at the company, and I’m always amazed when people don’t take advantage of it. I’ve seen reviews implying McMaster is discriminatory. Perhaps it was local to my branch, but I actually saw the opposite - there were multiple unqualified people who were in key positions for totally demographic, non-talent related reasons. I wouldn’t say the firm practices reverse discrimination by any means, but it is unfair to say that being a minority at McMaster is a disadvantage.
Cons
Its hard to tell someone not to work at McMaster given the incentives, but you need to think about how a place with such generous benefits and good work/life balance has so many consistently bad reviews from staff and management alike. The key issue at the firm is the lack of talent development for management. Not all members of management are bad, and I definitely had a lot of talented and driven peers. But I also had some awful peers and managers who were unjustifiably confident, lacked perspective, or were objectively incompetent. Most (but not all) managers are straight from college, and they take cues from senior leadership, who generally entered the firm the same way, causing a loop that allows impressionable supervisors to inherit bad behaviors. I believe managers with previous experience are generally viewed with skepticism by senior management, who have little to no experience at other firms and are uncomfortable when challenged with new perspectives or ideas. Management at McMaster is largely style over substance and performance at the firm is a poor predictor of how you’ll do elsewhere. This inability to recognize and leverage talent is why you see people who leave the firm end up succeeding at Big 4 firms and Fortune 500 companies, regardless if they were fired or if they made a concerted effort to leave. For management specifically, the work you're doing at McMaster isn't interesting or scalable to other companies or industries. You will feel at a disadvantage or underexposed when dealing with peers in other industries, regardless of your compensation or academic background. Being a private company, McMaster develops everything internally, and this impacts exit opportunities. Even supply chain and logistics companies will expect you to have technical or process-based skills McMaster won't provide. Senior managers at the firm aren't connected anywhere else and very few people you work with end up being good resources down the road. If you are not in management, you won’t gain any marketable skills and you’ll be treated like a child. Promotion is unbelievably rare and few people make a career here. You really need to ask yourself if an extra $10-15k a year is worth the opportunity cost of spending years with zero professional growth with a highly significant chance of being fired. In my opinion, you’re better off trying to get into a functional organization that may pay less initially, but has upward mobility, name recognition, and lets you develop an actual skill set.
