McMaster-Carr reviews

The work environment is stressful at best. The mindset is "we pay you well, so work for it." You're always behind on your work and will rarely catch up. As soon as you finish one task, three more are added. The work can be boring. As mentioned earlier, employees get paid to perform data entry 8 hours a day. In my capacity, hours were spent reviewing purchase orders for errors on a daily basis. It was a struggle to stay focused and motivated. Management can nitpick. There are no small mistakes. I was lectured for not signing internal notes correctly, told that I "needed to get it together." I showed up to work two minutes late (literally, not figuratively) due to traffic and my manager had a "sit down" with me regarding my tardiness. I understand being corrected but the severity of even the smallest sins led to an environment of feedback avoidance. People would literally avoid certain pieces of work if there was a high risk of feedback. Management mostly sucks. Instead of promoting from within, McMaster recruits recent college graduates from prestigious universities in order to be “Management Trainees.” They essentially climb the ranks from Trainee, to Supervisor, to Manager, usually within a year or two. As you can imagine, this causes a high level of resentment from longtime, established employees. I did not envy the added pay and prestige that came with the “Management Trainee” position. More often than not, I felt sorry for them. Most of these trainees fail, usually at the Supervisor stage. I think the average lifespan of a “Management Trainee” is about 9 months. As you can imagine, this leads to incredible turnover. In my 4 years, I had somewhere around 8 immediate Supervisors. They’re almost always newer than you and less familiar with the work but will be providing feedback within weeks. You often find yourself changing the way you work as you constantly cater to new audiences. It’s frustrating. There is an absolute lack of empathy. You’re given unlimited sick days but secretly you’re not supposed to take any. I took 4 in a given year and it was brought up negatively during an annual review. Around 10% of the workforce is fired yearly. In my first few months, 3 employee in my department were let go as well as an employee of 23 years from another department. It was very stressful, the constant fear that you may be next. You are never safe and the culture reflects that.

Absolutely soul-crushing, tedious work. It's also challenging. Challenging, boring work that has no meaningful impact, other than to enhance "efficiency" and lead to "productivity gains" (read: to justify staff getting fired) in micro-managed departments. Pretty much everyone I talked to at McMaster is cynical about their jobs. The so-called "management development program" isn't structured in any way (you're randomly moved around at the hand of some opaque authority), and it doesn't develop any applicable skills. The vast majority of people are there because it's the only job they can get that pays that well (especially for those with liberal arts degrees) or they need the tuition reimbursement to fund their business degree. If you're a graduate from a top school and want to build your resume, then surely explaining and justifying your position as a warehouse or call center supervisor to future employers isn't going to be the most appealing. Granted, you'll meet some great, intelligent people here, but they're more likely than not going to be jaded about the job. One of the managers who interviewed me actually told me "this isn't a place to work if you want to change the world." Hardly very motivating. This brings me to the toxic, hostile culture that is McMaster-Carr management. Everyone seems to be afraid of getting fired. There is 0 job security at this place. It operates on fear, especially for non-management. Feedback is not forthcoming, and when you do get any feedback, it's going to be negative. Get ready to be thrown under the bus during meetings, even by the manager who is supposed to be developing you. In terms of learning about how a business works from the inside, it's not a place where you're going to be inspired. The foundational software all departments use and rely on is an IBM program from the 1970s. It crashes almost every Friday, leading to huge delays in getting work done and shipments to customers. There are actually entire departments based on working around this awful, archaic software. Get ready to learn how to do "runs" to get data on an interface that looks like something out of Star Wars. Your recruiter might try to sell McMaster as the "Apple of industrial supplies". Don't buy it. Sure, there's a sleek new office, but it's intentionally designed like a panopticon (wikipedia it) so that everyone's work space is entirely visible and you never know if a supervisor is looking over your shoulder. You'll also be reprimanded if you have anything other than 1 pen and 1 drink on your desk. God help you if you have hand sanitizer on your desk, or if you leave a sweater on your chair. To give you some background: the company only recently started allowing employees to keep water on their desk. My advice? Work here for a few months if recruited and save every penny. Look for another job the whole time. If you look at it as a holdover while you look for a job worth doing, then it's great pay. This isn't a place to stay for longer than a year, unless you want a serious case of depression. I should have taken all these scathing reviews on Glassdoor more seriously before I committed to taking the job. Quitting this purgatory was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.