McMaster-Carr reviews

- Everyone is out to get you from day 1. Very toxic work environment with people ratting on you and you are constantly walking on eggshells or watching your back because management promotes toxicity -Warehouse work is not only laborious on your legs but also gross. Know if you are joining the management that you might be put in the warehouse which is literally a horrible, noisy, filthy, and annoying place to work. It feels like you are working in a prison with barely any windows. It’s like the opposite of working in a nice office in a nice building. - Lack of actual learning and development. If you work in management, you barely know anything about hard skills because the company uses a very antiquated system and barely gives you opportunity to learn anything transferrable. Their inventory management system was discontinued by the developer because it’s so old and outdated. This company does not invest in technology or innovation and is fine running inefficiently. - People are toxic and it seems very cliquey like you are in high school. Rarely will you meet your coworkers outside of work since the work place environment is so toxic that everyone just wants to be away unless required to be there

I could go on and on, but here's a condensed list of cons: Scrutinized Over Every Detail - The culture is a sink or swim environment. You're placed into new roles every few months as part of management and you're forced to learn the ropes within little/no training. Everything you do here will be scrutinized down to the tiniest detail. If your work is not impeccable, you're doing something wrong. My entire time here, I felt like I was walking on eggshells. Your personal strengths are not valued here - all they care about is turning you into a McM-bot. As an individual contributor, your work will be evaluated in 15 second intervals. You'll be penalized for taking bathroom breaks. Expectations are incredibly high and unfair. No Flexibility - At McM, you're placed into different roles with very little say or experience in the role itself. There are no opportunities to "specialize" in an area. Your career trajectory could go from warehouse operations to customer service to finance to data analyst... and you have no control over it. You will learn useless skills specific to how McM conducts business. You'll learn so many of these skills that you won't be able to become a master at any of them and most of these skills aren't even transferrable to roles outside of McM. It's really difficult to get a job outside of McM since nobody knows who they are and you'll work on so many different teams that you won't get any valuable experience in any area. Poor Management - As a new manager myself, I attended useless trainings and was forced to manage and within a short period of time, 'improve' work of people that had been doing their jobs for 10+ years. I was given harsh feedback about employees from upper management and was the one to relay it. The management here does not care about the wellbeing of its employees. They only care that the work is being done. Turnover - A lot of folks leave McM after a couple of years due to the terrible culture. This causes a lot of external turnover. There's also a lot of internal turnover due to folks switching roles every year or so. Every few months, you'll have to relearn how to work with a different manager and you'll have to continually train people on how to do their jobs. This sounds exciting at first but after a couple of rotations, it's incredibly exhausting. Incredibly Surface Level - McM "cares" but only at a surface level. Oh, we need to improve the diversity? Ok, let's hire minorities from HBCU's and private universities and place them into management in the warehouses, but not in the offices where it's majority white. But, it's totally fine that all of upper management is and will always be old, white males. Oh, we need to address the toxic culture? Let's invest millions of dollars into creating useless people practices training that doesn't even get implemented. Many managers don't even have the decency to treat others with basic human respect. Poor Performance Management - In a 12 month period, I had 6 different managers and spent time on 4 teams. Within this period, I had one particularly bad manager for 3 months. This manager did not like me and dictated my entire performance review. When I objectively mentioned how unfair it was to have a year's performance dictated by one terrible manager I had for 3 months, all I got were shrugs from management. You can't show any signs of weakness here. Nevermind trying to have an open conversation with your manager about your areas of development. Every single word you say can and will be used against you. Management has a stick up their behinds - If you're part of management, you'll be treated like royalty on the surface level. Management has happy hours and has access to "secret" meetings about company performance. Management and individual contributors don't fraternize. Individual contributors get very little perks and are treated like they are "lesser" than management in every way. If individual contributors want to get anything done, they'll have to go through many hoops. If you want to bring up anything to HR, don't even think about it. HR is part of management and is extremely biased. Management constantly makes changes to processes without considering how the changes impact those who actually do the work. Management has hours and hours of philosophical meetings with each other scrutinizing over pieces of work individual contributors do, but will never talk to the individual contributors to understand how it is done. Boring Work - The work here is incredibly boring and monotonous. You'll work on projects like improving customer response time by 2%. Senior management makes a big deal over small, inconsequential changes. I've worked on a few projects compiling reports for senior management. The senior management at McM shared edits for reports and took every opportunity to make it seem like their extremely minor and inconsequential changes were make-or-break changes. McM also considers themselves a superior publisher - every single internal document is held to an extremely high standard and minor details (like not using the exact word a specific director prefers) will be scrutinized over... even when there's like 10 people reading the document. Outdated Technology and Poor Data - The technology that McM uses is from the 70's. Literally. If you're wanting to work here as a software engineer or designer, go somewhere else. There's a reason the McM website hasn't changed in ages. The data here is all over the place as well. Very few people are trained on how to access data, and McM relies very heavily on their data to make decisions. I spent weeks and weeks chasing after certain data since there was no centralized place it was stored. All this to say, if you're a college grad like I was considering McMaster-Carr, please do not come here. Within the couple of years I was here, I developed a lot of anxiety and lost a lot of confidence in myself. I was scrutinized over every single detail and felt like I didn't have a voice. In retrospect, I wish I had listened to all of the negative reviews. It really doesn't get better. The only way to survive your time here is to not let the toxicity get to you and just do your job, nothing more. The money is enticing, but with hard work, you'll be able to earn more than what McM pays in no time.