McMaster-Carr reviews

While McMaster successfully identifies top talent to hire, it really struggles to support individuals who are not immediately ready for what the company expects of them. On most management teams, you are given up to 2 weeks of onboarding before you're expected to perform. For a company that spends so much time debating what "Quality" means and finding ways to support individual contributors, it spends shockingly little time finding ways to support its new supervisors - likely because managers are all overworked already. This creates negaitve feedback loops for the individual contributors who never have a supervisor for longer than a year that can care about their development, leading to their inevitable failure. After about a year of work as a management hire, you will realize that the incredible 40 hour a week work-life balance is not as realistic as they advertise. It's true for individual contributors (who are arguable better respected by the company), but everyone in management is working 45 hour weeks at an absolute minimum. In the california branch specifically, warehouse management runs so unfathomably lean that everyone is working upwards of 50 hour weeks with day-to-day variations in hours that could start and end anywhere from 6am to 8pm Management rotates insanely quickly - both between teams and attrition out of the company. It's almost as if it's *intended* for new hires to stay at the company for fewer than 3 years. Part of this is due to seemingly random team moves where individuals can spend less than a month in a department before being moved to a completely unrelated team without a trained backfill, leaving their direct-reports and co-management scrambling to reallocate their already huge, undocumented, and antiquated workloads. Plus, there aren't many skills you can develop that are applicable anywhere else outside of general project, ops, and people management since mcm does most of its work with old verisons of excel and systems from the 80s. Many of my coworkers believed the environment to be toxic and cutthroat. I didn't feel that way under my managers, but I can very easily see how that might come across when everyone is terrified to make a mistake they were never formally trained to avoid. You cannot work here if you consider yourself to be emotionally sensitive to feedback. imo: get in, get your money, and have a plan for after ready for whenever the time comes

You have to relocate to corporate if you want to be promoted in certain departments.