Mettler-Toledo reviews

Summary ---------- Work here if you fancy a spot of time travel to the 1950s. This business is not a software company. It's a fear-driven blue collar factory sweatshop, managed by incompetent and inexperienced managers who have created a toxic culture of 1950s factory style industrial hell. Take a look through other reports on this business and note how often poor management is mentioned - do a search for tribunal cases and you will see this company has had numerous complaints. Be very careful before accepting a role or even interviewing. I suggest you ask the business how much turnover they have had in the past 3 years. The GIT repo contains lots of names of people that have left. I have no reason to lie here - I only wish that I had seen an honest review before I joined. Location --------- Situated in a blasted, desolate industrial hellscape in Salford (a staff member was pulled from their car just down the road) where the inbred locals have had a festival of litter and decorated the streets with trash, most people get up early to avoid the traffic and are at their desks by 7am or 8am. There is no food on site - you will either take a packed lunch or use your miserable 30 minute lunchbreak to go to a local burger joint. It often rains here - and I guarantee that as you gaze out of the office windows, over the overcrowded carpark, at the brutalized Salford landscape as the rain hammers down under the sad, baggy grey sky, you will feel bleak. Working here is grim. What does it feel like to work here? ---------------------------------- It feels like a victorian mill or a prison. I get the impression that 'management' would ideally like to control and 'own' every aspect of their workers lives. I also get the distinct impression that "management" don't feel obliged to be bound by the same rules as "workers". If you're used to a professional software environment, Safeline will feel backward and weird. You will be expected to clock in and out using an old fashioned time clock like a factory worker, and your working hours will be monitored down to the minute. You will have your lunch break time mandated and monitored - and you will have no autonomy to make independent decisions. You will be required to 'ask permission' for almost everything. There is a total lack of trust. It doesn't matter how experienced you are, you will be micromanaged to the point of absurdity. You will follow a waterfall SDLC but endure pointless daily agile-style standup meetings (which are really just to micromanage) You might even get to send weekly status emails every week. There are several poor, strange, borderline-autistic, anal-retentive types in 'management' who are literal-minded micromanagers, obsessed with the wrong sort of detail. These men are unable to motivate a team, do not understand people management, and treat document and code reviews not as a means of collaboration and spotting issues, but as an opportunity to massage their own ego and effectively say 'I would do it differently'. They have great difficulty accepting ideas that are not their own. So much time and effort is wasted due to backward or plain wrong working practices. After a short while, it's no longer amusing working here, You are likely to find yourself unwillingly engaged in futile, pointless discussions about irrelevant details with people who have never actually worked anywhere serious other than this small company [and a maybe a few other small, no name places]. Your opinions will not be welcome - new ideas are feared. Pay is low and the company is clearly watching every penny. The R + D department is small - and it feels like a shoestring operation. Even purchasing something cheap needs sign off at director level. A number of engineers have bought their own keyboards and taken them into the office. This is the sort of place where a sausage on a stick and a slice of pizza is classed as a big treat. Culture -------- Dated 1950s industrial style 'command and control' mindset. Workforce divided into 'managers' and 'workers'. The 'managers' and 'workers' sit in different areas of the building (even in a software team). This means that even 'team leaders' sit apart from their teams. The terrible management is the single biggest problem. The software management team are all engineers promoted to being managers - and the inexperience shows dreadfully. Engineers out of their depth tend to micromanage and behave as if their opinion is the most valuable and useful in the room. You will get that in spades here. Premises ----------- The building is a desolate set of units in an industrial estate. It feels like a zombie bunker with metal shutters that come down every night. In the summer the building is too hot, and in the winter it's too cold. The air con system feels cheap so the temperature in some desks is too cold and others is too hot. It looks ok (it just has been redone) - it's basic but clean. There is a pool table that doesn't get much use - mainly because if you use it too much - you're going to be criticised for it. There is a tiny 'tea cupboard', a clean (but small and dull) shared eating area with a microwave. Add a couple of meeting rooms and that's it. Software Systems ------------------ Timesheet systems are old fashioned and tailored to a factory environment using shifts. As a software engineer, you will be completing a timesheet that refers to shifts and feels like a throwback to the 1950s. It's awful. The SDLC uses a godawful set of processes which means you will be estimating tasks down to the HOUR or less. Everything is controlled and micromanaged. There are serious efforts to ensure that you daily fill in your tasks with the exact fractions of hours you spent on them, every day, and ensure that every single task (down to a task for code review, a task for updating a document, and so on) is accurately estimated with a resolution of 1 hour or better. This is all done for 'control and monitoring' purposes. The management team have no idea how to manage apart from 'command and control' so.... If you're used to the more usual kind of software environment where effort is estimated in man-days and it's quite relaxed - (as is standard) then... be careful. That's not the way that they work here. There is an obsession with hours which would be comical if it wasn't serious. There is a serious lack of trust. There is an overriding compulsion to micromanage. If you are an engineer, you are not going to experience meaningful career growth working at Mettler-Toledo Safeline. This ... hands down - is by far the worst and most joyless business I have ever been involved with. I cannot emphasise this enough. Give this place a wide berth and avoid at all costs