If you feel qualified to work at Formlabs, you can also do so much better than them in Boston, I guarantee it. My experience started with a career fair: great conversations with 3-4 employees, got an email from one of their recruiters. First interview was behavioral with two current MechEs, both friendly and positive. They assured me that although Formlabs is still a very chaotic and "flat hierarchy" place they are building up more of a support system so you don't drown in the deep end, although they will definitely still throw you in and expect you to perform. Not bad.
I was then invited to do a skills test, which was a bit more difficult than I expected but overall fun to work on. They emailed me the test at a time of my choosing and required me to email my answers within 2.5 hours later.
Second interview with managers: one mid-level and one right at the top of the company. Asked me to sign an NDA, no problem. I wasn't told what the interview was about so I expected to discuss high level things and maybe NDA-worthy details of their work to see if it matched what I want to do. Instead I got grilled the entire time on my skills test answers... maybe they didn't like my answers as much as I had thought?
This last interview was very revealing. I had done my homework, spoke with 3-4 former & current employees who all pieced together for me a nightmarish story of a structureless company in 2016-2017 full of young cocky engineers making (sometimes-big) product mistakes. A world where technical achievement is above all else, including safety. Specific concerns of note: CEO illegally unlocking a welder for use without proper ventilation (at least one employee got sick from fumes later), a workshop so cramped that you could never safely operate a machine, nylon powder all over the product testing floor and near workers' desks, and no standard process for obtaining a properly fitting respirator to prevent breathing in the particles at work....
I took all those stories and said "well, I've dreamed of working here for years, I love their products, so I wanna find out for myself, maybe they've figured out solutions to all this since then?" But no way. It seems they fixed the most egregious workshop problems, but the underlying attitude problems at the top had not changed. The top-level manager showed up to my interview 5 min late, clearly wasn't prepared, asked some good tough questions, but then was clearly itching to leave when I asked him at the end "what does the health and safety culture look like at Formlabs?" Their answer was pathetic: "well uh, you know, we've gotten a lot better over the years, certainly we've made mistakes early on but now with how we've grown we definitely have to meet a lot more state requirements as an employer and we recently had to become an official hazardous waste producer, so meeting more requirements there... we've got our haz waste disposal right next to the shop." In other words: we do nothing for safety until we must, so it's lucky for our employees that the law requires us to conform to more stringent standards as we grow?? Even just confidently saying "safety is important to us here, we've done a lot to improve things as we grow" would have been better... On top of that, the mid-level manager I spoke with about my skills test answers tried to pull very specific answers out of me on the spot despite my having 2-3 other decent points on each question. I was left with the feeling that Formlab's "fix" for the big technical mistakes of their past is not to build a more well-structured collaborative environment where individual strengths are valued and knowledge gaps are supportively filled, but rather it is to hire a cookie-cutter force of engineers who all notice the exact same design flaws on the exact same skills test questions? Odd to say the least.
This whole experience confirmed everything I had heard: despite some minor improvements over the years, Formlabs has terrible high level leadership. You just can't ignore a bad, micromanaging, literally hazardous CEO in my opinion. I later spoke with a former manager and they once again confirmed everything I had heard. They had gotten out to make their own company with lessons learned about toxic culture and their own huge issues with Formlab's twisted values.
Summary: unless you are madly in love with Form printers and want to work on nothing else at all cost, do not waste your time with Formlabs. It took little effort for me to start talking internship/fulltime at 3 other awesome actual startups (3-12 employees), all of which made it clear that safety is a priority, that they're being careful about how they devise their culture, and that they value more than just raw technical output per employee. Even other larger established startups like Desktop Metal seem to have a much better culture.
