Beware: mechanical design engineers are actually underpaid product managers - Mechanical Design Engineer Formulatrix Employee Review

1.0
Sep 6, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

good enough place to have worked. If you want to go into management as a young engineer you will have an unbelievable amount of power/responsibility/experience. As a product manager you can shape your product to be whatever you want it to be. If you don't want to be a product manager, they have cool prototyping equipment. If you like personal projects you will be able to do a lot. You will also be responsible for machining your own prototypes, which is a very fun part of the job. There's a lot of opportunities to teach yourself arduino and raspberry pi, you can shape out a role that has a lot or a little of this depending on how big your team is. Coworkers are great. It has a startup feel without the startup risk. Very casual atmosphere, not many meetings about meetings, and you are never more than 2 people away from the CEO.

Cons

For starters, they remove your Glassdoor review because it's negative. Good thing there are some ex-employees disgruntled enough to upload a third review. So many cons, don't stay here long. The profit share ended up being a [REDACTED]% bump to my salary over my tenure, so it's not nothing but not a whole lot either. If you leave the company they expect 2 months' notice. BIG RED FLAG. There is no clear timeline for the shares to liquidate, and even when they liquidate it will likely disperse over 1.5 additional years. You need to be employed at the company for those 1.5 years for them to pay out fully. This is not normal. They expect 45 hours/week(50 hours/week when I started) with salaries that are not competitive with the market. They also don't like it when you point out that your pay should be 12% more because you work 12% more. Bonuses are given out based on what percent of goals you complete. If you consistently get higher than 80% then your goals are considered too easy and they won't give you the 90% of your bonus that you deserve. Goals are a meta-game to figure out how to convince management that something is hard when it actually is easy. But don't make it look too easy. There is very little communication from the CEO about why he is doing things. He moved to Dubai and the only official communication about it was 1 email. There is 1 'state of the company' meeting a year, but you just get a calendar invite someday in the year. No communication about why it's late or early. They hire ME's telling them they will do design engineering, but then pull a 180 and say "obviously you will be managing a team of 10 engineers in Indonesia". There are no senior engineers here, so if you want to become a better engineer it is quite difficult. They are incredibly cheap everywhere. Meaning there isn't enough food at Friday lunches, it's difficult to buy tools that are over 1000 dollars, and when you ask for resources in the US, you get people in Indonesia instead. There is a single US software person and a single US electrical person. Very few amenities on site, we have a crappy coffee maker you might find in a home kitchen, no social things like other companies have(ping pong, basketball net, game console) Expect to have lots of meetings at inconvenient times. Especially if you are a product manager there is no escaping having either early morning meetings or very late meetings. Everyone meets with Indonesia at least once a week, most have more than one inconvenient meeting. You are managing their engineering and not just production, so it necessitates more meetings more of the time. I had a separate meeting for software, electrical, UX, mechanical, and production. Most companies only have to deal with production.

Explore other reviews about Formulatrix

5.0
Dec 30, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Very cool products and cutting edge R&D and tech. - Life sciences is a great market - you're helping those that help find cures. - Biotech/Pharma have money, and are willing to spend on the best products.

Cons

Global company, with various offices in different time zones. Occasional early or late meetings.

5.0
Mar 28, 2025
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Fosters relationships between disciplines - Workplace is neat and tidy - Supervisors are helpful in identifying areas of growth and fostering said growth

Cons

- Far from the city if you do not have a car

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