Some of the smartest people you'll ever work with, creating cool products in spite of shortsighted leadership.
Pros
The people at Formlabs are the lifeblood of the company. Every single one of them is incredibly knowledgeable and fun to work with. In R&D you get to work with some very fun and challenging problems, which makes coming into work feel less like a grind than at other companies. Flexible PTO is nice when you can overcome the usual apprehension about using it at "inconvenient times," and the catered company lunches are usually pretty solid.
Cons
Innovation and speed are constantly hampered by some of the most absolutely boneheaded upper management I've ever had the misfortune of working underneath. The CEO insists on attending and intensely scrutinizing every system-level design review for upcoming products, despite knowing next to nothing about the user experience for one of the flagship product lines. Biweekly system design reviews often consist of a room full of managers arguing over minutia while top system risks get will get a single-line directive from the CEO, but this directive will often reverse course multiple times in a row as people forget that certain approaches have already been tried. These reviews will often have managers presenting raw, incomplete data from ICs who were not consulted prior, leading to false conclusions being drawn and sometimes entire programs being cut by misinformed upper management. Middle managers can be hit or miss, often needing to be hounded to attend 1-on-1s by their direct reports in order to get some semblance of what the vision is for the future of their projects. Manager feedback is often conflicting, with performance review scores of "consistently meets expectations" being granted only for the employee to later be laid off with no notice citing "performance" as a driving factor, and without strong manager feedback it can often come down to who the CEO remembers seeing near his desk on a day to day basis. Management almost never seems to be affected by headcount reduction, resulting in there being many managers who rarely speak to each other or coordinate each others' use of an IC's time. It is not uncommon for multiple ICs to be directly stacked with several high-bandwidth projects from multiple upper managers, with little ability to push back or discuss prioritization of work. Because direct managers are often stacked with meetings, it is hard to draw their attention to these issues and get them to advocate for a resolution. Pay is also not competitive for the area, and annual salary increases do not match either inflation or the annual cost of living increases for the greater Boston region. Unless you have a manager who is willing to go to bat for you, upwards mobility within the company is near zip. Most mid-to upper level roles get filled by outside hires unless the person who would be promoted is particularly chummy with management. Employee concerns about being able to afford to live within commuting range of the office are met with dismissal at best, and outright exasperation at worst. Questions about 401(k) matching are met similarly, though most employees have given up on asking about that after many years of the same lackluster response.
