Formlabs reviews

Pay is comically low vs. rest of industry. Sales comp structure needs some love & to be fleshed out more - it gets “fixed” every year but doesn’t get better. No 401k match despite there being a question asked every town hall and probably the most requested employee change next to pay. No attempt at sustainable / eco friendly product or messaging - what I was told from an Exec was that we are “leaving it up to employees” - this is a cop-out if managers aren’t allowed or are told to have their direct reports carve out time for this. Change comes from the top and it is clear they don’t care. This is a plastics company in the plastics industry with all the waste associated, despite what Execs want you to believe. Zero respect for the tenured people who had/have been there for half of Formlabs' existence or longer. These are people who helped grow the company and shape its culture. An employee was asked to postpone his already-booked sabbatical that kicked in after 6 years. He said no. Management move him to another team as retribution. Middle management has had zero training and is a mess which makes sense considering upper management gives them no support and frequently changes goal posts with no top-down messaging or goals of where the org is going as a whole - except "we want to be the best in 3D printing". Middle management are super micro managing: Camera on requirement during weekly scrums. If you miss an RTO day for being sick you have to “make it up” on a would-be WFH day. If you are at a trade show, that technically makes you out of the office. You are also expected to make up those days you missed by coming into the office on WFH days. RTO requirements: I joined for the flexibility, that has since changed. Some employees were cleared for fully remote work for unfair reasons while others were not. It is clear who management thinks is an important and who is not, and that is not a good feeling. This has become worse with even more micromanagement, now you basically have to clock in in-person. What was once a culture of trust and support has turned into a culture of squeezing everything they can out of fewer employees (since there are semi-annual layoffs). The “Path to Profitability” has caused the company to start looking at people like numbers: what is your daily input, how much you are contributing to the org, and “cutting the dead weight”. People can tell when they’re being looked at like numbers, this decreases morale & job security and increases day-to-day stress. Leadership says "We're still a startup" when justifying layoffs, constant re-orgs, lack of 401k match, small salaries, & asking their employees to do way more than their job titles for the same pay BUT at the same time "We've been around for 12 years and are a well-established company" when trying to justify their space in the market. CEO is a true Zuckerberg in all the wrong ways with zero EQ. Desperately tries to be like Elon, idolizing Tesla, Apple, and similar companies in the pursuit of being like them because that's what he thinks success is. Never stops to ask himself how he can be different.

Low salary and management constantly is dangling the carrot of "we are working to get near market rate" but they never will. Even if you get another job offer, Formlabs will give a lousy counter. They clearly have very set (low) values of what each position should be paid and refuse to go above that, despite the fact that many positions are very vague, especially on the Process team where some people are mechanical specialty, some software, some integration, but the "allowable pay bracket" is the same for all. Plus the CEO directly gates all individual raises, despite the fact that he doesn't even interact with many engineers. This is a nearly 600 person company, there should be a better system than that. Stock options are all but worthless unless you were hired more than 2 years ago or plan to stick around for 10 years and things go well. Upper management loves to gate engineering projects as they near completion despite not having any input or desire to be involved before that, wasting a lot of time. Deadlines are ridiculous and never are considered "real". You are highly encouraged to work well over 40 hours despite the poor compensation so many people get burnt out.