Inept, growingly insular, unempathetic senior leadership (managers of managers). We all know companies aren’t meant to care about you but damn..
“R and D Reset”:
9% of engineering surprise fired on one day for “performance reasons”. This layoff was executed at the peak of engineering achievement and company growth stemming from the launch of the Form 4 generation product line refresh. A sour taste to leave in every engineers mouth right at what I would call the peak of my personal Formlabs tenure. The largest complaint from this decision was that nearly none of those let go were given negative feedback over their recent performance reviews before being dismissed without notice. Senior leadership worked to appease, by claiming that the “new bar” for performance would be well communicated and future firings would not come as a surprise.
Despite this, in the last two months I have witnessed the following within the engineering organization:
A 6-year engineer who had never received a biannual performance review noting they did not “meet expectations” or better was abruptly fired for “performance reasons” the Friday before their approved sabbatical.
A senior engineer was unexpectedly let go as their partner was expecting their first child any day.
It is unclear if either of these employees received the sabbatical and parental leaves they earned.
Poor continuity of management or teammates:
After the R and D reset in the Fall of 2024, SLS hardware engineering had a team of 21 engineers led by 3 managers. One year later, 2 of the three managers have left. 7 SLS engineers are no longer at Formlabs. If you are a candidate planning on joining an SLS engineering team in the next year, I would not. If it is your only opportunity, tread carefully.
If you are a prospective candidate for a management role, good luck. No external hardware engineering hires made in the last 5 years have survived more than a year or two. There are currently none employed.
HR:
Our Chief People Officer is a Wayfair alum. Today, every manager reporting to her was also hired from Wayfair. If you know Wayfair, you know that’s all you need to know. If you don’t, take a quick peek at their glassdoor page.
Achievements include:
Implementation of a role leveling system across Formlabs; strategically suppressing performance based compensation increases to be limited to “promotions” from one level to the next. With that system in place, they have worked with managers to shift the goalposts of their “leveling framework” to prevent promotions (and thus adjustments greater than standard COL increases of 2-4%). The majority of hardware engineers have been boxed into level 2 or level 3. I am not aware of any promotions from level 2 to 3 or level 3 to 4 since the inception of this policy 3 years ago.
Revamped recruiting guidance to focus on candidates with “high slope”. Examples of strong positive slope indicators included a theoretical resume of a Tufts student who transferred to MIT before applying for an internship. “Anti-indicators” of slope included candidates who had worked more than 3 years without a promotion (nearly all engineers at Formlabs).
Instituted a toxic system asking employees to stack rank members of their team during performance review cycles.
Compensation and Benefits:
- Expect 50th percentile compensation
- Only one opportunity to cash out equity in company history. (2021. Only up to 25% of accrued equity could be sold. Only those with greater than a two year tenure were eligible to sell any shares)
- Bottom of the barrel United Healthcare insurance
- No 401k match
- Parental leave (actually reasonably good)
- Sabbatical (6 weeks) if you can survive 7 years outputting high impact work at low compensation. That is if they don’t fire you the day before you start your sabbatical
- Flexible OoO (depending on your manager and voluntold work across weekends and holidays)
- There is plenty of parking onsite
- Lunch 3x a week with snacks (remains a good benefit despite a gradual decline in quality)
- Some nice company parties and events (still existent yet slowly declining in frequency and quality)
- Unlimited 3D printing (a truly great benefit if you have time for side projects)
