McMaster-Carr reviews

They hire managers straight out of college and refuse to promote from within, so the position you hire into is where you stay unless they decide to move you laterally. Many employees have asked HR and branch managers if this will ever change and they've emphatically stated it won't. That's maddening considering they invest so much money into their employees' salaries and they already know the business, company pays your tuition if you choose to obtain a degree, yet you have to leave in order to put it to use or grow professionally/personally. HR doesn’t operate independently. If you speak up in a HR forum, your name is attached to the comment when it’s reported out when it should be kept confidential. Several ex-coworkers suddenly started underperforming after going to HR about concerns/complaints. The majority of your time off for the following year must be submitted at the end of the current year! They've been doing this for decades. How is that creating a good work/life balance? They even somehow managed to botch partial telecommuting for eligible employees when they at first advertised greater flexibility and work/life balance. Systems are EXTREMELY outdated. Many are from the 80s and there are always workarounds because they try to patch the problems rather than spend the capital to fix them sooner rather than taking several years. They use Excel for many processes rather than investing in professional forecasting software. This frustration is shared by their Tech Support department. Managers are extremely passive-aggressive and each department gets a new supervisor 2-3 times/year because the fresh-from-college managers often quit once they realize the mistake they've made. They walk around with a red folder that typically indicates an employee is in trouble or receiving a coaching session to intimidate the workforce. Reviews are one-sided and you’re wrong if you make a decision that doesn’t align with the manager even though you often operate in the grey area. Employees work to pay their bills and make it to the yearly CPS, that's it. The work is mind-numbing and the silent work environment is soul-crushing. They encourage employees to notify the company of co-workers mistakes, which likely adds to that toxic work environment. Most employees, and managers, walk the halls with their heads in their phones and avoid making eye contact with each other. Branch management doesn't allow you to personalize your desk outside of 2 photos. If you don't believe the reviews, stand in the main office when you interview and imagine working in the environment 40 hrs/week. Stay for the pay, leave if you want a career or some sort of personal fulfillment or professional development.

Where to begin? -McM is an extremely private company that's controlled by a small, risk averse family. Over the years, the company has carved itself a very specific niche in the industrial supply distribution industry, and really doesn't face any competition or serious pressures from the market. On one hand, as you start at the company, this is a great environment to learn the ins and outs of an operation - a bit like riding your first bicycle with training wheels. However, after you get promoted and moved a couple of times, you reach a very hard stop in terms of opportunities for learning and development. Since the company is not really focused on innovation (both internally or externally), the work is very, very, very dry. Iteration and slow process building is the name of the game. On a macro point of view, there really isn't any diversity of thought or strategy at McM. The company focuses on a particular strategy and doesn't really embrace new and original ideas. -Leadership (high level directors and VPs) have fostered and enforced a culture of negativity and impersonal, top-down relationships. Whether you're in management or not, you'll have to go through cold, biased, and sometimes hurtfully personal judgements of your work and your direct reports' work. Many of your managers will lack true leadership and development skills, and the ones that possess them will not be incentivized to use them. At times, you will be pressured to be harsher than is fair on your direct reports in order to establish an artificial curve, or to reinforce the opinion of the VP that sits in a private office without interacting with representatives. -From a company structure perspective, it is extremely frustrating to work in any area that is not part of HQ/Systems. There is close to no regard for the operation's input on product development or company vision. You'll notice this on day 1, when you'll learn to use outdated, slow, and buggy internal software. You'll find yourself working around applications 80% of the time, instead of using helpful tools to do your work. Much of the work that seems to touch on those things is entirely hypothetical and is usually fruitless, if you don't count the pdfs that high-level managers are obsessed with making and sharing regarding their visions. On top of it all, the company has no financial incentive to change (no competition or any sort of transparency/accountability structure). As I said already, the leadership isn't much better. Interestingly, one of the only things that have seemed to make a dent during my time were the abundance of terrible Glassdoor reviews, and excellent applicants that have (unsurprisingly) passed on employment offers from McM because of the terrible things they read here. There are many more things that have been said already in other reviews, and many other things that are so bizarre or dumbfounding in how depressing they make people feel. At the end of the day, McM is the place that it is. If you are looking for a high-paying job that will expose you to the fundamentals of an operation, you're at the right place. However, you have to be fine with the reality that the negative, ugly atmosphere at McM will eventually overshadow even the highest bonus checks you can get.