McMaster-Carr has somehow ascended to dominance in its field not thanks to but in spite of the way the company is run. The two major issues I have encountered (and that you will likely see repeated over and over in thorough reviews here) are:
1) a permanent and impenetrable elite "class" of managers recruited straight out of Ivy League schools (or a few short years post-grad). Your manager does not have firsthand experience doing your job and so their guidance is necessarily limited; however, that won't stop them from holding you to either humanly impossible quantifiable metrics or a vague job description that you may or may not live up to according to their whims and moods. I don't know what kind of training, if any, the managers are given, but I can tell you that whatever it is, it isn't working. They come off as detached and condescending in their interactions with individual contributors (ICs). If you'd like to have your performance review determined by 20-somethings with minimal social skills and even less real-world work experience, you'll love it here.
2) a philosophy that employees are interchangeable. Sure, the recruiter will tell you they think you'll be a "great fit" for job X, but the company won't hesitate to switch you to job Y with just three days' notice and no choice - the expectation is that every employee should be able to excel in every job. Only a "manager" with limited exposure to the working world could deliver that line with a straight face, considering that everyone on, say, the Systems team obviously has an Engineering or Computer Science degree. Don't bother asking if you can move to a different role or department that might be a better fit - they simply won't entertain it. Whoever heard of a company with such a self-defeating policy? So instead of optimizing its (supposedly) most valuable resource, its people, the company forces square pegs into round holes, and when the worker isn't able to deliver (due to lack of training, minimal resources, and/or unclear or contradictory direction), blames the employee and forces them out. Brilliant!
