Don't Get Stuck Here - Anonymous employee McMaster-Carr Employee Review

This is not a place to settle if you desire a career advancement or want to acquire skills that will make you marketable to other companies. If you are very young with absolutely no other job prospects, work here for 3 years or less. Save money, pay off some student loan debt, get a masters degree using their tuition reimbursement benefit (have to be with the company for one year before you can take advantage of this perk), and then leave. If you are a mid-career professional that wants to actually use your skillsets, wants to be valued, and would appreciate the chance to climb the ladder, this is NOT the place to invest a single second of time. This company’s culture and structure leaves much to be desired. There are two hiring tracks: management and individual contributors. They specifically hire very young people, with little to no work experience, into their management trainee program. They seek out these kids from top tier schools, as if a university’s badge is the best qualifier to be a manager at an industrial supply company. A degree from Harvard or Northwestern doesn’t automatically make one qualified for a manager role. I don't know of any other company that prefers to hire inexperienced outside people for management positions, rather than promoting talented and experienced people from within! It's actually jarring to see people who have been at McMaster decades forced to be supervised by fresh-out-of-college managers that don't know what they're doing, and have no experience leading teams in professional settings. It's an incredibly insulting and inefficient way to run an operation. If you are a hard worker that has ambitions for attaining leadership/executive positions in the future, you will not achieve this at McMaster, nor will you gain skills that would make you appealing to other companies. You can be the strongest person on your team, but instead of promoting you, they will shuffle you to a different team (without notice) so you can "develop" in another area. It makes no sense. It's like they're punishing you for being great at your job. And if you actually want to work on another team, there's no in-house job board or way to apply internally. It's down to your manager's mood and maybe a little luck. When I was recruited, a red flag that I ignored was the lack of a clearly-defined job description. I take full responsibility for being dumb enough to not trust my intuition about their intentional vagueness. Heed my warning and do not make the same mistake. In my interview, they led me to believe that because I spent almost 20 years in a previous career and had a wealth of transferable skills, that I would have a chance to flourish with their company as a generalist. It was a lie. I was essentially swindled into a data entry job that was made extremely tedious because of their antiquated systems and technology. They are using technology from the 1980s and 1990s and have entire departments built around working with ancient software. My role consisted of adding data into Excel spreadsheets and old IBM programs all day, every day. The most frustratingly mundane work. None of my professional experience and extensive education was optimized in this role. The same was true for most other generalists. I worked with people that had engineering degrees and years of experience in their previous careers, but at McMaster, they were relegated to data entry or working in the company’s customer contact centers. Such a waste of talent! I could see myself becoming apathetic and depressed if I stayed any longer because I was not stimulated creatively or intellectually. I also knew I had no chance of advancing because I was not hired into management. It was the perfect example of being a mindless cog in a corporate machine. I would echo others who have said that while the salary may seem desirable, you MUST consider everything else: toxic work culture, ever-changing performance metrics, no upward mobility, being supervised by incompetent 20-somethings, being shuffled to different departments with no say or notice, etc. Even working from home is not a perk because they give you desktop equipment instead of a laptop, which forces you to be tethered to a home office. I stayed long enough to pay off some debt and save a bit of money, but I refused to fall victim to the golden handcuffs and waste valuable working years on a road to nowhere.