Medtronic FAQ

Pros

Great culture, benefits package and leadership.

Cons

Nothing, can't say anything negative about them.

Pros

Has a lot of conveniences such as: cafeteria, nice kitchenettes with free coffee and teas, bank/ATM, store, coffee shop, onsite daycare, ping-pong tables, great outdoor walking paths, fun outings. Great culture and atmosphere.

Cons

Some Managers like to micro-manage

Advice to Management

Would like to see more remote work opportunities.

Pros

The pros about working at Medtronic are the tuition reimbursement benefits and great health, dental and vision benefits. Paid Time Off. Yearly bonuses.

Cons

The cons of working at Medtronic is the low competitive pay, the demanding work and excessive overtime. The annual pay raise does not reflect your skills and contributions to the company. Job responsibilities get added regularly with high expectations of quality completion.

Advice to Management

Upper management needs improvement on how to maintain a good working environment. Upper management does not show recognition to employees for their extreme contributions.

Pros

Motivating mission, smart and dedicated people, great work-life balance (e.g can work in some cases from home part of the time, can take half day Fridays off in summer, good maternity&paternity leave), good benefits. Business is doing consistently well.

Cons

Slow moving and bureaucratic culture (though probably typical to a large corporate in a highly regulated industry). Few career progress opportunities beyond individual contributor.

Advice to Management

Consider how to maintain & increase market share. Accelerate the product & software release cycle so as to bring faster new and improved features to surgeons and patients , without sacrificing quality.

Pros

The pay is better at Medtronic than majority of other corporate companies, benefits are good like pension (basic 401k though). The products are important (but also the people that make the decisions would easily put cost savings ahead of Quality....despite the motto being "Quality Begins with me."

Cons

THE PEOPLE!!! At the North Haven corporate area there are almost too many people who have worked there since the US Surgical days 15+ years ago & still treat everything at the pace of 2005. You will be treated as JUST a number. Team comradery in just about all groups out of the Lab Services is extremely low. Basically anybody part of a real Core Team project is miserable in their group b/c directors will treat you only like a number. Everything runs SO SO SO SLOW!!! They like to minimize cost by going to Contract Manufacturer's but the projects take 6 months longer than it should take. Absolutely no chance at Work-Life Balance. You enter the building miserable & you leave the building miserable. What got me to move to this company was the company slogan. Within 4 months I realized the slogan "Quality Begins With Me" is ONLY for the public & the shareholders...and the quarterly Town Halls. You work on a core-team project & if they could cut as many corners as possible they would do it. It is ALWAYS the QE on the project that has to tell the Project Manager that this isn't how it works. The directors don't fully understand how dysfunctional their own team is because they are traveling a quarter the time, getting 10 weeks of vacation a year, or working from home another 1/4 of the time. Personally don't think anybody that is working on validation type projects would want to start working here in the next 9 months with the regulations happening. The company is so stuck in their old ways of the only goal is to manufacture as much as possible that they fail to realize if they don't build these validation lots for regulatory then the product line could be forced to stop running. We get these "backorder" data showing how much there is but they refuse to just stop production for a day for sellable product to move to the one shift that would cover all the validations for the Stability, Sterilization, Packaging, & Biocomp teams.

Advice to Management

Value your employees. Actually believe in the corporate slogan. I swear they need to have the Quality Engineers be the Project Managers (PMs) because then things would be done properly. Stop the stupid reporting of: Low level reports to a mid or senior level then that person reports to the team manager then that person reports to the director. Then the PM's boss will call your director for an update & then you get yelled at b/c your director was unaware of one particular part you told your direct manager but somewhere in the next two conversations it was missed. You better start teaching EVERY SINGLE person in the company about MDR/SOTA regulations because I really think there are only 10% of the people that should understand it, actually know what it is all about.