Thread regarding 3M layoffs

They have poured too much money into SAP, and the benefits did not show up. Bad investment decision.

Think of the hundreds of millions spent trying to make the company “digital”. That money should have been invested in core material science including focus on technical development and career tracks. The company simply has lost its way. 3M won’t compete with tech companies and we should realize that. We should be building labs, hiring the best material science talent we can find, and focusing on the core of what made 3M great. Digital isn’t going to grow or save the company.

Care to share which Divison president that you were from? At least we can verify your claim.

I was the president of a very large division. I left a year ago because this company is so messed up. What these people are saying is true, I couldn't stand to be a part of it so I left a 600K a year job at barely 56. My lifestyle will suffer bigtime but i can live with myself

It is not just new folks who are leaving, even mid career folks with 10 to 15 years of experience are leaving in record nos.

3M's pipeline of technical talent will have a huge deficit in the 5 to 7 years when many more Boomers retire. Who is going to work in the lab ????

With Advance3M structure it has created another unnecessary layer of regional reporting... COC should consider to remove this extra layer to cut costs... They do nothing except to collate reports and make nice PPT presentations...

Tech community needs to be right sized and management jobs consolidated.

Your primary job in the technical side is to work hard so that you manager can get credit for it and get promoted much faster than you can ever dream about.

This is the current situation these days folks !

Career advancements in the technical side were always difficult, but now over the last 10 years have become absurdly more so. Add job uncertainty to that list.

Earlier technical people thought that " Hey I have somewhat of a secure job and I like what I am doing even though career wise, I am not where I should be based on my performance and credentials".

With successive layoffs in the last 4 years and certainly more to follow, that line of thinking no longer exists.

People who have any chance of leaving are simply LEAVING. It is mass exodus with no end in sight. This was a long time coming and finally * scheisse* is hitting the fan.

Unless you are ready to join management ranks immediately after your first promotion, don't bother to stay here. Almost any other career track, esp. technical track, offers little opportunities for any meaningful career advancement. You will get 1 or maximum 2 career promotions in your lifetime over 25 or 30 years if you are pursuing a technical career in mother mining these days, unless of course you get canned before that (most likely).

The official standards for technical promotion are ridiculously high and it is also random at times. Delaying or denying promotions for technical folks leads to cost savings for the company and sadly that is the only thing left these days that is supporting the company stay afloat.

It is such an irony that a company that prides itself on it's connection to science and technology has so little to offer to the people actually doing science, technology and engineering in 3M these days.

If you are a young ambitious PhD keen on an industrial R&D career, this is not the place for you. Also see numerous previous post on this topic in this message board.

Once upon a time, a 3M technical career was pretty good. If you were smart and worked hard you could earn an above average salary, be respected by management, do some good in the world, and advance slowly but surely. A new PhDs could count on a bare minimum of 3 promotions in a career, some going much further. 3Mers invented, perfected, and produced a wide variety of products that nobody else on the planet could even make on the bench, let alone at scale.

I even remember about 15 years ago or so that 3M would proudly say they pay at the 75th percentile of wages for a given position. Today they say, less proudly, they will try to pay 50th percentile wages and are often below that. R&D attrition has at least tripled in the last 5 years, and that is the widely disclosed inside 3M number.

Today 3M has leadership that thinks the physical sciences are a liability and has zero interest in growing any new business. I've personally been told by a current COC member, in 2022, that new products are no longer needed in 3M. Multiple 3M laboratories are being starved to death as I write, even the labs that have not been outright ki---d already.

This isn't a happy note to write, but I'll get to write a better one soon -- my resignation.