It's fine - Middle Manager Hydrofarm Employee Review

Easiest job i ever had as a assembler

Night shift was mandatory. However i still enjoyed it,

The pros used to be independence and getting to work from home. While the wfh part is true your workload and responsibilities will grow and grow and grow until you are expected to put in overtime constantly for the job. The only good thing about this job is your fellow workers.

Plenty to list here so I will try to be thorough. If you’d like to move up in this company prepare to do all the work of the position without any of the benefits for months before they even consider a promotion. Management is clueless, from department to department no one understands what the responsibilities of the workers are. As a customer service representative a manager from another department suggested I make cold call sales to prove myself for promotion. Something the sales department would have hated for me to do and it has nothing to do with the position I had. “Middle management” is just the people they’ve suckered into take all the responsibility without any of the pay. Which leads to the actual managers having no idea what’s going on within there teams. Turnover, during my time with Hydrofarm dozens of employees were laid off, asked to resign or quit on their own due to toxic managers, low pay and other issues. The utter disorganization of this company will be its downfall, we had 3 different managers while I was there and 2/3 of them were managers of other departments who took on our department after our managers were let go and our department consolidated to another. Management is constantly having to be taught basic SOP’s because they are moving around so frequently. Empty promises and praise, they are excellent at stringing you along, with managers saying they are “hopeful” that we will receive raises, bonuses or other incentives that never come. Atleast when I started they would throw us a bone with a gift card every couple months, not that that makes a difference but it’s better than hearing “things are in the works” for months. There is no focus from management and the lack of organization and knowledge from department to department, has left them with outdated software and technical bugs on a daily basis. Responsibility is constantly offloaded to the bottom workers with no incentive or additional compensation. Not to mention it feels like most management is doing as little work as possible and passing it to the next person down the chain. HR is unfriendly and does not have the interest of the workers in mind, they only care petty drama and in my experience did nothing to resolve the situations rather they participated in the issues, which is a shame cause this company’s could benefit greatly from a decent HR team. If you love the industry and want to find a meaningful experience within it, stay away.