An acquaintance reached out about a job posting she saw at Medtronic. She asked me what I thought about this company. I made sure to tell her how my group just had several people laid off for no cause in May to help fund our VP's promotion to sr VP. This sr VP also chose to show us all photos from her daughter's multi-week European vacation right after she fired our colleagues and then dumped their work on the rest of us who are left behind. I don't think that acquaintance will be applying to work here after I told her what this company is really like as an employee. Guess actions have consequences. Keep destroying your reputation Medtronic.
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@av wow..you just keep coming back, eh! Go on, enjoy your life after Medtronic..
Promotion in this company is about as far away from a meritocracy as you could possibly fathom.
As angry as you are at your boss, OP, that is not how RIFs at Medtronic work. They're not ever based on salary, or on freeing up a budget for a promotion. You can believe me or not, but I worked on RIFs for 7 years at MDT.
In fact, if you go down in HC, you're even less likely to be promoted because the span of control (i.e. how many people you have reporting to you) goes too low.
My job at Medtronic got sent to India over a year ago. I wound up in the finance industry as a biomedical engineer with an AI background. Go figure. But I am wrapping up doctoral research with AI in healthcare and the Mayo Clinic from the academic side. As a PhD student, I network with a lot of university students. A few have posted summer internships at Medtronic and recent hirings as an entry-level FTE.
IMO, the job market is horrible right now for college graduates of Gen Z. Not only that, they also have to deal with horrible inflation and an obscene housing market. So, if they manage to get a summer internship or entry-level FTE at Medtronic, then I say they should take it. Back in the 70 to about the early 2000s, a recent college graduate who worked for a couple of years could easily put a down payment on a home at a modest price and setting. For many big cities, that is no longer possible. Inflation has outpaced income, so a lot of young college graduates just live with their parents even if they get jobs.
But the caveat is that I would not trust an entry-level FTE to last long-term into a 10+ year career. I would advise them to assume they could get laid off any month and prepare for such a financial hit. The economy is too tumultuous right now. Just get the experience for however long it can last - perhaps 1 to 3 years before people like the "Bobs" start evaluating their positions. Recall the "Bobs" from "Office Space" were hired to lay off tech workers.
To be fair, the "real world" experience could still be valuable if approached pragmatically with caveats noted above. Meanwhile, I only need 12 credits to wrap up the PhD in AI for healthcare which I do part time while working in finance. I'm studying improvements over CNN with other AI algorithms regarding Euclidean and Non-Euclidean data from clinical images using PyTorch and a super computer on campus. It's fascinating. Upon completion, I hope to get back into R&D in healthcare - but not at Medtronic. I learned my lesson.