What are perks and other benefits like at Protolabs?

I think this is a great place to work. Good people to work with. I am lucky to have a great leader and have had for a few years. Flexible work environment. We work together well. I think salary is good, but if you combine it with the flexible work environment, the leadership, and the other benefits, this place is hard to beat.

We have old systems that don't talk to each other. It's known and it will take time to fix/improve. Not terrible, and can be worked around.

Friendly work environment. Like the folks I work with. The work is a little tedious but consistent. The benefits are very good.

The material we work with is of questionable safety. Lots of airborne dust. Masks and other PPE are provided, but long term safety/quality of life comes into question.

Good benefits and work life balance

Constant changing of Commission sturcture making it harder to have a competitive OTE

- Great coworkers! My colleagues always made Protolabs a welcoming, collaborative environment! I learned a lot during my time here. - The benefits are great...for now

Where to begin? - In general, people here are just a number. Instead of being treated like a valued, contributing member of the organization, employees are perceived by management to be an extraneous line item eating away at their bonuses. Nobody's job is safe. In the past few months, entire departments have been shuttered with very little notice or severance. High ranking and highly respected individuals at the managerial and director levels have also been terminated with absolutely zero notice and no plans to delegate their responsibilities. - It's clearly a sinking ship. Most people who have the ability to do so are leaving, many premier account managers in particular have jumped ship in the past few months. It is unclear how they plan on maintaining the top-tier client base that they so covet without those good folks on the ground doing the actual work. - Low pay. Positions pay well below market rate, and raises are hard to come by. Instead of leaving raises to merit and managerial discretion, everybody gets the same tiny pay bump that doesn't even cover rent increases regardless of performance. Sales had their commissions chopped down to next to nothing. - Gaslighting leadership. All-company meetings are filled with leadership crowing about high profits and the thriving culture while laying everybody off and cutting funding for team events down to nothing. Their response to a tsunami of negative employee reviews was that those employees should just quit. Instead of hiring on expensive consultants to fix your issues, literally just take accountability for your actions. It's that simple. - They announced record profits and an end to paid sick leave within a week of each other. Think that just about sums up the management style around here.

Protolabs is an easy job with simple tasks—do the work, clock out. You can slack and still earn most of the pay and recognition. Benefits are average. If you want minimal effort for expected outcomes, it's an ordinary job. They show some concern for diversity, which is noteworthy in manufacturing.

I have a lot to say but I'll give a short take first for people considering working here. Frankly, if you are the kind of person that reads Glassdoor reviews to figure out if you should work somewhere, you care too much about your job to work here happily and successfully. This company is not for people who want to be rewarded for good work, who desire self-actualization or who want an even vaguely competitive salary. Working at this company is only survivable long term if you are the kind of person who will never, ever care about your job beyond what you need to do to clock in and out. Disengagement is a survival skill. Any further engagement beyond that is not only an active risk to your career, it will quickly burn you out and leave you miserable. Pay is terrible and handled poorly. Protolabs benchmarks salaries nationwide but aims *below* the market. Job posting salaries are dishonest; it's corporate policy that employees can *never* earn more than halfway up the posted salary band. Hitting that cap halts raises beyond cost of living unless job titles change. In sales, the commission system is a scam. Despite record-breaking targets, no seller I have spoken to about this (dozens) has hit more than 85% of quota. The threshold for receiving any amount of commission is 80%. If you actually stay on pace with your target, your quotas will increase mid-year without explanation. If you are assigned a departing colleague’s customers, your quota also increases, potentially undoing months of hard work. Staffing and business organization decisions are erratic, unstable, and never thought through, resulting in a constant flow of disruptive changes made without any regard for the functioning of the business, the support of employees, or even the company’s own bottom line. Let me be perfectly clear here - I am not saying they are making calculated business decisions that happen to hurt people. I am saying they are making decisions that both hurt people as well as their own business in both the short and the long term. Taking this job means you have to watch management destroy their own business in front of you, over and over again. Going above and beyond or taking ownership is an active career risk. Promoted and/or critical employees are often cut during pointless reorganizations, with management seeming to lack any understanding of the harm such a decision does. The company actively pushes out vital talent - likely by design. Management keeps organizational decisions secret. Major changes happen suddenly without explanation, despite the clear benefit of transparency and feedback. Upper management, disconnected from daily operations, imposes sweeping changes entirely blindly. More than once, management announced a key role was eliminated, the role being in charge of implementing a strategic program - only to be surprised that now there are no employees left to run said program. Upper management and HR communicate with arrogance and condescension. They see no need to explain disruptive, costly decisions, leaving rank-and-file employees to pick up the pieces without support. Their tone and attitude is genuinely the worst I’ve seen in my professional life - condescending, dismissive, and disrespectful - masked beneath a thin veneer of "Minnesota Nice." You can see this attitude on Glassdoor, where HR’s public responses to negative reviews are often dismissive and incorrect. And they talk like this in a public venue, where they are trying to impress potential new hires! Their tone here foreshadows internal interactions, where they feel no obligation to be respectful or transparent. This superiority complex isn’t just communication - it infects the whole company. Employees and lower managers are blocked from advancing beyond certain levels. The company leaves roles vacant for years rather than promoting qualified internal candidates. Managers and directors frequently misuse HR and disciplinary processes for retaliation and harassment of employees that challenge decisions or push back in any way.

- My immediate colleagues are wonderful, intelligent, and great to work with - Benefits are decent

I’ve only been with PL for a little over 2 years and things have gone down hill FAST. What once was a company built on culture and people, has now turned to profit and greed. It’s very clear that the c-suite team doesn’t care about the employees or their concerns. Entire teams have been laid off without a plan to continue their workload, managers with years of experience have been laid off without warning, or a way to keep the knowledge within the company. Wages have been low since day one, but even after hiring a pay specialist (and they quit shortly after) nothing was done to give any sort of market value updates. The leadership teams somehow are still patting themselves on the back for “listening to their employees”. Wild take considering many folks barely got a raise (like 3%) or none at all. High level AM’s have been leaving left and right for better positions and the solution is to offload the work onto other teams that are already struggling with demand. Folks are burned out, scared to speak up, worrying about losing their job, and are generally miserable. The culture that was here when I started is completely gone. I’ve already felt like I’ve overstayed my welcome here.

Decent health coverage, which management is probably trying to cut.

This place is on fire right now: management seems determined to tear it down just for kicks and stock-price manipulation. Cutting benefits, giving everybody these insulting cost-of-living increases that don't match the cost of living, closing offices, laying people off: they've singlehandedly turned this company into a place that EVERYBODY is looking to leave over the course of about a month. I've never seen anything like it.

Location, great benefits, PTO and holiday hours

Lower pay than other companies doing the same job. Cut our pay and hours last year. Seems like the company is always looking to save money at the employees expense.

Protolabs is an easy job with simple tasks—do the work, clock out. You can slack and still earn most of the pay and recognition. Benefits are average. If you want minimal effort for expected outcomes, it's an ordinary job. They show some concern for diversity, which is noteworthy in manufacturing.

I have a lot to say but I'll give a short take first for people considering working here. Frankly, if you are the kind of person that reads Glassdoor reviews to figure out if you should work somewhere, you care too much about your job to work here happily and successfully. This company is not for people who want to be rewarded for good work, who desire self-actualization or who want an even vaguely competitive salary. Working at this company is only survivable long term if you are the kind of person who will never, ever care about your job beyond what you need to do to clock in and out. Disengagement is a survival skill. Any further engagement beyond that is not only an active risk to your career, it will quickly burn you out and leave you miserable. Pay is terrible and handled poorly. Protolabs benchmarks salaries nationwide but aims *below* the market. Job posting salaries are dishonest; it's corporate policy that employees can *never* earn more than halfway up the posted salary band. Hitting that cap halts raises beyond cost of living unless job titles change. In sales, the commission system is a scam. Despite record-breaking targets, no seller I have spoken to about this (dozens) has hit more than 85% of quota. The threshold for receiving any amount of commission is 80%. If you actually stay on pace with your target, your quotas will increase mid-year without explanation. If you are assigned a departing colleague’s customers, your quota also increases, potentially undoing months of hard work. Staffing and business organization decisions are erratic, unstable, and never thought through, resulting in a constant flow of disruptive changes made without any regard for the functioning of the business, the support of employees, or even the company’s own bottom line. Let me be perfectly clear here - I am not saying they are making calculated business decisions that happen to hurt people. I am saying they are making decisions that both hurt people as well as their own business in both the short and the long term. Taking this job means you have to watch management destroy their own business in front of you, over and over again. Going above and beyond or taking ownership is an active career risk. Promoted and/or critical employees are often cut during pointless reorganizations, with management seeming to lack any understanding of the harm such a decision does. The company actively pushes out vital talent - likely by design. Management keeps organizational decisions secret. Major changes happen suddenly without explanation, despite the clear benefit of transparency and feedback. Upper management, disconnected from daily operations, imposes sweeping changes entirely blindly. More than once, management announced a key role was eliminated, the role being in charge of implementing a strategic program - only to be surprised that now there are no employees left to run said program. Upper management and HR communicate with arrogance and condescension. They see no need to explain disruptive, costly decisions, leaving rank-and-file employees to pick up the pieces without support. Their tone and attitude is genuinely the worst I’ve seen in my professional life - condescending, dismissive, and disrespectful - masked beneath a thin veneer of "Minnesota Nice." You can see this attitude on Glassdoor, where HR’s public responses to negative reviews are often dismissive and incorrect. And they talk like this in a public venue, where they are trying to impress potential new hires! Their tone here foreshadows internal interactions, where they feel no obligation to be respectful or transparent. This superiority complex isn’t just communication - it infects the whole company. Employees and lower managers are blocked from advancing beyond certain levels. The company leaves roles vacant for years rather than promoting qualified internal candidates. Managers and directors frequently misuse HR and disciplinary processes for retaliation and harassment of employees that challenge decisions or push back in any way.

Relaxed culture Great work life balance Flexible working Hybrid working

Bad communication from exec leadership Constant lack of including middle management for 'front-line advice/insights' when making crucial change decisions Could do with padding out the company benefits Career progression not clear and felt overlooked many times