A few months ago I was debating leaving my job for a new one. I got offered a contract position that was $15k over my salary for a startup. I put a post on this sub asking if it would be risky or if I should take the $15k and see where it goes. Not surprisingly, most of the comments I got on that post were to tell Steelcase “fuck you, pay me more if you want me to stay”. What’s even less surprising is that they didn’t pay me more or even offer a counter so I wouldn’t leave. That was a royal kick in the nuts considering we had all of our other mid and senior levels devs on the project leave, so I was the last one that knew how to do the development for that project in the company internally.
So I left. I took a chance in a completely new industry I’d never worked in before and I’m happy to say it’s paid off even more than I thought it would. The company decided to hire me on full time because they liked my work so much and they’re actually willing to pay me my worth with a $15k salary jump on top of the original offer. So my $15k gamble turned into an extra $30k per year and a MUCH better job where I actually feel appreciated.
Consider this my warning to people in IT. Whether you’re a software dev, IT helpdesk, data analysis, etc. stay away from Steelcase.
It’s the epitome of “our culture is great so we pay less”. They’ll try to wow you with the big cafeteria in the office, the giant outdoor space, the arcade games and the nap station. Don’t fall for it. Not only will you never have time to use any of that, they’ll continuously tell you they have your best interest in mind and want to see you grow your career while making it as difficult as possible to get promoted. And even when you do get promoted you’re still only looking at an extra $5-10k in the promotion package. I tried talking to HR and higher ups a few times about salary and always got “yeah we’re working on a new salary structure so you’ll get updates soon”. Soon will never come. The merits don’t keep up with inflation And you won’t get the title you want either. They purposely give everyone a generic “application engineer” title (regardless of what your speciality is) so that they can pay you an applications engineer salary, which will almost always be lower than your specialty title.
Aside from all that, they’ve been bleeding IT employees for a long time now. A lot of responsibilities from upper management have been trickling down to the lower levels and of course, with all of those additional responsibilities they won’t offer any extra pay.
My last point is that they’re really pushing for return to office, which makes sense because they are an office furniture manufacturer, but they could easily pivot to start targeting home offices. They just don’t want to. Management has their head in the sand and is waiting for the “work from home fad” to be over. Which is wildly dangerous considering that instead of seeing the writing on the wall with losing 1/2 the IT employees in the past year, they still think they’ll be fine on their archaic and god awful tech stack.
Steelcase had me fooled for a long time thinking their culture was the best around. They’ll convince you that there isn’t anywhere better to work even while their business is crumbling around them. I’m just glad I got out when I did.
TLDR; If you work in IT, stay away from Steelcase.
Disclosure – this is a throw away account so the name and shame won’t come back to bite me in the ass.