Dow reviews

The company is headed into wrong direction. The board needs to intervene and purge out incompetent C level executives who have been responsible for driving the stock price from ~60$ to ~20$ in less than a year. The extreme focus on DEI is counter productive - it is costing the company a lot. Promotion freeze and hiring freeze is in place for about a year yet you’ll see higher level directors and fellows get promotions. The policy is not applied to all levels equally. Spending freeze is getting to a ridiculous levels. Workstations haven’t been upgraded for 4+ years. The awards and recognitions have been stopped for over a year. The morale of the workforce is very low. Despite laying off a significant portion of employees, the leaders have unrealistic expectations about the amount of work that needs to be done. The employees have been reduced but the work is still the same if not more. The Dow chemical company from 2022 and from today are not the same. It will probably take years to recover from this position. The company wide surveys for leaders and organization have been discontinued. The flexible work has also been discontinued - the company didn’t fail cause employees had flexibility - the company failed because the leadership has been a disaster. This company needs a fresh start and purging of current C level execs. If you have an offer from Dow, please reconsider it. There’s no growth or promotions for at least 3-4 years.

-Dow epic-ly fails at co-aligning employee performance with employee rewards (pay raises). The people that rise to the top are always those that play the game the best. Technical performance is 'rewarded', but often the spotlight is stolen by someone else. These sorts of thing are common in corporate america; Dow is on the worse end of it. -Core R&D is not the best place to be right now (recently chopped pretty heavily), and based on trends in the chemical industry, it doesn't look good for the future. The degree to which Dow's businesses value Core R&D varies, but there historically have been complaints. -Midland sucks. It's a good place to live if you want to raise a family, but other than that there isn't much going on in any regards. -although Dow has a good culture in terms of accepting different races/genders/etc..., it has a very narrow personality type. Everyone at Dow is Type A, and Dow employees struggle heavily with doing anything differently than they used to. Dow really struggles with non-conventional solutions and thinking outside of the box. -High-level management change every year or two really undermines overall group performance. -mid-level management (e.g. most people's managers) are usually some combination of ineffectual, impotent, or uncaring. On average I've had a new manager every ~10 months, and not a single one really helped my career much. Some were well intentioned, but constrained by 'rules'. Some didn't care. etc... -When you factor all of these things together, could think that Dow would struggle with talent retention (e.g. keeping high performers versus people who play the game well). This is a well known problem at Dow. It is very common for people to getting industrial training at Dow and then go off to another company where they are more highly valued.