warehouse worker

fulfillment associate

receiving associate

facilities associate

shipping and receiving clerk

Digi--key-Electronics

TL;DR
This company is based in the small town that it originated in, but has lost its small town and employee focused vision. With its' explosive growth, has gone "full corporate" and focused on profits, turnover, and quantity. Quality of work, pay, and incentives to stay with the company has hit abysmal lows over the past 4 years because of the new terrible leadership in the executive team and their decisions.


If you enjoy the following:
- scaling pay and opportunities up to about ~55`k per year then it's all horizontal movement (except engineering, software, and upper management)
- an executive team that always uses toxic positivity in their statements then consistently doesn't follow through on improving anything or listening to employee feedback - rather, makes things worse
- meaningless, repetitive, corporate work that will not help you achieve any useful skills other than being capable of performing entry level labor, all trainable within 2-4 weeks

Then this job is for you!

This is pretty much your bread and butter job for anyone looking for opportunity in rural northern MN, this gets your foot in the door for a decent paying job, but there is little room for meaningful improvement when you cap out at ~55k per year - that is, as long as you're willing to deal with:

- Execs who consistently make decisions in a vacuum that hurt quality of life for employees (mandatory overtime, the elimination of remote work, the elimination of "cost of living" pay increases during the highest inflation in decades, reduction of annual raises as well, dilution and elimination of high-skill jobs by delegating responsibilities to lower pay departments)
- Having execs preach consistently about the needs of communication and employee feedback and have them consistently make professional politician-esque statements that never answer questions and leave employees in the dark as they continually churn out their meeting vacuum decisions
- meaningless work, including increased performance analytics and KPIs that will leave you feeling micromanaged, crunched for time, and always behind
- always hearing toxic positivity corporate speak like how everyone in a 5000+ employee company are "family" and a "team" and how "we're all in this together" while everyone is working mandatory overtime and filling out raffle tickets to win an "employee giveaway" of a golf cart that our President bought and didn't want

Don't work here. If you're in Northern Minnesota and looking for a big company to start with, do yourself a favor and get out of Northern Minnesota because all of the major corporations here will underpay you, treat you poorly, and suck the life out of you.




Much time is wasted daily just trying to work through production system failures.  Much time is wasted in meetings trying to understand system interactions and hand-offs.  Much time is wasted playing ownership games.  So much time wasted makes it extremely difficult to add new value.

Company has recently begun heavily investment in outsourcing software development to overseas.  Management claims again and again this is no threat to local staffing, but its not hard to see through that claim.

The city of Thief River Falls, TRF, facility, where HQ and warehouse are located, is dying and the work force pool from the city is tapped out.  The housing situation of the city doesn't support the demands of the company which leads to obvious problems.

The benefits and PTO are pretty good with some caveats.  Any bonus opportunity that might be had is $100 or less and seems to be getting worse every year.

Company doesn't know the value of their employees or how to measure their merits and compensate accordingly.  There was talk when I left about some way to measure that by following the money, but I don't know where that ended up at, but its probably going to take many years to sort out.

Company remodeled some years ago.  Some walls near break room have now become meaningless inspirational word art decor, but otherwise the refresh was overdue.  The new offices from the remodeling were chosen to be encased in non-frosted glass.  They're not very popular as a result.

Both the city of TRF and company operate as though its still in their heyday years in more ways than one.  The economy is forcing the company to make wiser financial choices now in reaction to the failing economy and rising costs after decades of neglect and poor management of shared resources and licensing.  This may have played a hand in the recent rise in outsourcing efforts.

Feedback from contacts that remain employed have said there is some major trust issues with upper management.  The reasons for this are unknown.

For reference, I worked in Inbound Sales, Customer Service, and Trade Compliance at the Thief River Falls, MN location.  Each one of these jobs had weeks upon weeks of training associated with it (I had probably close to a full year of training total).  Digi-Key (DK) really likes to make sure their employees know what they are doing - which is great.  There's a lot of hands-on/on-the-job skills you end up learning for each department as well, but you get the basics and groundwork to build those skills on through the initial training.

The #1 perk of DK is the health insurance.  When you go to the doctor's office you realize what it's like to be Canadian or European.  It's practically like free healthcare.  They do dental and vision insurance as well.

Something important to note about them is that their pay rates are usually for the Thief River Falls area.  I think the highest my pay was after 5+ years of working there was $16.25 per hour.  This ended up feeling pretty low for the amount of training and work I was doing.  Also, all three of the positions I worked were considered "linear moves", so they didn't include pay raises.

Speaking of Thief River Falls, it's a ghost town.  DK is the only thing keeping it alive.  Most people drive 45 minutes over to Grand Forks, ND to do their shopping.  DK does have another MN office in Bloomington, but it's mostly IT people and some people from other departments that didn't want to live in TRF anymore, so DK let them work in the Bloomington office.  I don't recommend living in TRF.

The time off situation is pretty bad at the TRF location.  If you want to take a Friday off or any time off during the summer, you have to put it in months in advance, because the books are full and everyone wants to be out of the office.  I think I had 2 weeks of paid vacation and one week of unpaid medical.  It would get so bad trying to mark time off that you'd almost have to call in sick whenever you needed a day off for something.

Overall, they are not a bad company to work for.  Their main location is horrible, but if you can get a position that allows you to work remotely or in Bloomington (or internationally!) it's not bad.  The health insurance is amazing and there are lots of opportunities to move around internally.

A typical day is more meetings than necessary, not always relevant to you or your team, avoiding important topics because they don't think the workers deserve to be treated with respect. You Are A Number.

Management can't get their stories straight and keep promising things and then revoking them. Like work from home. They even explicitly stated to an employee who had sold their car to make ends meet that if they couldn't return to the office they could quit because that's not DK's problem. EVEN THOUGH they explicitly promised that WFH would never be revoked.

They keep talking over and over about workplace culture and how it's soooo missed and discourse is needed for the company to progress, and then they ignore all feedback that isn't what they want to hear.

They claim to have exhausted the employment opportunities in TRF; however, they revoked WFH after a lot of their employees moved to other areas. Then they took months to come up with a permission slip to work from home. Then they got hissy when people said that they weren't going to move back to TRF and would quit if DK tried to make them move back. Retaliation from management is expected. They are just making everything as difficult as possible for their US-based employees so that they can use these people quitting as an excuse to hire GCC out of India. DK has become sleazy as heck!

The hardest part of the job is trying to navigate all the horrible decisions by management, and the fact that management is just chasing the changes other companies have made instead of listening to their employees. They're absolutely incapable of hearing any opinions that don't align with the reactions they want. 

They have even tried to force salaried employees to work the warehouse as part of their "2nd Skill Initiative". It was just a shady way to get them to work two jobs so that the company could save money by not hiring more warehouse employees. Also, the salary is low compared to similar positions.

The most enjoyable part of the job is interacting with the people on your team! Odds are that your teammates will be wonderful humans who are great to work with and bounce ideas off. 

I worked here for a few weeks. The trainers were really good and I enjoyed the training process here.

However, once it was time to take the training wheels off.. things got old, quick.

For one, I’m not sure if it’s dust or what but by the time I’d leave for work I’d have a stuffy nose, sinus headache, itchy throat, coughing and sneezing. It was either suffer through this or suffer through wearing a mask the whole time.

And then there’s the work. For one, I’m tall and the work stations being so low caused me bad back pain. Most people probably wouldn’t have this issue, though.

And the work itself is just so… repetitive. The same thing over and over. I look around and everyone in here looks depressed. It’s a challenge to have any one there make eye contact with you. Looking into the eyes of employees and they seem so blank. And I can see why. In my time here I began to see how if I stayed for long I would also grow increasingly dampened by the meaninglessness of this work.

A place where you have to add extra steps to your work just so that you get credit for it and show up as “productive” on the computer system.

If you want to feel like you are but a robot, this is the spot for you. Thankfully, robots will be fully taking over these kinds of jobs before long.

All criticism aside, if you can deal with the monotony of this job I’d imagine it could be a good fit for you if all you care about is decent pay. I thought that all I cared about was the decent pay, but didn’t realize how important a sense of purpose and inspiration was. If you’re looking to feel inspired at all in your workplace this is NOT the place for you. 

Unless, of course, “Helping make Digikey rich and getting products to customers fast and efficiently” is a wealth of inspiration for you… in which case, go for it!

I couldn’t help but feel that my energy would be more useful in some other way in this world. What that way is I hope to soon find out, but it surely wasn’t Digikey. 


First let's start with the benefits package is generous, the pay is decent and it's a continuously growing company.

I used to be happy to say I worked here.
 But now they say "thank you" while axing schedules and other incentives. You're truly just a number now. 

This was once a place you'd brag about working for. I can't believe the routes they're taking to save a few dollars. Cutting back PTO caps, reducing banked holiday opportunities, reducing their flexible schedules that helped keep that beautiful work life balance. 

They'll say they appreciate you, then the next day your PTO cap is reduced. The next week they'll say thank you again, then your nice 12 hour schedules that helped with family and daycare and that perfect work life balance are gone.

They'll say thank you, but reduce your banked holiday opportunities.

Every day I worked there I wondered what they'd take away next. It's sad, I really, really miss the family oriented place that cared for its employees that Digikey used to be.



Digi-Key has a decent work experience if you are willing to do the same thing day-to-day with very little change. I had extra time where I put a huge effort in developing technical content for their technical forum. The largest disappointment was being rejected for being put on forum work more permanently because of some mistakes I made. I admit I had problems, but I poured multiple hours of work that seemed ignored. I felt very unappreciated for the extra work I put in. When I felt demoralized, I hardly wanted to put effort in anything and became despondent. I wasn't really congratulated, recognized, or even praised (I'm not typically one to go asking for appreciation either). Almost all "movement in the company" is lateral, not vertical. Titles changed, but not much else did. I enjoyed my coworkers before I got moved to a different cubicle. The movement placed me around people that didn't really talk to me. A huge problem is their view on company image. They absolutely monitor social media and have disciplined other people based on things said outside of company hours.

I really ejoyed the freedom I had in my role and team I worked directly with. I would do both creative and analytic work on a day to day basis and report/share these with my team. The marketing team at Digi-Key is all-around really great to work with and organized. No matter where you work you'll run into unpleasant people so there's a bit of that here and there, but overall, I found it easy to fit into the culture and be myself. The management I interacted with respected my expertise and experiences and spoke highly about me to others which I really enjoyed. I learned so much about the enginneering/electronics industry and just how complex and intriguing it is. I would say learning the language, behaviors, and how to best communicate effectively with this industry was the biggest learning curve I encountered. I really got along with my immediate team and couldn't ask for a more respectable, genuine, and fun team to be apart of. I truly feel like there is room and support for me at this company to grow in my expertise and within this industry.

I worked here for 12 years. When I started, things were great. Pay was higher than average, the benefits were stellar. More recently, with inflation, the pay is no longer enough. Sales staff did not get a pay raise during Covid, even though the cost of living skyrockted. There is no flexibility from management, new hires aren't trained properly, and the focus has shifted to quantity over quality, and the customers have noticed. They built a monstrosity of a warehouse just across the street that they can't even make work, orders aren't shipping, receiving is backed up, there aren't enough people in the area to hire. Building the warehouse here was a mistake, and now everyone in sales get screamed at daily by angry customers because we can't ship on time, or someone completely messed up the order they sent in. Even the supervisors and managers have no idea what they're doing. None of the internal systems work right. They expect us to do too much, all at once, for too little pay. Their idea of rewarding the staff is with an annual company picnic - in the parking lot. High stress environment. Not worth the pay. Wouldn't recommend for anyone, unless you like the taste of corporate boot.

The Fargo location has a fast-paced yet casual work environment, strong co-worker unity, and stable employment opportunities. Unfortunately, poor decision-making and lack of communication from off-site management can cause some serious headaches for employees at all levels. A terrible snow-day policy (you are expected to use your own PTO or UPT if you cannot travel due to weather conditions, and have a high probability of being terminated if you do not have enough of either available due to recent illness, vacation, etc.) and lack of equity between locations (lower pay, no shift differential, and less or reduced employee perks as compared to the Thief River Falls facility) has led to increased employee turnover. Advancement opportunities at the location are few and far between, but when they do happen they tend to pull from current employees as opposed to outside hires.  

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Warehouse worker 43 salaries reported	$19.85 per hour
Fulfillment associate 1 salary reported	$18.00 per hour
Receiving associate 31 salaries reported	$20.92 per hour
Facilities associate 12 salaries reported	$19.17 per hour
Shipping and receiving clerk 11 salaries reported	$20.14 per hour

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