Dell

The best reasons to work for Dell are:

1. Experience working with the best and latest technology on the market. Learning is constant and varied on the job, and training courses are constantly provided and encouraged.
2. The salary and benefits package is good.
3. Colleagues are professional and highly skilled, which makes for a great experience to learn from others' knowledge.

Downsides are:

• Just lost several of my colleagues to involuntary redundancy, and the way it was handled by management was disgraceful. We had to wait from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. to know whether we were one of the people being made redundant or not.
• Atmosphere and morale are at an all-time low.
• Management is ruthless and seems to have no respect for employees.
• Expected to work weekends and a lot of out-of-hours work for no extra pay.
• 24/7 on-call for I.T. people such as myself once a month by rotation, which ruins any chance of work/life balance.
• Treatment of women in the workforce is disgraceful regarding lack of promotion or equality, especially if maternity leave is involved. Might as well kiss your career at Dell goodbye if you have the audacity to get pregnant while working for them.
• Culture of fear propagated by management by extending layoffs over a one-year period.
• Dell aims to serve stock market analysts instead of their customers and/or employees.
• Internal movement to other positions is almost impossible. It is easier to leave the company and get placed in another Dell job by an external recruitment company than to attempt to move internally. What HR is doing is anyone's guess, but they are not involved in trying to retain good people.
• Endless mindless duplication of reporting; this company seems to be run on Excel spreadsheets. There is repetition of the same reports being produced around various functions of business when surely everyone should be working off a similar set of reports?
• Globalization has been very badly managed; people traveling around the globe trying to coordinate global teams, and a few months later, management complains about Opex.
• There used to be a 'Winning culture' at Dell, now replaced with 'Fear culture,' which is crippling the company's innovation.

See above downsides of Dell.

Serve your customer best by treating your employees well instead of bowing to the stock market analysts.