Dell

The salary and benefits are pretty good. There's also an actually decent focus on work/life balance. Aside from the occasional long hours before or during a release to production, most people pretty much keep it to 40 hours/week. Most people also have flexibility to work from home at least part of the time.

To put it nicely, on the whole, I would say that Dell (or at least the engineering space) is a giant, inefficient, incredibly frustrating organizational mess.

When the company went private several years ago, a good chunk of the best engineering talent either quit or were laid off. Since then, the direction from management seems to have been to outsource about two-thirds of all team members to India and to never get rid of underperforming employees. So, over time, as many of the great engineers are promoted up or leave the company out of frustration, we've seen a steady degradation of overall quality on software teams.

There's also a frustrating amount of red tape to go through for every little thing. Want to deploy a bug fix to a test environment that will unblock several downstream teams for next week's release? You gotta wait until the end of the day when deployments are unlocked for two hours, or else get email sign-offs from five managers who don't know anything about your project, several of which may be asleep on the other side of the world.

Lastly, over the years, I've seen management change hands and departments renamed so many times that I literally don't even pay attention anymore if it doesn't directly impact my team. And especially when upper management is changing around, there's a good chance somebody somewhere is getting laid off. It makes people nervous.

So, to kind of sum up my pros and cons here: if you want a relatively stable job with good pay and benefits, decent work/life balance, and flexible hours, and you don't mind dealing with a whole lot of frustrating nonsense tangential to your actual work, then Dell might be a good fit. But if you're a real go-getter and want an exciting environment to work in, then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

Focus on hiring and retaining more solid engineers.

Encourage middle/lower management to get rid of under-performing employees quickly before they drag down their teams.

Empower engineers to improve products and fix problems more quickly without needing to jump through so many hoops.

Stop trying to reorganize and re-brand the whole company every 6 months.