Hewlett Packard Enterprise

I was with HPE for close to 5 years, joining as a Junior Dev Engineer and I was a Senior Software Dev Engineer when I left.

I was part of HPE-Aruba Networking BU, so I will keep my review relevant to this BU alone.

An excellent place if you really like development activity as part of your job.

This BU is always growing, innovating, and looking to compete with the best in the industry, hence there are always many feature development opportunities for engineers.

There is a real scope for understanding standard as well as new technologies as there is so much work involved.

Pros as per me:

• Excellent development work and a great platform to learn and improve your knowledge with respect to Networking protocols.
• Very good and experienced seniors who have overall knowledge in their respective fields.
• You can test yourself as you will be involved from the design phase to delivery for the customer stage. You will understand the whole process very well.
• Help is always available if you ask for it.
• Decent hikes year on year.
• Management and leaders have a good vision of what they want in the next 3-4 years.

Though the company offers great opportunities to build a career, it does have cons, as I have seen. Here are the cons with the BU I worked with:

1. No work-life balance.

2. There is a lot of obscure activity expected from the developers, which could have been easily performed by other teams. This takes too much time beyond the actual work assigned, and the worst part is that these obscure activities are not even considered work, even if they take a lot of time. Hence, the pressure is high on developers.

3. The process involved in getting a feature to completion is so tedious. It sometimes feels like developers are running the company.

4. Management is very much involved in micromanaging.

5. Other than working on technologies and becoming knowledgeable in the technology part, there is no career plan for employees. It is like management just wants you to work a lot, but they have no plans to help build your career.

6. Though it has decent hikes, the bonuses they offer on a yearly basis are literally peanuts. Worst in the industry.

7. No flexibility, no WFH options.

1. Stop micromanagement; trust your engineers to deliver the feature.
2. Improve compensation and benefits.
3. Treat developers as humans. Please come up with a program to offload a lot of the obscure activity with which the developer is not equipped to other teams. This helps the developers improve their efficiency.
4. Appreciate your engineers regularly; they work so hard. They deserve it.