Hewlett Packard Enterprise

I worked as a Software Engineer for a number of years at HP. There was flexibility and quite a bit of freedom to experiment technically (probably because I had some seniority on the team).

Benefits (Health/401k, etc.) were good, probably because it is a large company with a very large headcount, giving it more leverage than medium-sized companies to be able to afford decent benefits.

Workforce reductions happened quite often, and I believe they will continue, with another 30,000 announced recently (around mid-2015).

Salary is low. There were no increases in the recent past. And in my case, HP was dishonest. HP refused to do anything about compensation, despite repeated requests to do so by my immediate managers, when I relocated from a part of the country where the cost of living was low to a 'high cost' city. OK, fine. I understand that it's not HP's responsibility, since my decision to relocate was a personal one.

But here's the problem: HP had no problem billing the account I worked for more money after I relocated. That is, since I relocated to a 'high cost' city, HP started charging my account a lot more, but my paycheck from HP remained the exact same, and they kept saying they did not have more money to pay me. They had the nerve to tell me to 'just hang in there' for now. Ha!

When I think about all those training courses on 'Ethics' that HP made us take every year, I just laugh. What a joke!

Constantly claiming that your employees are the 'heart & soul' of the company, but not doing much to compensate them for their efforts, is not a winning strategy. Why? Because there are plenty of companies to choose from. All things considered, the only regret I have is not leaving sooner. My bad.