CSC Reviews

Pros

Some great people.
Pretty good salary.

Cons

Atmosphere of favortism regardless of work.
Too much form over substance.
Too many reports and processes that detract from actual work to do.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to HAVE better work life balance not just talk about it. Also, manage on a person by person basis -- not a herd mentality just because that is easier.

Pros

The people are smart, some of the best in the industry. The company is really loyal, I survived 3 major projects ending or getting cancelled and they always helped me get a new assignment or job within the company. They were very good with work-life balance. It is a very good organization for job stability.

Cons

That being said, they tend to pigeon hole people. They dont try to move you around to learn new things and help you advance.

Advice to Senior Management

Use the great people you have. Get them more training.

Pros

smart people, smart goals, wrong strategies to get it moving forward and riddled by rifs and cutting to stay in game vs investing time, resources, people, money in innovation and growth

Cons

driven by reports to The Street, got caught up in slice and dice management from the top leading to lack of innovation, changes that were not strategic, and major rifs of very good people

Advice to Senior Management

look forward, develop a cutting edge strategy based on growth and on outsmarting and outdoing competitors and competitive forces then man/woman up with the right talent and do everything you can to get them to stay and to team.

Pros

- Enjoy working with the Raytheon employees at the Dulles Hub
- No shortage of parts for our repairs or replacement hardware

Cons

My major pet peeve - "Mandatory" time off - CSC has individuals burn a weeks worth of vacation time during the Christmas break, and about another week collectively with their mandatory holidays.

Advice to Senior Management

It would be nice if you guys could actually let people work during some of these breaks. I'm not even talking overtime, I just mean let us actually show up. Just because you're giving us a week off doesn't mean that the work load will magically get lighter while we're gone.

Pros

Large company servicing other large corporations around the world. Many different types of roles.

Cons

Limited vision and focus on innovation and limited ability to position and support initiatives that can take advantage of what customers really need, hence they are more often than not relegated to being just a run and maintain at lowest cost type business.

Advice to Senior Management

As R&D investment is not appropriate (as that is how most technology or product companies maintain competitiveness), then the allegory for companies like CSC is to "actively" invest in the development of capabilities, vendor partnerships, solutions and services associated with emerging technologies that will have real business impact, not just here and now ROI.

Some CSC senior leadership is too focused on cost optimising "manager" behavior, and lack the necessary strength and vision to truly provide strategic leadership.

Pros

Consulting and administrative people are very nice to work with.

Cons

People do not return phone calls. There are different groups within CSC that are competing for the same piece of business. They keep no bench of consultants so staffing of opportunities is difficult. They are behind in terms of being successful at new technologies such as cloud computing and social media. Some of their offerings only existing in a pdf marketing brochure.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of lower margin businesses. Stop the infighting for opportunities between business units.

Pros

On site management really cares about employees and attempts to keep staff happy.

Cons

Communications are intended to obfuscate, not inform. emphasis is on making money, not providing a quality service. Very top heavy organization.

Advice to Senior Management

clean up the middle tiers, invest in staff, and focus on innovation.

Pros

relaxed work assignments, good place to start career if no other options available.

Cons

not good for career growth, access tuition reimbursements and other training budgets is extremely difficult even for high performing employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest more on employee higher education. Make it easy for high performing employee to access tuition reimbursements.

Pros

People are nice and helpful, willing to teach

Cons

Can get really repetitive and boring.

Pros

• Great people
• Good training for college new hires
• Good project experience
• My personal experience with my practice lead and HR personnel has been very good. They have an open door policy and are willing to work with you to pinpoint your interests and capabilities, if you approach them.
• Some projects are very flexible, allowing teleworking.
• Opportunity for promotion
• Career coaching and mentor programs have great intent and work well, if you have a good person. My personal experience with my career coach has been awesome.
• Tuition reimbursement is top notch.
• Decent benefits
• Ability to move internally if you so choose
• Excellent learning portal with a wide variety of courses. Very useful when on the bench.

Cons

• New hire processes and orientation are not standardized across the organization. People in other divisions did not have the positive orientation experience that I did.
• Promotion process is long and drawn-out with lots of paperwork and evidence needed to prove your value. This is in the process of being revamped, but more of this stuff could be automated.
• Matrixed org structure with horizontals that support vertical divisions. This is good for varied work experience, but makes the horizontal consulting practice dependent on verticals. As a result, the consulting practice doesn’t have as many of their own projects. Consultants are contracted out to the verticals as support, but verticals will always try to fill positions with their people first. This contributes to the organization not meeting their numbers, and thus employees are not compensated well even if they do get promoted. (Just a theory) I understand that tough economic times are also a major factor, but we have to be able to adjust accordingly.
• Relatively high turnover, which means that they spend more money paying new people competitive salaries rather than giving current employees better raises. (My perception) Cost of living increases are about 3-4% annually, and my promotion resulted in a 7% total raise, with cost of living included. People at our competitors can expect to receive a 20% raise after a promotion, but they meet their numbers. See above theory.
• Limited project opportunities for people in certain practices
• We work to implement quality technology solutions for our clients, but lack in our own technology platforms. If we can implement technology solutions for our clients and claim it is the best thing to use, it should be good enough for us, and we should be able to implement it for ourselves.

Advice to Senior Management

• Train all of your employees, not just college hires. Even if they understand the consulting industry, they still need to be familiarized with our internal processes.
• Find ways to improve the way your own business operates, using your own base of information technology solutions. You have talented people; use their knowledge to make things run better, and compensate them accordingly.