Dell Reviews in Austin, TX Area

Pros

- Smart and competent co-workers who work hard and care about their work.
- Good pay and benefits
- Telecommuting

Cons

- Low morale and energy due to uncertainty and workloads
- Really hard to make headway against entrenched organizational problems.
- Plethora of divergent and hard-to-use tools for business and HR processes.
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Advice to Senior Management

Keep plugging away at breaking down the organizational silos that compete against each other and stymie cross-silo solutions development.

Pros

Very good culture and attitude with decent compensation that is difficult to match as well as a strong reputation in the industry.

Cons

Very slow growth and difficult to receive promotions or to transfer between departments now and occasionally misguided or incompetent management.

Pros

In the late 90's early 2000's, Dell was an exciting place to work. Despite being large even then, a strong entrepreneurial thread ran through the company. People were rewarded for getting things done. Pay was above average (but now headed to average). Austin is a great place to live. If you are lucky, you might get a good manager, but there is no guarantee and reorgs are frequent.

Cons

It was sad to see Dell lose its soul over the last 10 years. When you sell a commodity, you have to differentiate yourself somehow. Dell decided to remove its point of differentiation (support) by setting up a truly second-rate offshore support model. This horrible experience was then proliferated through other parts of the company including software development. I'm not at all convinced that it is saving the company money. It creates a tremendous amount of overhead and frustration both internally and externally. Also, Dell appears to have no common values or norms that they are looking for in the management team they hire. VP's/Executive directors are as different as night and day. The goal seems to be to "shake things up" with each new executive they hire, so they are always on the hunt for more aggressive and eccentric leaders. Reorgs happen, on average, once per year. It is like working for a brand new company each time. You have to be very adaptable and flexible to work at Dell for long. Also, Dell will not hesitate to fire you if they think it will help business results at all. Perhaps this is exactly what investors want, but it certainly has a bad effect on employee loyalty.

Advice to Senior Management

There's still time for Dell to resuscitate itself, but it will be very hard. It will have to start with creating some type of culture at the company. Dell has become the average of all companies in the US by hiring managers from all the other big companies in the US. Create some type of strength in the company that people can rally around and be proud of that makes them different.

Pros

Reliable hours, compensation and work load. Good benefits package. The team I am personally working with has a good attitude and skill level. Hard to find a higher paying job in town.

Cons

Business owners and departments are very segmented or sillo-ed, which creates avoidable but reoccurring problems. Resourcing is not ideal, projects assignments are typically similar in nature. There is not a wide variety of work and it isn't easy to quickly move between departments. Top level management repetitively makes poor decisions and it affects morale from the top down.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire stake holders more carefully and surpress the urge to over-react quickly to solve problems. The corporate environment at Dell is not always fast paced, give talented, smart employees time to solve problems rather than re-assigning them to another task, etc.

Pros

- Strong leadership and healthy encouragement in career development
- Great recent acquisitions (KACE, Boomi, Perot, Etc)
- Competitive Pay

Cons

- Hasty organizational changes based on the market
- Standards based corporation this is not considered an "innovator"
- Difficult to transfer career paths across organizations within Dell

Advice to Senior Management

- Provide clear and honest direction when large organizational changes are coming
- Reward employees with addtl responsibilities and pay when they have shown a record of success

Pros

Great brain trust among peers. Stimulating and fast paced environment. Good compensation relative to the industry and located in the Austin Texas area which has great quality of life.

Cons

Since most of engineering is now in Asia, evening and very early morning conference calls are the norm. Many want to pursue the "glamor of International business". What they don't realize is that this means that the blackberry never stops because somewhere in the world, it's prime working hours and they need your input so the conference calls never end.

Advice to Senior Management

Clear strategy, demonstrated comittment to employees even when the market softens. So many people are walking around keeping their heads down avoiding layoffs that they aren't as productive as they could be. Every Christmas break for the past few years there have been significant re-orgs for the new fiscal year. Net effect is that holidays are spent fretting about if you have a job when you return... so exhausting I left after 17 years... Love the company but couldn't deal with that any more.

Pros

Easy commute if you live in Round Rock.
Decent resources for employee's to increase their knowledge/skills if you take advantage of what's available.

Cons

Bureaucracy like the govt.
No innovation.
Cronyism
Employee trust in management very low. Management not forthcoming with pertinent information.
Hiring practices and applying for new positions both internal and external aggravating.
Performance evaluation based on unknown factors.

Advice to Senior Management

Study the employee-management practices of companies that rank highly with employee's. Employee satisfaction leads to better productivity.
Don't copy competitors. Invest in R&D.

Pros

Pros for me include:
- a great group of co-workers
- well at dell program
- networking opportunities internal and external

Cons

Cons for me include:
- finding out Dell does almost nothing and I do mean nothing, in the U.S. anymore
- an almost total lack of real training for anything other than learning about products
- prevalent ignorance all the way to executives about important aspects of the customer base to which they are trying to sell
- being forced to use ridiculously convoluted processes to complete relatively simple tasks...and did I mention those processes almost always use external people to try to save a dime?

Advice to Senior Management

You hired people with particular areas of expertise...let them use their knowledge and do the jobs you claimed you wanted them to do. I have so much more to say, however, you won't pay attention, you never do.

Pros

Challenging technical and business problem solving. Largest .NET eCommerce site in the world. Very few companies can match the scale of Dell.

Cons

Too much reliance on offshore developers. Promotion from C3 to D1 can be very political and difficult. It is much easier to be hired in as a D1.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce offshore development resources, and invest in fewer, but higher quality local resources. The development group needs to be close to the business in order to deliver in an agile manner.

Pros

There is exposure to a lot of new technology at Dell.

Cons

Communication is lacking from upper management and training is up to par for contractors.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide better communication to employees.