Electronic Data Systems Reviews in Detroit, MI Area

Pros

The best reason for me is the paycheck. The company ecourages individuals to training and offers in house computer based training. Most of my career training I did it on my own time by using the internet. About 8 years EDS had incentives for employees to get certified, but that was stopped. There many nice and very skilled people that I have worked with overtime, and I have learned a lot from these people.

Cons

Recently most of us are leaving in fear of getting let go because of the economic conditions. I have seen many experienced people let go in US and then you hear that that upper management is encouraging increase in outsourcing the jobs to other countries. We used to have flexibility of working from home that made life easy, but they took that away from the employees. One would think with increasing gas prices that a reasonable company would offer that the employees in order to increase morale. The process for one to be promoted from one position to another is very complex it makes believe that they do not want employees promoted.

Advice to Senior Management

no comment

Pros

I learned a lot as it was a diversified workplace and almost everyone was great to work with. We had people from around the world working at the company and most were very skilled. The vacation and time off policies were very generous. If your client had the time off you did too, regardless of how much vacation you had. So if your client was off for the week of Christmas, you were too and it didn't count againt your vacation days. They used to send us for lots of training. I made many great personal and professional contacts. They tried to keep up with the latest technology.

Cons

Layoffs every year. I made it through 17 years and then my job was off shored to people I trained! Expected to be on call 24/7. Didn't stick up for employees when internal customers were abusive. Internal customers treated us like slaves and wer very abusive on conference calls in front of EDS managers who did nothing. Lots of management turnover. I had THREE new managers that i never even meet. My last manager quit and my senior manager used my 2007 review to write my 2008 review. I first met her at my 2008 review. My review rated me on job responsiblities that I wasn't doing anymore and hadn't for a year and a half.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop giving bonuses when you are laying people off. Get some managers that have been trained to lead people.

Pros

High quality of other employees.
Good relationship with first-line managers.
Places strong emphasis on supporting the customer, and providing a good value to the customer.

Cons

1) Over the last five years the compensation levels have dropped and benefits have been reduced. For example, it used to be fairly routine to be able to be reimbursed for after-hours graduate classes; now there is no reimbursement available.
2) There is continuing pressure to move more systems development work overseas, even though quality will suffer.
3) Top level management is *grossly* over-compensated. As part of the HP acquision of EDS, a number of senior managers were offered golden parachutes to resign - equivalent to millions of dollars, plus compensation and benefits for several years.
4) Too many layers of management between the top and the bottom, and way too many senior staff positions with ill-defined responsibilities.

Advice to Senior Management

You people spend way to much time in meetings, and you're too removed from the nuts and bolts of the business. Get out and spend more time in the trenches with the software engineers who interact daily with your customers!

Pros

EDS is a large, global IT services company that offers some job mobility and flexibility.

Cons

Since the departure of Ross Perot, EDS has suffered from increasingly mediocre senior leadership and an erosion of values and ethics. People are generally treated as a commodity and leaders no longer receive any meaningful training on how to deal with employees and clients in a fair and ethical manner.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize that success of the company results from the success of the people. Reinvigorate the values and ethics that made EDS a once great company.

Pros

Intelligent employees; good opportunity to change career focus; The communication from upper management to the worker bees is wonderful;

Cons

Company Direction in endless flux; Senior management cluelessl; EDS does not know how to pick lower level management; no idea how to write reasonable contracts; too much focus in moving work offshore; the communication from upper management is great, but the problem is it that it is always about a new way of doing things.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop focusing solely on the shareholder and focus on writing good contracts that your employees can actually fulfill.

Pros

The only reason to work for EDS is the paycheck, and the benefits.

Cons

I am currenly looking at the buyouts that the auto companies are giving their employees, and comparing them to how EDS treated employees that they let go some years ago.

SHAME on EDS for what they did to them. EDS reduced severance payouts that should have been anywhere up to 26 weeks (for employees with 26 years experience) to only 4 weeks of severance. (Prior to the Reduction In Force, the official policy was 1 week of severance for every year on the job.) EDS stopped helath plan participation on the day employees were fired.

I know people at Chrysler, that with just over 5 years experince with the company, are being offered buyouts of over $50,000, plus a free vehicle! Plus continuation of medical coverage for 6 months. More senior employees are getting even better buyouts.

Consider that when EDS fired thousands back in 2001 and 2002 that EDs was still making decent profits (just not as much as IBM), Consider that currently Chrysler is on the verge of filing bankruptucy in the next 6 months - if they don't get government loans. This comparison lets you can see just how little EDS values it's employees!

Avoid this company at all costs. BTW, HP now owns EDS.

Advice to Senior Management

Pray for forgiveness for yourselves - you're going to need it.

Pros

This was my first "real job" out of college, so in one sense, this was a great starter job. I think the benefits package is/was also competitive with other large corporations in the US as well.

Cons

Where to start!

- In general, I thought upper management was completely clueless with regards to the problems facing the front-line workers. Outsourcing (or Best Shoring) is not, in theory, a bad idea. There were plenty of over-paid, under-performing US workers (who never seem to be fired, since most managers cannot, apparently properly measure performance), but replacing them with even less competent workers is not a solution, especially when their failure just leads to assigning more work to the remaining US workers. And, of course, admitting failure was never an option, so no matter what they screwed up, it was a "success"

-Obsession with process, in lieu of actually solving problems. What people don't seem to get is that when the process is too cumbersome, people will a) skip it, b) avoid the work, or c) deal with it. Guess which ones people chose more often than not? And guess what effect that has on workers and the work they do?

- As mentioned earlier, management being seemingly incapable of determining employee worth/value.

- Job security is non-existent. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if EDS didn't insist that we're all one big happy family, and that we should be loyal to the company. Better to just be honest about this being a mutually beneficial business relationship.

- Ending the telecommute option. This had to be one of the dumbest moves EDS ever made. In an age of instant communication through a plethora of means, EDS slams shut one of the few benefits it had going for it. The fact is, good workers will either work, or they wont. They wont have to sneak around as much at home, but trust me, they're the same crappy employees when they're sitting in their cubicles too. Instead of implementing a fair, decentralized policy (giving individual managers discretion to allow it, and the ability to revoke it for employees that can't handle it), they implemented a corporate-wide policy ending it. This led to some hilarious situations, where teams that were geographically dispersed *still* had to come in to any office. It doesn't matter if they work with no one at that office, and never talk to the people around them, it's good policy to have them in the office, sucking up (expensive) real estate, phone lines, etc.

- Since this was my first (real) job, EDS could low-ball the crap out of me. Fine, I get it, I'm untested and need to prove my worth. But what happens when I do? A fat pay raise to bring me up the median salary of my peers? Of course not! It doesn't matter if your in the top 20% of your group.... sure, you'll get that 5-7% raise, but when you start so low, it doesn't really matter. The worst thing is, you can *never* bargain for a better salary. Tell them you have a job offer that pays an industry standard wage and they basically say "we don't negotiate with terrorists!" Of course, you can leave and come back in 6 months and they'll gladly upgrade you to a higher wage.... if EDS thinks someone else is willing to pay you more money (and you can prove with a paycheck; a credible offer wont work!) they'll pay more. EDS should try leading, instead of following.

Advice to Senior Management

Being a senior manager is no doubt difficult, but people really are a company's best asset, and EDS clearly doesn't believe that. They frequently can't recognize talent, and even if they do they stifle it with poor compensation, inflexible working conditions, a nasty bureaucracy that makes problem solving difficult, and staffing solutions that frequently create more problems.

Pros

Pros:

I worked with some wonderful people when I was at EDS. The people are diverse, intelligent, opinionated and extremely knowledgeable.

EDS has so many divisions inside itself. If you change from one team to another, it is like changing from one company to another, everything is totally different. Therefore, if you're bored with one aspect of technology, change to a different group and learn about other areas without leaving the company.

The benefits are good; the medical, dental, and vision are above average. You also get a decent amount of vacation time and I never had a problem getting time off.

Cons

Outsourcing was a big downside and we were told to "make it work" with no help from upper management. This was incredibly frustrating when you tried everything, but still had a hard time "making it work". Management came across as very helpful when it came to outsourcing and they wanted us to come to them with any problems, but they were very poor at following through.

Senior Management also had an issue with alternative work arrangements and believed that you weren't working if you were not in the office. This attitude was not very good for morale and just sent a very unfortunate message to all their hard working employees. Hopefully, this attitude has changed.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more aware of the tremendous talent and expertise of the people that do the actual work for the company.

Pros

The people are good, but misused.

Cons

Lack of leadership that understands issues.

Advice to Senior Management

Too much bureaucracy. Lessen the number of managers and focus on employee training. Stop myopic focus on offshore as that does not help moral or improve quality.

Pros

Before the HP merger, they offered good benefits and compensation - as a former member of the General Motors family, EDS has a lot of the same benefits that the UAW negotiated during the good times at the automotive companies. The vacation time was very competitive, starting everyone off with three weeks plus one diversity day, but not sure if that will change under HP. There is opportunity for advancement if you're willing to pay the price. There is even opportunities to explore other careers. And I was surprised to find that a degree is not a prerequisite for employment even for management, which is refreshing. There's a lot of very talented employees with misplaced loyalties.

Cons

The expectation is that you will work as much as is needed. For the last year, in preparation for the "merger" with HP, there's regular workforce reductions that have left the remaining employees with excessive amounts of work to do. They haven't stopped pursing new business despite having let over 10% of the workforce go. They haven't changed the processes to streamline things to make it so that we can continue to do our work with any semblance of quality. There's a lot of politics and backstabbing - a lot of very ambitious folks willing to step on others to get ahead. Despite making my customers happy, my resource manager, whom I only have face-to-face contact with twice a year, gave me a bad performance rating, which left me vulnerable to layoff. It was clear that these ratings were given so that our department could hit their target. Despite what they say, they do forced rankings - at least 10% have to be given a low rating. At least where I am, there is very little support for new employees - you sink or swim on your own merits and there are those who will question your skills behind your back. If you go to your management for help with problems, they will judge you and give you a poor ranking. There is zero respect for your personal life - some speak with pride that they worked 100 hours in a week. There is no work life balance at all. They won't even provide any office supplies anymore - we have to bring our own. Seniority and/or skill will not protect you from being laid off.

Advice to Senior Management

We are people, not numbers on a sheet of paper - treat us with some respect and stop encouraging people to work themselves to death. As soon as the economy improves, everyone with any talent will leave. Be fair about layoffs - don't just let luck, or a the lack of it, decide who gets to stay on your sinking ship. A workforce that is constantly worried about being let go can't be a good face to your clients. And buy some damn pens and paper, for god's sake.