Pros

Great training program, allowing to build your own business and managers will help you whenever needed.

Cons

worst compensation and benefit plan I've ever had....

Advice to Senior Management

If you want oustanding performance, pay more than your compitetion for the same job and people may feel they are making what they deserve compared to competitors.

Pros

Strong support staff to get things done efficiently, decent benefits and a well established company that has been around forever and likely not going to go out of business during the hard times. Good overall vendor relationships, which makes things easier in terms of securing better pricing, etc.

Cons

Poor middle management, company is too focused on monitoring and controlling your every action, than on selling. Lower than average compensation, you are taxed heavily on anything you could possibly earn. Too much focus on monitoring and controlling your every action rather than simply focused on selling. Company takes a percentage of everything from you that you don't even see

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on sales, not "good activity"

Pros

The best thing about working at PC Connection was the technology (I work in IT). They do a pretty good job of keeping you technically current and using mostly current tools and IDEs. (Some companies will balk at upgrading to a new technology). The company isn't very big, and operates pretty lean...so your contributions can seem to have impact. The group I was in also maintained external applications, which was a nice change from the intranet applications I've spent a number of years working on.

While PC Connection doesn't spend much on training, they *do* allow developers to attend one conference a year...which was nice.

My group was great - my manager was really supportive and would shield the developers from most of the office politics.

Cons

Surprisingly, in a company of this size advancement can be glacial. Some days I felt as if I knew as much as the senior level developers in the group. Annual increases are lower than inflation and rather unimpressive. My group would rotate being on-call 24x7 - the differential was almost laughable and way out of line with what other companies offer.

Outside the sales organization, there were no bonuses or other incentives. There are also a number of raffles, contests and other incentives offered to the sales force but not to the rest of the company. This leads to a feeling of inequity with the "outsiders."

Advice to Senior Management

Offer some kind of incentive to the other employees in the organization who make things work. Increase the differential pay for 24x7 employees.

Pros

Good hardware, software and networking equipment experience. They offer a fairly structured 2-3 week training period. The health benefits are fair. There was also a 10-20% discount on computer goods and any returned merchandise was sold at a great discount to emplyees. There was a health club on in the building and the location was very close the highway. I also seem to remenber they gave emplyees a turkey at thanksgiving.

Cons

There was something about the work enviornment that was overly controlling. I felt undercurrents of dissatisfaction and there was alot of turnover in the sales dept. Sales support tools were not exceptional.

Advice to Senior Management

Conduct employee opinion surveys once per year. Pretend you value your employees.