Pros
Really great colleagues. There's a real sense of being in this together, so most everyone is supportive of one another. Beautiful campus. It's on a golf course with public trails. In sunny Colorado. Free parking.
Cons
The problem at Dish isn’t just money (which, in my field, is below market) or benefits (expensive health care that doesn’t kick in for several months, two weeks of vacation for the first three years, few holidays, no cash bonus for G&A employees, and stock bonus capped at $4,000 for non-officers). It’s also culture. Dish is the most callous place I’ve ever worked. If you interview outside HR offices at Dish HQ (headquarters), take a look around and listen. There’s very little laughter. Some areas are practically silent. In other areas, you might hear yelling. Also, check out the condition of the furniture while you’re walking around. Furniture is old and often broken. There are holes in the floor, so you have to watch where you step or move a chair. The company’s trying to improve the atmosphere through a leadership initiative, but, the approach has flaws. For example, the company is not taking a measurement of the people they are trying to develop. With no measurement and re-measurement, how will anyone know if managers have implemented what they have learned? Instead, they’re using a survey that focused on feelings rather than actions. Because employee IDs were required to take the survey, several colleagues have said they did not answer the survey candidly out of fear for their employment. Also, the program seems to be focused on middle management. Dish has a notorious reputation in Denver for managing through fear (which is why so many jobs at Dish HQ are filled with people from outside Colorado). As several recent articles and reviews have pointed out, this comes from the top. For example, there was a lot of publicity about a VP that pushed the geriatric father of another attorney at court. Nothing has been done about this. If the problems were not cultural, why would these behaviors be tolerated? Other behaviors for which Dish is notorious are micromanaging, vindictiveness, yelling, throwing objects (and sometimes hitting people with those objects), and threatening to fire people at the drop of a hat over small matters. The demands on personal time are tremendous. As other reviewers have pointed out, it's difficult to cultivate a life outside of Dish if you want to keep your job. I’ve worked every vacation and nearly every weekend and holiday, have been told to cancel medical appointments at my expense, and couldn’t attend a relative’s funeral. I’ve received no comp time for all of this work. Also, the company isn’t known from promoting internally. A common phrase around the office is that for Dish, there’s always someone better on the outside. On the plus side, if you’re hired at Dish, looking for another job in Denver is easier for two reasons. First, many interviewers don’t need a reason for leaving Dish. For them, the company’s name is enough. Second, people are impressed that you survived Dish. To them, if you can survive Dish, you can survive anywhere.
