Software Engineer - Software Engineer Dell Technologies Employee Review

3.0
Sep 27, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The salary and benefits are pretty good. There's also an actually decent focus on work/life balance. Aside from the occasional long hours before/during a release to production most people pretty much keep it to 40 hours/week. Most people also have flexibility to work from home at least part of the time.

Cons

To put it nicely, on the whole I would say that Dell (or at least the engineering space) is a giant, inefficient, incredibly frustrating organizational mess. When the company went private several years ago a good chunk of the best engineering talent either quit or were laid off. Since then the direction from management seems to have been to outsource about 2/3 of all team members to India and to never get rid of under-performing employees. So over time as many of the great engineers are promoted up or leave the company out of frustration we've seen a steady degradation of overall quality on software teams. There's also a frustrating amount of red tape to go through for every little thing. Want to deploy a bug fix to a test environment that will unblock several downstream teams for next week's release? Gotta wait until the end of the day when deployments are unlocked for 2 hours or else get a email sign-offs from 5 managers who don't know anything about your project, several of which may be asleep on the other side of the world. Lastly, over the years I've seen management change hands and departments renamed so many times that I literally don't even pay attention anymore if it doesn't directly impact my team. And especially when upper management is changing around, there's a good chance somebody somewhere is getting laid off. Makes people nervous. So to kind of sum up my pros and cons here, if you want a relatively stable job with good pay and benefits, decent work/life balance and flexible hours, and you don't mind dealing with a whole lot of frustrating nonsense tangential to your actual work then Dell might be a good fit. But if you're a real go-getter and want an exciting environment to work in then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.

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Dell Technologies Response
7y
Thank you for leaving such a helpful review. Improving is our major concern. Appreciate you a lot and we'll do our best to be better with this situation.

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5.0
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Pros

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Cons

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1.0
May 15, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Today? A job that helps pay the bills.

Cons

The culture completely changed circa 2022. Layoffs happen every month in small batches, so they are not covered in the news with big layoffs, but the total over the last couple of years is 10-20K people per year. Current employees that I still talk to live in constant fear of being laid off. The salary gap between employees in the same function is ridiculous and discriminatory. As a leader, when I'd raise it with HR, it was never addressed. Had a situation where I was hiring an underpaid employee from another team. I wanted to give her a 60% pay increase just to match what her peers on my team made, and I had the budget to do so. HR denied my request to do that raise and only gave her a 20% increase. They didn't want to send the "wrong message" that she was underpaid before (which she was) or that other employees could expect that level of pay raise in internal promotions (regardless of whether they should). They have to come into the office 5 times/week, even though Michael Dell once made fun of CEOs that didn't adopt hybrid/remote work. Just last week, I had a former colleague resign because the stress in the current environment was taking a toll on her mental health. If you have any other option, I'd highly recommend you don't take a job at Dell.

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