After ten years at Dell I could write a book of the "Cons" of working at Dell, but I don't have that kind of time.
Managerial accountability is nothing but lip service at Dell. Even though they talk about such things as diversity, ethics, non-discriminating, and meritocracy it is anything but because of how their system is set up. They have systems in place to hold your direct manager accountable, (if you can prove it), but not their managers above them nor the hiring managers for internal postings. In other words, it's smoke and mirrors.
For careers paths, Dell has a policy of not skipping pay grades which presents not only a problem for your career path but also for equal pay for the same job. Say you are moving from an inside sales position to a field sales position you have to go out at the base pay grade of say AE-1. But when someone is hired into that position from outside of Dell they go into the same position and responsibilities at an AE-2 or even AE-3 pay grade when they know nothing about how Dell "works" which is quite convoluted to most new hires: therefore, they are much less effective in the roles. Dell also finds that this isn't competitive enough to retain those veteran folks for long, so they opt to hire from the outside in rather than address the issue properly. So your choice is get screwed out of career path or get paid tens of thousands of dollars less than a less qualified peer. All of Dell's management knows this is a problem but no one wants to address it.
Their system is broken, and even though they went private, (which should easily facilitate change), they continue down the same dysfunctional path of operation as they did when they were bound by the confines of a publicly traded company. In 10 years at Dell I have never seen any of the CEO's in the Nashville building, and I don't think Michael Dell has spent more than 20 minutes here during his tenure. He sure as heck doesn't seem to care about making functional changes for the better.
