I did work through a contracting agency before being hired on full time. I was paid well and treated well. There was tension among people who got hired from the contractors' pool and as a contractor you weren't eligible to certain things like sales contests. I was treated as a member of the team and valued. There were just some annoying limits of being a contractor.
Lenovo consistently paid a little bit less across most jobs where I learned the salary against the industry. Pay can be a touchy subject for management but the fact is that not only was I miffed about my own pay towards the end of my stint; but competent, creative and innovative coworkers consistently left to take higher-paying jobs elsewhere.
Speaking strictly regarding my time there there were manufacturing delays that put our shipping times well behind industry average. This was around the IBM x86 acquisition and year after it. It went on a long time. Global technology supply chains are incredibly complex. However, I think that considering that we faced serious problems for well over a year to the point that large sales were canceled and returned combined with the fact that Lenovo had many people whose expertise was global supply chains working on supply chains they themselves built, I think it's appropriate to criticize poor performance here. This was a political issue in my time. I have only my own observation that it was ongoing for a very long time and rumors I heard that certain senior managers were intransigent to change. Some had to be forged out to fix the problem, but this took a long time. I hope this has changed.
