Pros
Smart employees, will spend money on training if pressed. Dell-owned, and Dell does seem to be slowly realizing what a circus it is and trying to make changes.
Cons
I recently had a conversation with another employee that seemed to sum up how I feel. He said “my todo list is so long that every time I look at it I honestly want to cry”. This has been my experience, overall. Higher management agrees to things without talking to anyone under them, and sticks us with conflicting deadlines, all of which are too short to meet. If we don’t meet them, we are shamed. If we do meet them, that becomes the new expectation, and we are still shamed for putting off other priorities. Old tasks never disappear, new tasks are added with reckless abandon, and everything is always “top priority”. I’ve lost track of how many times I sacrificed my soul to finish a “top priority” task, only to then find myself un-doing that work a month later when it turned out it either wasn’t needed or wasn’t properly vetted before starting. The lower managers aren’t the problem. I’ve watched a few come and go on my team, and it’s only a matter of time before their souls are completely crushed by the business expecting 50 people worth of work out of a demotivated team of 10. The business loves to talk about employee life balance and loyalty, but I watched them lay off half of my coworkers to “trim expenses” and then continuously brag about hiring new staff to other business units. I heard from multiple sources that some of the managers in question had been talking about wanting to get rid of the people they didn’t like after the acquisitions, and it definitely seemed personal. Fire everyone that built the tool and hire your unqualified buddy – great way to make us feel appreciated. The raise structure does seem to be improving, but historically it’s been a joke. Negotiate a high salary, because that’s what you’re going to be paid forever. My responsibility was increased exponentially from where I started to the point I was managing entire systems by myself, but my managers had to fight to increase my pay at all, and if it was it was often at the expense of other members of the team. Speaking of jokes, navigating the legacy EMC IT system for anything like HR, payroll, email, etc is impossible. I’ve spent countless hours on the phone, chasing broken links, etc. Even the offboarding process took me hours of support chat due to a broken link to a required document. I’m also not a huge fan of being paged at 2am for an alert that specifically says to page a different team than mine. The NOC used to be fantastic at troubleshooting and thinking on their own, that was a major selling point of our services, but somewhere we ended up with a NOC that just creates a ticket for everything. Add all of that together and I was working 80 hours a week, hating every minute of it, but being motivated by fear and shame. Leaving Virtustream feels almost exactly like leaving an abusive relationship. I realize that mine is a worst-case scenario, but I would still highly recommend that anyone who is considering working for Virtustream go do a couple of overtime shifts at a local convenience store, because you’ll probably make more money and be less stressed.
