CDW Network Engineer reviews

Management doesn't care about its employees anymore. Treat people badly, micromanage, etc. I came from Berbee. What a great organization. Berbee had the values of "we trust and support the individuals judgement." CDW doesn't care. They don't trust and support anyone anymore. Alot of my clients loved Berbee and were happy with us most of them had never dealt with CDW and the ones that tried went somewhere else. CDW raised prices and isn't even competitive. But like everything after CDW took over cooperation, morale and quality have declined quickly. Engineers who are happy do great work and create loyal customers. CDW has killed that. Engineers aren't happy. Management is more interested in numbers and pushing people for maximum productivity. If you aren't billing they aren't happy. Management rarely meets with employees and if they do its counter productive, implementing new policies and procedures instead of leaving us alone to do our jobs. Now they micromanage, demand constant updates, and tell engineers how, when and what they will do for a client. Instead of letting engineers decide on the best path to conduct an install or resolve a problem or do an upgrade sales and management tell us what we are to do. Sales seems to be driving the engineering force, best practices for the most part are ignored when dollars are questions. Recommendations by engineers are ignored by sales if they can make more money. Benefits are gone. They have the horrible benefits for an advanced technology company and they aren't even close to being competitive to others in this economy. i suppose next year the consulting bonus will be gone. Although its hard to make bonus now since they micromanage hours and if a project is undersold by sales they harp and ride you to keep hours down. If you start to go over on hours they pressure you now to do unbillable work. This way the sales numbers look good but the engineers loose their bonus. Growth is a joke too. At Berbee all engineers had the same title and ego's didn't get puffed up and very little in fighting occurred. CDW implemented titles for engineers, senior engineers, architechs, etc. Engineers with the bigger titles have let them go to their heads. Cooperation and team work are out the window making this one of the most miserable places I have ever worked. Senior engineers and architects talk down to others. It doesn't make any diff what the title is, an engineer is an engineer.

The company has become disjointed. Many layers of non functional and micromanaging middle tiers that provide no value to customers. Customers have stopped being the focus of the company, while arbitrary directives are now the way of life. Solid and progressive management who focused on what was important - our customers and our quality of service delivery have quit and moved on. This leaves CDW with a branch of business that they have no idea how to properly execute. They are aggressively trying to short change service delivery, and turn it into just cost center to support their licensing goals. Not being a nimble company by any means, the downturn in the economy have caused benefits to be stripped to the bone (no 401K matching, the re-defining of bonuses, etc...). And the oppressive pressure from up above has translated to highly skilled and well paid employees being micromanaged and baby sat by people who have no interest in keeping a workforce productive and happy, but just demanding some arbitrary % on a report.