Pros
- Average pay & benefits. - Good life/work balance. - Coworkers tend to be good, down-to-earth, and professional. - Supervisory-level management is pretty good. - Good technical environment for entry-level new hires. - If you like a steady, somewhat stodgy business culture, this is the place for you.
Cons
- Lack of leadership and vision at the mid-to-upper levels of management. - Hardware/software VAR business is not a long term growth business. - Not exactly an agile business environment. - Very little effort made at providing career advancement opportunities. - A lot of group-think. - This is not a company looking to solve big challenges. - For a company that "Get's IT", they are actually quite slow at adopting new technologies. A good example is that most internal web sites only really work well with Internet Explorer. That might have been okay 10 years ago. But it's totally lame in today's (technical) environment. - Somewhat related to the previous points. CDW is not really a technology company. The vast majority of their revenue is derived from hardware/software sales. It's a commodities business (akin to selling sugar, pork bellies, or crude oil). This isn't necessarily a con, but new hires should understand the business model they signing up for.