Arrow Has Problems - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Arrow Electronics

Oh the things to say about Arrow, where to begin? Let's start with the basics: Arrow is not the company it was even five years ago. There are some things you can expect to see if you join this organization: • An ingrained backwards-thinking middle management. o Many of the managers in this company were hired as a result of mergers and acquisitions. They are ill-suited for managing in some cases, and ill-fit for managing organizations >200 employees in far more. o Expect attitudes of “this is how we do it at Arrow” and “you can’t fight city hall” from this special group of individuals. o CYA is the name of the game. Many of these managers want to keep their heads down as falling in line is occasionally rewarded, and risk-taking in any fashion is strictly punished. o HR consistently takes management’s side in any disputes. It’s part of the culture. o If your manager doesn’t support a recommendation or idea you have, it dies on the table. You’ll then be called into a room and told your manager wanted that idea dead, because THEY feel the company has different needs. Even if they've chosen to take no action for years. o Is your manager specialized in say Operations or Finance? Have they been successful in that role in the past? Expect their next step of advancement to be a complete change in discipline, and when they fail, it will be their employees’ fault. Managers frequently are unsuitable for roles they are placed in, which are “loosely related” to positions they’ve been successful in in the past. o There is NO accountability. At least not in the traditional sense. If you upset your manager for any reason, no matter how unrelated to the job, you’ll be disciplined. But if IT doesn’t fix your issue for weeks at a time, your co-worker doesn’t feel like towing the company line, or someone’s favorite is involved (pretty much anyone in IT really), no action will be taken. o Pray that your manager isn’t one of the many passive-aggressive types that have banded together to protect each other and hire more of their ilk. They are plentiful and problematic. • A homogenous, fear-driven, defeated and uncreative IT team. o Are you eager to show your innovative chops in an IT organization? Advance within a company to higher echelons of management? Help the business by providing world-class IT support and flexible, intelligent solutions? o Well, unless you’re male, middle-aged and East Indian, this is the WRONG company for you, because that makes up the majority of our IT. o Due to the above, female employees may experience exceptional challenges in our IT organization. On paper Arrow is diverse, in practice, …no. I’ve watched said Indian males (three times now) place their hand in front of women’s faces to say “stop”. HR action taken? Well, none of those women are still with Arrow now. o If hired, expect to work long hours, while falsifying how long projects actually take (because projects have to come in “on budget”, even if the numbers used are pure fiction). o You can also expect to work with a number of contractors. Arrow is on a perpetual hiring freeze (unannounced to most) in order to drive Operative Expense reporting on the P&L lower, to please K-Street. o Expect to hear how we “don’t have resources” frequently. We don’t have them, but we sure as hell won’t hire them either! o There are problems in direction and vision within IT leadership. What is said by senior-most leadership is not supported or followed throughout the entire organization. Act on the complaints you've received. o Lessons learned at the end of the project: “1. We’ll look at the lessons learned next time.” Rinse, repeat. IT doesn’t learn from its mistakes, it commonly keeps coming up with new ways to make more. o Changes will be made in the production system, either untested or not fully tested. In Arrow, IT pushing code "on-time" is more important than actually fixing the problem correctly. o Note on the above, it isn't the testing team's fault as development ignores testers when code fails test. o Information is intentionally hidden from the business. How many hours will something take, when can it be started, how often is something happening, when will an issue be completely fixed? If there’s data, accountability can be created, so IT leaves all but senior executives in the dark. o Did I mention IT works on what it wants, when it wants, and if the business tells it to do something differently, they refuse? The business works for IT, IT does NOT work for the business. Why? It's been stated it’s because IT knows better than the business does what the business needs. • Disconnected and delusional senior management. o On a recent web broadcast, the senior management team decided to explain a round of layoffs that took out many multi-decade employees as “We made a mistake. These are people we didn’t have jobs for and shouldn’t have filled positions. It was our error and we needed to do this to take responsibility for it.” Funny, the VP’s that made the decision are still employed, but a large number of line employees aren’t. Sounds like the employees, not the executives took responsibility for VP’s screw-ups to me. o Expect on said web broadcasts to hear an hour-long string of buzz works and no real meat of what is actually being done in the organization. “Internet of Things”, “synergistic”, “solutions-based”, “five years out”… o Everything is five years out, especially any budget being allocated to fix existing problems. Arrow is constantly moving forward, always without fixing and cleaning up after projects and initiatives it just finished or long ago implemented but never properly stood up. • And if you’re working in the business unit… o Expect to frequently have systems go down or break, and to then spend days, weeks, months or years waiting on IT to get around to fixing it. o Reporting? Use Excel, we’re “Five Years Out”, because that’s how long it takes before anyone in IT will even look at it. This is a running joke throughout the organization. o New building in Centennial, several electric car docks outside, organization revenue was ~$24B last I checked; but we “don’t have the resources”. o Only executive pet projects get approved or worked on, get used to it. o IT to TELL you what the fix to a problem is, even if you know the customer/partner better than they do. IT gives you the fix IT wants to give, not what Arrow needs. o Only certain personally-preferred vendors and products are selected by IT. If your recommendation isn’t on that list, suddenly everything else is “too expensive”. Mind you, that never has to be backed up with research. It’ll just be called disqualified due to expense and you’ll be shouted down if you ask again. • Some other things: o During 2016-2017, the Employee Handbook was updated to remove all references to severance packages. No announcements were made of this change. o During 2018, all employees are expected to go into the HR system and electronically acknowledge having read the Employee Handbook; multiple announcements were made regarding this change. o Character assassination of employees who don’t drink the kool aid is a daily occurrence, eventually resulting in resignations or terminations. Just keep reminding yourself you were hired for your “previous experience and insights”. Arrow wants a variety of feedback, so long as it agrees with the agenda; and it had better! o Little accountability at the lowest sales levels. If they don’t do their jobs, either managers or operational staff have to do it for them. Since there’s no accountability, the cycle of not doing their jobs continues on. o IT systems go offline during work hours. Why? Because IT doesn’t want to work late of course… o Expect security updates which only let you delay for 30 minutes to be pushed to your machine under the same logic. o Need access to some program or secured folder? Access requests take days or weeks. Employees are not a priority, unless they’re Director or above. o In 2018 Arrow announced a "payroll shift"; which amounted to stealing a full week of pay from every employee in the company, drastically increasing Arrow's cash flow at its employees' expense. Underhanded, unethically and while I suspect not necessarily illegal, it should be.