Pros
I met some wonderful people at DISH with whom I hope to remain friends and colleagues for a long time to come.
Kontras
The Cons of working for DISH are myriad. A quick piece on the tangible ones... The raise and promotion model is perverse and utterly dissuades rewarding employees because doing so literally punishes all other employees in that group. Raises of all kinds (including promotion) are drawn from a pool based on an arbitrary % of the total salaries of the employees in a group and that pool is the hard cap for raises, i.e. giving Sally a raise means Sue gets a smaller raise and giving Sally a promotion means Sue and Sam do not get raises at all. The benefits are laughable. I never took advantage of any of them during my tenure until subscribing to the television service became compulsory to keeping my job. If you or a loved one have a chronic illness it will probably cost you more money than it is worth to be employed with DISH. Beyond the compensation and benefits problems the company lives in mortal terror of its founder, Charlie Ergen. Charlie has made clear in multiple all-hands meetings that he sees no value in IT whatsoever. One of his more (in)famous quotes is referring to iT as, "Replacable bags of plasma". His speeches to the employees are captured on video, but those videos are always edited because he cannot go a full meeting without saying something demoralizing and offensive. All of the HR policies come straight down from Charlie and cannot be overruled. Managers cannot hire who they want and have little to no power to negotiate salary or benefits. HR has the final say on any and all candidates. That fits with the general theme that only upper management have power to make any decisions whatsoever. Even something as trivial as access to the internet requires approval from a VP. The default, like everything at DISH, is that you have no permissions, no access, and no ability to make decisions without the approval of a VP. You are not treated like an adult, but an unruly child and that is from day 1. The "badge report" as it is colloquially called is another demonstration of the complete lack of respect for the employees at DISH. All comings and goings of an employee are tracked through the badge reader system and if one violates any of the numerous rules associated with arrival times (9:00AM for the general populace, 8:30AM for IT), break times (under 10 minutes), lunch time (under an hour and only between 11:30AM and 1:15 PM), departure time (4:00PM), or hours clocked in at the physical building in a week (42.5hrs [40 + 0.5hrs per day for unpaid lunch]), then one can expect a conversation with their manager or an HR representative. I am not exaggerating when I say that I was once asked to justify missing my weekly hours by 1 minute. This is not how professional adults should be treated. Software quality is nonexistent. The processes simply discourage it. The business units define the requirements and they are fickle beasts whose minds are only made up with days of a production release. I even had a few experiences where requirements documents were not finalized or approved until the software had already been delivered to production. Development's time estimates are ignored, Test effort estimates are ignored, and despite undefined requirements IT is held solely responsible for project failures and poor quality. This is all while IT works most weekends and most holidays to keep up with the constantly shifting requirements. Development is on call twenty-four hours per day, three hundred sixty-five days per year. Many teams have come up with rotations to handle this burden, and it is a burden. In our industry it is common for development to be the last line of defense. At DISH, development is the first and only useful line of defense. There is no documentation and almost no training given to the support tiers that should come before developers are engaged, so developers are always engaged. This last con I'm going to mention (exhaustively listing the cons of working for DISH would make this a novel) is the use of technology. DISH is at least a decade behind the industry. I only mention this because it is difficult if not impossible to grow one's career while working for DISH.
