Pros
* Dish is a good place to get your foot in the door and get some experience under your belt. * Dish hires smart people (they give you a multiple choice test to try to make sure) and the smart employees are good at figuring out how to do the work, even if they don't have the exact experience. When employees leave, they go on to great positions at great companies. * Work-life balance - If you have a good manager, you can actually have pretty good work/life balance and some flexibility to leave in the middle of the day for a doctor's appointment or work from home if you are sick and don't want to take PTO (despite the company's strict 9-4, "no-work-from-home" policy) * Beautiful building, nice cafeteria, good technology/IT support * Employees are overall very friendly, and the company organizes feel-good employee activities like a summer concert, Halloween party for families. Sling has even more fun employee events.
Cons
* High turnover--as soon as you start to get a well-trained team, they leave and you have to train up all new people. Obviously a problem at most companies, but worse at Dish because of the "get some experience and get out" attitude of many employees. * Management - Everyone seems terrified to make a decision or challenge authority. It's easy at any company to go with the status quo out of laziness, but at Dish it appears to be out of fear. Maybe this has improved now that Ergen isn't CEO, but he's still chairman of the board and majority shareholder... * Pay is under market, with poor benefits for a Fortune 500 company (no bonuses, option grant for higher level employees that requires you to sign a strict non-compete, high deductible health insurance, no parental leave and expensive short term disability). Not a big deal when you are inexperienced and trying to get your foot in the door, but often becomes a reason to leave. * Women in leadership - 2 female SVPs out of 25 Officers/EVPs/SVPs (check out the executive team on their website). 1 woman on the board, and she is the Chairman's wife. This trickles down to the VP and Director level. Women have left the company because they thought they were missing pay/advancement opportunities because they are women. In my experience, there was a gender bias at Dish that I didn't notice at my previous or current employer. * Pay/promotion not merit based. You really need to fight for your salary. Once salaries/raises started leaking on my particular team, it was distressing to see that the less competent/hard working employees frequently received more than the ones who were more deserving.