To put it nicely, on the whole I would say that Dell (or at least the engineering space) is a giant, inefficient, incredibly frustrating organizational mess.
When the company went private several years ago a good chunk of the best engineering talent either quit or were laid off. Since then the direction from management seems to have been to outsource about 2/3 of all team members to India and to never get rid of under-performing employees. So over time as many of the great engineers are promoted up or leave the company out of frustration we've seen a steady degradation of overall quality on software teams.
There's also a frustrating amount of red tape to go through for every little thing. Want to deploy a bug fix to a test environment that will unblock several downstream teams for next week's release? Gotta wait until the end of the day when deployments are unlocked for 2 hours or else get a email sign-offs from 5 managers who don't know anything about your project, several of which may be asleep on the other side of the world.
Lastly, over the years I've seen management change hands and departments renamed so many times that I literally don't even pay attention anymore if it doesn't directly impact my team. And especially when upper management is changing around, there's a good chance somebody somewhere is getting laid off. Makes people nervous.
So to kind of sum up my pros and cons here, if you want a relatively stable job with good pay and benefits, decent work/life balance and flexible hours, and you don't mind dealing with a whole lot of frustrating nonsense tangential to your actual work then Dell might be a good fit. But if you're a real go-getter and want an exciting environment to work in then I'd suggest looking elsewhere.
