The Home Depot reviews

Work-life Balance - As an assistant store manager, you are always on the clock. On your best week you can expect to work 50 hours and during your worst (inventory time) you may work up to 70 hours. 55 is probably average. The hours are not the worst part, though. Managers are scheduled as early as 5am and as late as midnight. This includes the weekends. Compensation - the overall take-home with bonus looks good, until you consider how many hours you worked to get that paycheck. I did the math and I was only making about $16/hour without bonus and $20/hour with bonus. Not what you would expect as a manager personally responsible for $20 million in business in a $55 million store. Upper-level management - this might be the most frustrating aspect of working for The Home Depot. Far too many regional, divisional, and corporate leaders feel the need to announce their impending arrival at your store with the expectation that you roll out the red carpet for them. Our core business is building relationships with our customers and contractors in order to grow the average ticket, but we had to put that process on hold every time a "walk" was possible. Instead of adding value to the business through increasing sales, we would attempt to make a dusty warehouse look presentable. Upper-level management has no idea how stores look when they aren't polished prior to their arrival, and this leads to unrealistic expectations. Nobody is willing to challenge this waste of time and resources. Unreasonable expectations of hourly associates - Walmart pays $10 an hour for associates to provide poor customer service with little accountability. The Home Depot also starts hourly associates at $10 per hour and specialists at $11 per hour. It was very difficult finding quality talent at that rate. A Pro Account Sales Associate, for example, was expected to sell $1 million per year for $11 an hour. Why would someone agree to be held to these expectations when he could work for Walmart with no expectations at the same rate? You get what you pay for.

The overall direction of leadership is "teach yourself...and then teach everyone around you." So not only are you expected to do your full time job, but you are also expected to learn cutting edge technologies, approaches, methodologies, etc... and then the minute someone learns that you do know something, you are expected to take more time to train them. Needless to say- their priorities for training, especially when it comes to funding are sorely lacking and creating many individual silos of the partially blind leading the blind. They are striving to be an agile dev shop- but currently their sole direction is " be agile" and there is no support other than leadership saying " we are agile- do it." I can't count how many misdirected and completely ignorant PM's respond to something with "this is agile..." and not actually understand the intent behind agile. So they default to blind metrics which are manipulated to give a a false sense of security and accomplishment. Oh- and management isn't even in touch with current benefits. They literally had no idea health was delayed for 90 days upon hiring...either that or they didn't care...either way-it speaks volumes. Of all the red flags i brought up in my tenure...they were too concerned with the immediate delivery of projects to really take a step back and address enterprise level/long term needs.