Pros
Dell works very hard and very genuinely at being "transparent". Management communicates early and often with employees, more so than any other company I have worked for. Blogs, daily news packages and frequent e-mails from senior management, up to and including from Michael Dell, are common. I have been in the technology industry for more than 20 years, and every employer has talked about "work/life balance", but very few have been sincere in their execution. Dell takes it very seriously, and walks what they talk. We work long hours when there is a legitimate company or customer need, but we never work long hours for the sheer sake of working long hours. Additionally, they are supportive of community involvement, and have been extremely generous to me personally in support of my volunteer commitments, and have even made financial contributions to my volunteer organization through the Dell foundation. Dell takes its' product quality and customer satisfaction very seriously. It's very easy to search on the web for unsatisfied customers. However, the fact is that when you are one of the largest companies in your industry, and you have quite literally tens of millions of business and consumer customers, you will find people who are dissatisfied -- we can't be perfect, but we do our best. I have personally been a part of some incredible efforts Dell has made to satisfy our customers, and not just large Fortune 500 customers, either. I know of one occassion, in the wake of Hurrican Ike, where we seriously dropped the ball on a consumer laptop service issue (due to the logistics difficulties we faced at our Houston distribution center), and went so far as to pull parts off of the manufacturing line, put them on a charter jet and hand deliver them to the customer and dispatched a technician for a Saturday morning repair.
Cons
In coming to work for Dell, you have to accept that they are commited to a very FLAT organizational structure. With over 80,000 employees, NO ONE is more than 7 steps from Michael Dell, and no manager has less than 10 direct reports. These mandates can limit career advancement potential, and meeting these requirements can stretch management, especially at senior levels. If you are not in Sales, all career paths lead to Round Rock, TX. I am in a field-based, customer facing group where every single one of the fourteen team members are in the region of the US we support, but our manager (and every other front line manager in our org) is based in Round Rock. While it doesn't affect our day-to-day ability to work with our manager internally, it hampers our ability to bring our manager in to customer locations for meetings, he can only make so many trips a year in to our region (especially during this time of wholly appropriate focus on expense control).