Arrow Electronics reviews

Oh the things to say about Arrow, where to begin? Let's start with the basics: Arrow is not the company it was even five years ago. There are some things you can expect to see if you join this organization: • An ingrained backwards-thinking middle management. o Many of the managers in this company were hired as a result of mergers and acquisitions. They are ill-suited for managing in some cases, and ill-fit for managing organizations >200 employees in far more. o Expect attitudes of “this is how we do it at Arrow” and “you can’t fight city hall” from this special group of individuals. o CYA is the name of the game. Many of these managers want to keep their heads down as falling in line is occasionally rewarded, and risk-taking in any fashion is strictly punished. o HR consistently takes management’s side in any disputes. It’s part of the culture. o If your manager doesn’t support a recommendation or idea you have, it dies on the table. You’ll then be called into a room and told your manager wanted that idea dead, because THEY feel the company has different needs. Even if they've chosen to take no action for years. o Is your manager specialized in say Operations or Finance? Have they been successful in that role in the past? Expect their next step of advancement to be a complete change in discipline, and when they fail, it will be their employees’ fault. Managers frequently are unsuitable for roles they are placed in, which are “loosely related” to positions they’ve been successful in in the past. o There is NO accountability. At least not in the traditional sense. If you upset your manager for any reason, no matter how unrelated to the job, you’ll be disciplined. But if IT doesn’t fix your issue for weeks at a time, your co-worker doesn’t feel like towing the company line, or someone’s favorite is involved (pretty much anyone in IT really), no action will be taken. o Pray that your manager isn’t one of the many passive-aggressive types that have banded together to protect each other and hire more of their ilk. They are plentiful and problematic. • A homogenous, fear-driven, defeated and uncreative IT team. o Are you eager to show your innovative chops in an IT organization? Advance within a company to higher echelons of management? Help the business by providing world-class IT support and flexible, intelligent solutions? o Well, unless you’re male, middle-aged and East Indian, this is the WRONG company for you, because that makes up the majority of our IT. o Due to the above, female employees may experience exceptional challenges in our IT organization. On paper Arrow is diverse, in practice, …no. I’ve watched said Indian males (three times now) place their hand in front of women’s faces to say “stop”. HR action taken? Well, none of those women are still with Arrow now. o If hired, expect to work long hours, while falsifying how long projects actually take (because projects have to come in “on budget”, even if the numbers used are pure fiction). o You can also expect to work with a number of contractors. Arrow is on a perpetual hiring freeze (unannounced to most) in order to drive Operative Expense reporting on the P&L lower, to please K-Street. o Expect to hear how we “don’t have resources” frequently. We don’t have them, but we sure as hell won’t hire them either! o There are problems in direction and vision within IT leadership. What is said by senior-most leadership is not supported or followed throughout the entire organization. Act on the complaints you've received. o Lessons learned at the end of the project: “1. We’ll look at the lessons learned next time.” Rinse, repeat. IT doesn’t learn from its mistakes, it commonly keeps coming up with new ways to make more. o Changes will be made in the production system, either untested or not fully tested. In Arrow, IT pushing code "on-time" is more important than actually fixing the problem correctly. o Note on the above, it isn't the testing team's fault as development ignores testers when code fails test. o Information is intentionally hidden from the business. How many hours will something take, when can it be started, how often is something happening, when will an issue be completely fixed? If there’s data, accountability can be created, so IT leaves all but senior executives in the dark. o Did I mention IT works on what it wants, when it wants, and if the business tells it to do something differently, they refuse? The business works for IT, IT does NOT work for the business. Why? It's been stated it’s because IT knows better than the business does what the business needs. • Disconnected and delusional senior management. o On a recent web broadcast, the senior management team decided to explain a round of layoffs that took out many multi-decade employees as “We made a mistake. These are people we didn’t have jobs for and shouldn’t have filled positions. It was our error and we needed to do this to take responsibility for it.” Funny, the VP’s that made the decision are still employed, but a large number of line employees aren’t. Sounds like the employees, not the executives took responsibility for VP’s screw-ups to me. o Expect on said web broadcasts to hear an hour-long string of buzz works and no real meat of what is actually being done in the organization. “Internet of Things”, “synergistic”, “solutions-based”, “five years out”… o Everything is five years out, especially any budget being allocated to fix existing problems. Arrow is constantly moving forward, always without fixing and cleaning up after projects and initiatives it just finished or long ago implemented but never properly stood up. • And if you’re working in the business unit… o Expect to frequently have systems go down or break, and to then spend days, weeks, months or years waiting on IT to get around to fixing it. o Reporting? Use Excel, we’re “Five Years Out”, because that’s how long it takes before anyone in IT will even look at it. This is a running joke throughout the organization. o New building in Centennial, several electric car docks outside, organization revenue was ~$24B last I checked; but we “don’t have the resources”. o Only executive pet projects get approved or worked on, get used to it. o IT to TELL you what the fix to a problem is, even if you know the customer/partner better than they do. IT gives you the fix IT wants to give, not what Arrow needs. o Only certain personally-preferred vendors and products are selected by IT. If your recommendation isn’t on that list, suddenly everything else is “too expensive”. Mind you, that never has to be backed up with research. It’ll just be called disqualified due to expense and you’ll be shouted down if you ask again. • Some other things: o During 2016-2017, the Employee Handbook was updated to remove all references to severance packages. No announcements were made of this change. o During 2018, all employees are expected to go into the HR system and electronically acknowledge having read the Employee Handbook; multiple announcements were made regarding this change. o Character assassination of employees who don’t drink the kool aid is a daily occurrence, eventually resulting in resignations or terminations. Just keep reminding yourself you were hired for your “previous experience and insights”. Arrow wants a variety of feedback, so long as it agrees with the agenda; and it had better! o Little accountability at the lowest sales levels. If they don’t do their jobs, either managers or operational staff have to do it for them. Since there’s no accountability, the cycle of not doing their jobs continues on. o IT systems go offline during work hours. Why? Because IT doesn’t want to work late of course… o Expect security updates which only let you delay for 30 minutes to be pushed to your machine under the same logic. o Need access to some program or secured folder? Access requests take days or weeks. Employees are not a priority, unless they’re Director or above. o In 2018 Arrow announced a "payroll shift"; which amounted to stealing a full week of pay from every employee in the company, drastically increasing Arrow's cash flow at its employees' expense. Underhanded, unethically and while I suspect not necessarily illegal, it should be.

"Arrow Electronics Again Tops Industry Ranking in FORTUNE’s World’s Most Admired Companies List 2020" Who are they surveying with this list, because it is certainly NOT anybody that works at Arrow. For a company that moved its headquarters to Colorado in 2011 one would think the executive team would have addressed the massive increase in the cost of living in the state in the last nine years. That is not the case with Arrow. The corporate offices are in one of the most expensive states to live, and while executives are able to live here easily, regular employees are living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs just to keep a roof over their head. Questions regarding this directly to the CFO have been met with uncomfortable laughter and the direction to go to HR. What may have been considered "competitive" pay 15 years ago is now entry level for this industry, even in the most rural parts of the country; yet is still being utilized company-wide. Calls and emails praising the company and employees for "record profits year over year" and massive seven-figure bonuses to the CEO and top executive team are mirrored with no raises and the thought of a bonus laughable to everyone below. But hey, you can wear jeans for an extra day next week, great work. Even a standard cost of living raise is non-existent. While rent prices can so much as double year over year, salary remains stagnant. If you are one of the few who finds an internal promotion that somehow isn't a "lateral" movement in salary, the most you can expect to see is a 5% increase on average. Wage negotiation does not exist and is considered an insult to the hiring managers, you are offered what you are offered, take it or leave it. If you live in the Denver Metro area you are guaranteed to have seen the Arrow logo somewhere. The money spent on advertising and marketing to establish brand recognition is astonishing, yet brand recognition does nothing if nobody knows what the company does. They are advertising a useless, unexplainable brand at the zoo, baseball and football games, Indy cars, etc. The common person does not shop at Arrow. The common person, if intrigued by the brand somewhere, will google the company and realize it means nothing to them, close their browser and move on with their life. The company is so focused on putting its name on everything that it fails to understand "Five Years Out" is a useless attempt at a buzz phrase that not even the executives can explain in ten words or less, much less non-employees even understand the meaning behind it. Employees are expected to take mandatory ethics courses quarterly, oftentimes the courses themselves are amusing as you run through the examples of ethics violations and try to find one that you haven't been asked to do, or witnessed personally. Arrow may preach ethics standards, but they certainly do not practice it internally. "So-and-so said this needs to be done, get it done" usually with "so-and-so" being a VP or higher, we are expected to comply. Any questions are first met with assurance that it's ok because it came from VP so and so, that it will "be correct on the back-end", followed then by hostility. Managers and above have been known to retaliate against defiance, some even with records in HR stating employees feel retaliated against, but they remain employed as of the time I left. The fear of retaliation is so strong that many employees, in my experience, would rather proceed with questionable behavior than raise an issue among their direct management or within HR itself. HR is a resource to protect the company, not the employees. What used to be dedicated HR personnel is now a generic inbox. In my time I had no less than a dozen different HR contacts assigned to myself and my group, until the turnaround became so great a generic HRconnect email was created. Not everything used to be like this. This used to be a fun company to work for, I used to be proud to say I worked for Arrow, one of Colorado's largest employers. Halloween used to be a very big deal, where the entire night before and day of was dedicated to groups decorating (oftentimes extremely elaborate - the pirate ship?) entire sections of the building to the point where it is unrecognizable as an office. Employees were heavily encouraged to bring their families and children through the buildings in the early afternoon to see the decorations and trick-or-treat through the cubicles and offices. It was something that everyone looked forward to. The last few years have been either "No decorations" or the day before "you can decorate if you like". No elaborate displays, very few children coming through, it has lost the magic and nobody at the top seems concerned to bring it back. Every year each department would have a large holiday party (think typical corporate event: Hotel, food, drinks, raffles... a fun holiday party where spouses were more than welcome). The only ones that are held anymore and strictly for executives, if any department wishes to do something it now comes from the pockets of the directors and middle management, nothing Arrow sponsored for the lesser employees exists. I don't know what is worse, being a more recent employee and never having experience the "fun" side of Arrow, or having experienced that and watching it devolve into a soulless corporate office over the last few years. Arrow used to hold an extremely competitive benefits package. I guess it still does if you're an executive ($6,000,015 in equity awarded to the CEO last year). We had sabbaticals. We had stock provided to us after a year. We were part of the company. These were taken away without an explanation. Even the tenured employees weren't grandfathered in to the sabbatical program. Healthcare used to be decent, expensive but provided adequate coverage. Then around 2014 they switched to "high deductible" plans across the board. Now nobody I know of goes to the doctor unless they absolutely must. Nobody can afford to pay the monthly dues, on top of thousands of dollars for their deductible, just for their insurance to finally start chipping in. It's cheaper for Arrow though, bonus. *********COVID-19 RESPONSE*********** I have seen a lot of reviews showing up after Arrow decided to show how much their employees matter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. They are true. All of them. Given the choice, the CEO would have kept the offices open and at full capacity throughout this entire crisis. Luckily, 100% of the employees at the corporate offices have the capability to work remote, so when the state ordered offices to be temporarily shut down, Arrow had to comply. However production did not miss a beat, because of the aforementioned ability of remote working. However. As soon as the state order was to be lifted, emails were sent out saying employees are to return to work the day the order is lifted. Arrow Electronics is headquartered in Arapahoe County. Arapahoe County pushed the closure out another week, from May 11th to May 18th. Arrow was then self-declared an "essential business" (???) and therefore should not be held to the standards of the lockdown...even though, as stated before, all employees had been working remote the prior month and a half. The date of reopening Arrow was pushed out another week, most likely due to an order from the health department, and further measures were to be taken to ensure "employee safety and corporate compliance". May 18th, expected to have 50% of employees returned to the office, unless you had a medical or caretaking exception. On June 1st, those exceptions expired and any further exceptions became more strict. If you had a child with no school or summer care due to COVID-19 closures, that was no longer a reason for you not to be in the office. If you lived with people who were high risk, that was no longer a reason to work remote. Unless you had a signed doctor's note, on a specific form derived from Arrow, you had no excuse and must return to the office. Working remote was no longer to be an option every week; in compliance with the minimum state orders, the return was to be 50% of the time...every other week. Badges were to be scanned and monitored to ensure everyone had returned to the office. Everyone, that is, except for the executive team. Their top level floor is off limits to regular employees so nobody knows for sure if they have been in or not. Should probably monitor their badges too. Arrow's competitor, Avnet? Their employees are continuing to work remotely through the rest of the year. Mouser? Working remote for the rest of the year. Digikey? Remote for the rest of the year. Avnet cares about their employees and their community. Mouser cares about their employees and their community. Digikey cares about their employees and their community. Arrow? A decade ago I would have said yes. A year ago I would have been able to trick myself into believing they do. This year? It's clear they do not. As much as Arrow cares about their image, this would have been a prime opportunity to garner free publicity and good faith with the community and state as a whole. News stations eat it up when a large company treats its employees like humans. Flexibility during this crisis would have made a mention and interview on 9news. Now your employees are ticked and feel betrayed. You might not care if we quit, that's one less mediocre benefits package you have to pay, but we will carry this animosity with us for life.