Dell Service Engineer - anyone any experience ?

Austinhead

Hi Folks,

Bit of a long shot, but i was wondering if anyone on here has experience of being a dell field service engineer, or knows anyone who is ?.

I'm considering getting into it after spending the last 18 months fixing PC's but without enough work - i'm currently working for someone else so only get 1/2 the money and there isn't really enough work for that.

Anyway, basically you are self employed so no perks. Pay per job is £15 and you get around 6 jobs a day. You might get a bonus of £400+ a month, but get nothing towards any mileage or car costs e.t.c. I'm wondering whether it's really a go-er or not as I currently have no idea how many miles i'm likely to be doing. My car costs around £20 per 120 miles in petrol and there is NO WAY I can afford to get a cheaper car to run as i'm skint.

I can image spending £20+ a day on petrol esp as you have to go to depot every single morning to collect parts, also have to contact all the customers to give ETA which means phone calls costs.

If you have experience in this i'd be really interested to know what you thought of it, and whether it's worth getting into ?

Thanks.

Oh and I don't mean to sound rude or want to offend anyone, but no replies are needed about it being better than having no job etc etc, i do have work already, with hours to suit me (3 kids to ferry around lol) but could do with more hours and I do enjoy the PC repair work.

The_ICT_Engineer

As a former field engineer, £15 per job is a very poor rate (Until you arrive, You have no idea how long a job is going to take). I was getting paid that per hour in 1992. Furthermore I was covering around 150 miles per day using a company car. If using your own car, You need to factor in the cost of car insurance for business use plus the wear and tear of the car it's self. Don't relie on getting six jobs a day either. Call outs are like buses, A long wait then three come along at once.

Field work can result in some very long days, Hence why I prefer being site based.

Austinhead

Thanks for your reply. £15 an hour 20 years ago *gulp*

All the jobs have been diagnosed over the phone, so theoretically I should already know what the job is before I get there. However, I also know from experience that things do not always run smoothly ! The only advantage I could see would be that it is more work than I have at the moment - although certainly take what your saying about call outs being like buses, i'm already having that problem !

What is it that you do now ?

mcfisco

From my experience of Dell technicians [I'm not going to call them engineers] everything is a swap out, nothing is fixed whatsoever
So I guess if you're doing desktops and laptops, worst case is a mobo and that would be a tough £15 [gross] to earn

Austinhead

yeah, i can think of many situations where the tech support person on the other side of the world, at dell, has incorrectly diagnosed over the phone ! Problem is you are only given the parts for that day, based entirely on someone else's diagnosis ! If they are wrong, you are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Mobo would def be the hardest and longest job I would think. Guess there would be others that might just be a keyboard or a bit of fascia.

Decided to not go for it anyway. Thanks peeps.