RealNetworks Reviews

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great people and great ideas

Cons – Ideas never used or just help on the back burner
HR lacks professionalism and is behind in the times with compensation
lack of morale and energy due to bad management
Hiring friends to work for you that have no experience is so wrong
no management training

Advice to Senior Management – hire and keep the smart people who make an impact

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Free soda
Good case study for how to blow a few hundred million quickly
I had a very comfortable chair
We got to play lazer tag once

Cons – General lack of industry knowledge from directors on up
Too many employees, too little projects
Horrible salaries
No direction on anything, ever!
Super low moral (brutally low...)

Advice to Senior Management – Recruit better employees, raise salaries, get rid of directors who should be working at a bank or the government...not a top level entertainment company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Good at promoting to higher levels of responsibility, and allows you to move laterally to new types of role (after proving yourself for a few years in the field they hired you for). Pays OK.

Cons – Glaser and his executive minions can be nasty bullies. Glaser will call your ideas "stupid" in front of your peers/bosses if he disagrees. Plus the company is living off the past with no clear strategy of where to take the company in the 21st century.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – In today's market the benefits, are very good.

Cons – Revolving door CEO, no direction, company is an ATM machine for the Chairman of the Board.

Acting CEO is an autocrat.

Management has now view down into what the company is really doing.

Employees are fodder, and are expendable.

No new products in ages.

HR is out to screw employees.

Under-market salaries.

Advice to Senior Management – Remove head from anus, listen to your employees. Ship a new product!!!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – They have good donation matching program

Cons – This place is a mess. I really feed bad about everyoneone who's stuck working there.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks

Pros – Technology driven, good location, get to use the latest technologies, still has a good name in the Seattle job market

Cons – Lot of politics in the company. If you are on the losing side, your head is on the line.
The company has no clue on the direction it is going. Non existent sales/marketing team. No new business in the pipeline.
The company is just burning the cash from the settlement with Microsoft. So its days are numbered.
The managers don't know how to manage their teams. No direction from the top management.
Because of the downsizing and attrition, the load on the individuals has increased a lot. No work life balance as you are expected to work long hours and weekends.

Advice to Senior Management – Need to find new business, develop new product ideas, get a strong sales team, communicate to the teams, set direction to the team

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks

Pros – 1. Very good benefits, great location
2. I was given time-off whenever I needed it and had flexibility to work from home

Cons – Where do I start:
1. Lot of micro-management and name calling...so much of dirty politics that I wonder how work gets done here.
2. I never laughed when I was here, the atmosphere is just so stressful, when is the next cut coming, who will go, is the company going to be there tomorrow....
3. Growth is next to minimal and as someone else has sadi, salary is a big joke.
4. The company doesnt have a direction. Decisions are taken without any aim.
5. New ideas are not encouraged and are in fact brutally crushed.

Advice to Senior Management – People lower in the stack like Developers, testers form the core of the company, invest after them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks

Pros – Location is in Seattle so food options are great, benefits are good, parking across the street but still have to pay, cafeteria food not bad, flexible time off

Cons – Management do not know what they're doing. They will probably run this company into the ground. Managers love giving other managers super important titles. You will have to manage up and kiss a lot off butt to get ahead. Good luck getting a decision made. Compensation is below par and don't even think about raises or bonuses. No career path.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop sugar-coating the bad. Have direction and execute. Stick to plan. Listen to the people. Treat employees as talents, not expendables.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks

Pros – + Great location, subsidized parking, free bus pass
+ Friendly support staff (admins, building security)
+ Good cafeteria with long hours (8am-6pm)
+ Very good benefits with tuition reimbursement
+ Pleasant work environment with flexible hours for most part

Cons – - Absolutely horrible management at every level
- The onus is on short term revenue and not one manager has the sense to look at the bigger picture. In the name of short term revenue, one team blew the chance for Helix to be part of the Android stack. A director from the same team pretty much killed off the open source effort that Real had spent years building up. Quality suffers and customers don't come back.
- Pay is a joke
- Non-technical personnel at various positions including Program Managers, Directors, VP of Technology and heck, even the CEO is not technical enough.
- Layoffs every 3 months does wonders to your morale as an employee. The *biggest* problem I have with Real is how they have active hiring on the side (anywhere between 10-30 positions open) as they are still laying people off. This is borderline unethical. The jobs are being to China and India in the name of costs cutting but there are no hiring freezes ever. This is something Real's useless HR needs to learn from their neighbors at Redmond. Again this is a big FU to your employees who have been with you for 4-8 years.
- Dependent on advertising and people installing Yahoo/Google/WeatherChannel toolbar to generate revenue. No real products - downsize all you want but without any products, there's no future.

Advice to Senior Management – I could give a lot of advice but nothing's going to change.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at RealNetworks

Pros – - The location is good
- The cafeteria is half-decent and the ambiance is nice
- Generous vacation + sick leave package
- Decent insurance options
- Some very smart people at the engineering level and some very good groups to work for

Cons – - Pay ranges from poor to mediocre at the non-manager or non-lead level.
- Incredibly poor management (although a lot of the inept executives have been let go, there are still a bunch of "ambitious", suck-up incompetent people at the Director level; these guys haven't shipped anything successful in years but keep moving around teams and destroying their teams in the process).
- Way too many managers and way little management. Company seems bent on promoting people to managers and directors without any direct reports. What are they managing or directing?
- A non-trivial number of people admit they are at Real because they can't find a job anywhere else. This coupled with the constant layoffs does wonders for employee morale.
- Human Resources has plenty of people in the group but for all intents and purposes, most of them are pretty useless. The company has no growth chart or defined levels of any kind. HR only comes into the picture when there are layoffs.

Advice to Senior Management – - Stop being bad and recognize your engineering talent.
- Stop ripping off your employees and stop giving fat bonuses to executives when your stock price is 2.50$
- You are a public company and you have a responsibility to your investors - how do you guys even sleep at night?

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend