Rovi Reviews

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

Pros – Good benefits. Competitive salary. Friendly employees. Some bright employees. Projects can be fun to work on.

Cons – There have been very bad hires over the course of the last 2 years at Rovi. They've restructured their Engineering divisions by getting rid of technical leaders and replacing them with business leaders who have less than an ounce of technical knowledge or abilities. These are the people making decisions and determining the direction of a technical company.

You are not asked for your opinion or input on projects, instead you are told what to do by the non-technical leaders. Even if what they are asking doesn't make sense, who cares? Figure it out and make it work, or else. If you try to have an opinion, you will find yourself curbside very quickly.

The CEO is boring. I have fallen asleep through every single one of his all-hands meetings. I could never trust a leader who puts me to sleep.

On the subject of bad hires, there are a lot of low-level (director and below) hires which need to be reevaluated. There are too many employees who have no clue what they're doing, but somehow kissing the right bottoms to excel and stay gainfully employed.

Direction of the company is unclear and seems to change with the wind.

We were told if there are problems, talk with your manager. Unfortunately, the managers are afraid to bring it up to their managers, so talking to your manager doesn't do much good.

Work-Life balance used to be good, but then they "laid off" a large number of the workforce and redistributed the workload to other areas. If we try to have lives outside of work, then our work will never be completed. Most employees are finding themselves working longer hours or after-hours on a regular basis.

Advice to Senior Management – Start listening to your employees. Like, really start listening to them. Tom, if you truly want people to be an adult and leave if they're unhappy, then I hope you and the rest of your management team have fun building, testing and deploying our products.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – - Great, talented smart people working hard to compensate for bad business decisions.
- Benefits package is very good

Cons – - work life balance is terrible. IT Ops and Engineering regularly work 6-7 day weeks
- technical debt is so high that most products would have to be scrapped and rewritten
- layoffs, layoffs, layoffs - everyone suffers for flailing sales teams
- technology infrastructure and products are vertically designed

Advice to Senior Management – Look at Facebook, Google and Apple. Respect the engineer. Business degrees can't fix the problems Rovi has, only engineers can. Stop pretending to be a top Silicon Valley company and start acting like one.
- Hire and court great people
- Build horizontal solutions that are cheap and resilient
- Stop laying off great people because they are located in areas with higher costs of living and operation - it's incredibly short sighted.
- Management: stop making decisions that are based on protecting your job or getting your bonus. - - Manage people, not tasks
- Flatten the organization - too many middle managers. The end result being information dilution.

I could go on and on but changing he above would be a great start.

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

Current Employee – been working at Rovi full-time for more than a year

Pros – - Salaries are good
- Being near the entertainment industry is fun

Cons – - Little to no strategic guidance
- No one seemed to care to do good work

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Rovi full-time for more than a year

Pros – Great pay and benefits with bonuses, Excellent office culture, Budget for social events. Good group of engineers but bad executive management.

Cons – Too many aqcuisitions leading to layoffs. Unclear product direction. New CEO has not improved things evident in stock hit. Lots of restructuring going on. Outsourcing overseas.

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

Current Employee – been working at Rovi full-time for more than a year

Pros – 1) Work/Life Balance
2) Benefits
3) Some smart colleagues

Cons – 1) Company doesn't know how to make innovative products
2) Always relies on patents to market their products. Patents are junk and good for nothing
3) The company revamped twice in period of 2 years, no proper goal/strategy

Advice to Senior Management – Management is off-shoring engineering to China/Russia. This is further gonna degrade quality of already half baked products. The whole idea of off-shoring is gonna fail. Please wake up before you realise that

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Rovi full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Core group of talented individuals.

Cons – A lot of changes since new CEO and none of this changes shows positive effect.

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

Current Employee – been working at Rovi

Pros – Good benefits
Cool friendly people
Open environment

Cons – They give promotions without raises
Fail to recognize employees who deserve the recognition
Real disconnect between upper management and lower lever employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Rovi

Pros – Great benefits, great stock price appreciation over the last several years. Interesting area (guidance and discovery) and sector (cable, web and consumer electronics) to work in.

Cons – Stifling bureaucracy, very mixed middle management, some senior executives checked out once they made their millions. Patent troll tendencies from Gemstar-TV Guide continue to dominate company.

Advice to Senior Management – Fred Amoroso's retirement is coming at the right time. Change, beginning at the top, and a thorough housecleaning is needed.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Rovi

Pros – - Depending on your manager, the ability to telecommute once in a while. This needs to be agreed upon with senior management and/or on the hire date.
- The technology is good and the prospects for the future of this industry is also good.
- The ESPP plan is good. The price locks in for two years. The # of stock options granted at hiring is average for the industry and size of the company.

Cons – 1) Management at Rovi can go unchecked, where 360-degree feedback does not include feedback for your managers.
2) The career development program is limited to your current group. Changing groups is difficult since internal candidates compete with external candidates for these positions. Also, there is no rotational career program.
3) Recurring stock options are not granted. Only those given at the hire date are. Like other companies in this area do, all employees in the company should be given recurring stock options.
4) Due to multiple aquisitions, there are scattered resources around the country. So, there is a slight disconnect here which makes communication and coordination a challenge.

Advice to Senior Management – Please look at the Cons section for some of this information.
There's one extra issue. Overall, 1st-line management is inexperienced in leadership. Full 360-degree feedback is a must.

Former Employee – worked at Rovi

Pros – You can work very independently. If you want, you have the opportunity to make your own job. Compensation is adequate. Benefits are ok. Good vacation allotment and holiday schedule. In the right place you might have a very decent manager.

If the management's vision pans out, it could be an interesting ride.

Cons – They over promote. Senior Management doesn't appear to execute well. They have a lack of attention to operational aspects of the business; Lack of clear vision.

Company is a serial acquirer with no clear integration plans or understanding of the businesses they purchase. They end up squandering opportunity, potential businesses, and shareholder value buying high and selling low.

Advice to Senior Management – Don't buy companies if you don't know what you are really going to do with them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend