Advent Software Reviews

Pros

great environment and great products

Cons

typical office politics that is expected.

Pros

Work - life balance
Stability
Flexible hours

Cons

Could be more innovative and dynamic.

Advice to Senior Management

Get on the cuttiing edge instead of riding off the bleeding edge.

Pros

Young and intelligent peers
Great benefits,especially ESPP
Flexible timings

Cons

All the cons I list are directed at the young business units within Advent

Awful,ill-equipped senior management
Lack of mature process and structure
Favoritism, if you were not a part of the start up team, you can forget your chances of growing within the company.
Lack of recognition for hard work. (Refer above point)
Rude and unprofessional managers.
Poor compensation.

Advice to Senior Management

Post merger, Advent should focus on restructuring existing management to better transition the new unit in and provide opportunities for the employees to enable them to grow personally as well as career wise.

Pros

Quality executive leadership; superior direct management; excellent work/life balance, gives back to the community, smart people 99% are really nice.

Cons

As the company has grown certain procedures, policies, rules have been put into place creating an increase of red tape... may not be the worst thing as one must hone the skill of choosing one's battles.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to manage with both feet on the ground. Stay focused on what we do best... taking care of Advent's clients, investors, and employees.

Pros

Advent operates in a narrow, deep, requirements-intensive technology and industry niche, which influences much about how the company is managed and how it can grow. Given these attributes of the business Advent happens to be in, it is an exceptionally well-managed company and a great place to work and to develop deep competence.

Two critical things Advent must constantly strive for:
1) it must be a reliable vendor for its customers. Among other things, this means Advent must take longer to release technology, because the design and testing phases are so extended; and it means Advent actually cannot take many risks, because it will disrupt customers if something doesn't work. Unlike many companies in the San Francisco area, Advent cannot easily "try" things to see what might work; everything has to work as soon as it's announced to customers.
2) it must be staffed with people who combine functional competence (ie, ability to write software, ability to sell, ability to market) with extremely deep, focused domain knowledge about investment management systems (ie, the difference between hedge fund traders and institutional traders, the difference between the transaction records of various fixed income securities, etc). The depth of this domain, and the kind of people attracted to it, can be almost crazy at times, but successful people at Advent and in this line of work must care about the details of the domain.

On balance, Advent meets these objectives. In my experience, senior management cares deeply about whether the technology works for customers, and spends surprisingly significant amount of time thinking about employees and their well-being. They don't always get it perfect, but the effort, intent, and overall track record is very positive.

My view is that employees (and customers, for that matter) who get frustrated with Advent are not aware of or are not assigning value to the constraints that Advent must live with. The people who fail or get frustrated are generally the ones who don't understand the constraints, take shortcuts, or try to glide above the details. Contrary to some of the unfavorable comments here, in my experience senior management cared very deeply about the input and well-being of employees who know what they are doing, and talented people had plenty of opportunity to grow within Advent. Another correction to some of the comments here: there are senior people, at the very top ranks and throughout the middle management, who have deep experience elsewhere. Yes, there are many Advent lifers throughout all levels of the company, but it's not exclusive that way, and the lifers who have risen have all contributed significantly and earned their promotions.

Also, I'd reiterate what many others mentioned on the good benefits and general work environment. Many commented on things like the dog policy. I'd also point out Advent's substantial focus on community service; for example, the company basically shuts down for a day every year so everyone can go out and do public service (this is in addition to many smaller service opportunities throughout the year) . . . Advent is not a very big company but has a broad and deep service attitude that is bigger than the size of the company would justify.

Cons

Given the constraints above, Advent's business changes and grows only incrementally, and every new step and commitment must be undertaken with a lot of care and planning. Therefore, Advent is not a "let's draw it up on the whiteboard and go for it" kind of company. If you are looking for a change-by-the-day Silicon Valley experience, you might be disappointed.

Advice to Senior Management

Stick to the principles that enabled Advent to survive market crises and grow when many of its competitors sold out or shut down. If anything, there's always an opportunity to communicate more to employees so they understand what and why decisions are being made, or not made.

Pros

Leadership is top notch
good work-life balance
ethical

Cons

finger-pointing
need to get rid of mean people

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the groups who do NOT like their manager; they will leave and you'll be stuck with a terrible manager.

Pros

Like I said it's a great place to work, my manager at the time was very supportive of his team and understood what our jobs were all about. Certain top level executives definitely held a lot more sway compared to others but it's the usual politics you'll encounter anywhere you go. Overall its just the people you worked with that made it an enjoyable stay for me.

Cons

It took a while for me to notice it and even took longer for me to accept it but when you get a chance to work here you'll may or may not notice that certain "elitist air" in the environment but maybe it was just me. But some of the people I've shared this thought with have agreed with me.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep at it! I'll always recommend Advent highly to anyone who bothers to ask and it's a great place to start a career for you new grads.

Pros

Advent makes the leading investment management and performance reporting software. If you work for them in any capacity and later chose to work in other areas of finance your resume will get noticed. I knew very little about finance and technology when I started at Advent in an entry level position, when I left 4 years later I was fully prepared to meet the needs of various private wealth mangers and other financial advisers. I could not think of a better choice to start my career, now even years later having worked at Advent always gets me a call back from hiring mangers and has allowed me to get some great jobs.

Cons

I was not able to advance as fast as I wanted at Advent and felt stuck in the technical support role for longer than I wanted, however temper this by the pros mentioned above as working in this role provided the foundation for great success after working at Advent.

Advice to Senior Management

when advancement roles are not available consider rotating staff between products to provide depth of experience

Pros

Excellent, absolutely excellent benefits. Bring your dog to work! Facilities: Bike cage, frequent shuttles, cafe with decent food.

Cons

As others have stated, your superstar mentality will literally get you in trouble with your boss. Have an idea to drastically improve something? Were you thinking you would introduce a great idea? Think again! You will present your idea, then be chided and dismissed. Six months later, your boss will use your idea and call it his/hers and you will not be thanked. You want to propose something risky that has potentially huge benefits? No trust, no confidence. Shut you down, shut you up. However, hypocritical management team members will propose even riskier ideas without checking with their technical team. They will fail and you will fill out the root cause analysis. A management team that merely speaks of policy and streamlining but does not live it out.

Advice to Senior Management

Fire all of your managers and get fresh recruits from startup companies. Your ideas are old and outdated. Your logo is old. Stop "acting" like you have redundancy and strict policies, your environment is one power outage away from a complete disaster.

Pros

Great Company. Great Products. Great Work Environment

Cons

Not much in the way of career advancement.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't put all your eggs in one basket.