Autonomy Reviews

Pros

1. You can say "Look, I work over there!" while pointing at the tallest building in Boston.
2. Free lunch Friday.

Cons

1. No career growth, unless somebody quits.
2. Bonus system is good only in theory.
3. If an employee does get a bonus, it is a retainer.
4. No performance review/feedback.
5. eDiscovery capabilities are mostly over-promise under deliver
6. Integration of acquired companies is non-existent. No cross training and knowledge sharing between team.

Advice to Senior Management

Dear HP,
Please look closely and audit all operational aspect of Autonomy. Please talk and listen to employees and come up with a good and tangible plan to address many of their concerns. Please assess the corporate culture, analyze the low employee retention rate and act to address them.

Pros

technology is a cut above.
very knowledgeable people

Cons

little direction
lousy people skills
black hole for information access
no training, cross-training,
everything's a one-off
thankless

Advice to Senior Management

put some processes in place, empower your employees.

Pros

Reasonable compensation if your prepared to have no life
Nice colleagues
Some capable upper management

Cons

- Terrible, incompetent middle management. The best pre-sales/tech have left leaving those who were average to push the pencils. Some have never experienced anything else than Autonomy and are incredibly blinkered.
- churn and burn culture with grads
- Virtually no QA
- projects delivered ad-hoc with slaves/graduates
- unreasonable hours
- zero training
- zero respect
- poor quality software - try and find a working version of introspect/eas/digital safe/etc.
- over marketed software (bordering on propaganda)
- lies/deceit to unsatisfied customers
- graduates are clueless as have no guidance - experience is irrelevant in engineering i suppose?
- rushed software for sales based culture
- zero communication (especially for non UK offices)

Advice to Senior Management

Clear out middle management
Pray customers dont start asking for references

Pros

Middle management is appreciative and supportive. Relations with coworkers was very good. Amount of time off was generous and other benefits were at least competitive.

Cons

Autonomy is run as a disconnected set of silos. Arbitrary decisions about hiring are handed down from on high including laying off longstanding employees with exemplary records. By the way, the company policy is zero severance after almost twenty years of service.

Advice to Senior Management

Empower product innovation and do not hand out decisions unilaterally as you probably do not have enough information to make a decision. Hope that HP realizes that major changes shoud be made at top levels of technical management.

Pros

It has some good technologies and smart peoples. It also pays good after merger with other small companies.

Cons

benefits are not good. the company is pretty stringent on everything, from pc, laptop and other stuff. Low benefit matches.

Advice to Senior Management

please offer good benefit packages, good 401k matches. Put more energy on research and development, not only on sales.

Pros

Good pay and compensation plan has possibilities to earn a lot of money. That is about the only good thing here.

Cons

no communication on what is going on
bad treatment
micro management
people feel like they are slaves
expectation to dedicate your life to the company for this treatment in return

Advice to Senior Management

Find out why people are leaving and don't assume it has nothing to do with the way the company is treating them.

Pros

Great products and technology
Strong financials
Market leader
Opportunity to make a lot of money

Cons

Brutal culture - either fit or you're gone
Micro management

Advice to Senior Management

Hire professionals and provide latitude to do things their own way

Pros

Good comp plan for achievement
Great technology story

Cons

Too much time spent on sales reporting
Feel compartmentalized - communicatiton on a need to know basis
Living in a fishbowl

Advice to Senior Management

The next growth step can only happen by empowering the people.

Pros

"Free Lunch Friday", free sodas. Decent health insurance

Cons

"Instantaneous stock value" management style, churn & burn employee treatment.

Advice to Senior Management

Sell to HP... already did it. Great.

Pros

The only two things that seem to be average would be the benefits package and the work life balance at this company.

Cons

Lack of communication from top to bottom, unfair reward and recognition practices, glass ceiling with lack of advancement opportunities for inside sales. Micromanagement by untrained supervisors.

Advice to Senior Management

Complete reorganization.