Blue Coat Systems Reviews

Pros

Great technology, Good Brand Name, Good Innovation, business in Asia needs a lot more focus and investment to grow significantly

Cons

Leadership needs to be fixed and basic business processes need focus, partners are lacking drive, sales teams are high turn over, no investment in emerging countries

Advice to Senior Management

Lead by example, trust employees, retain staff, Communicate plans and direction, plan together on how to grow the business, show employees and public you are determined to grow the company through investment and innovation in solutions and technology

Pros

Great people, great office, great opportunities.

Cons

Management is slow to follow through on decisions that were made thereby handcuffing the staff and resulting in decreased productivity.

Advice to Senior Management

Get your act together and lead the talent you have at your disposal. There are a large number of extremely experienced, talented and intelligent people working in Waterloo and all that's required is clear leadership and empowerment to allow us to produce great things.

Pros

Most people are friendly and approachable. Good balance of work and balance. PTO is generous for those who have been there for a while. PTO policy is flexible.

Cons

There are not a lot of growth opportunities within Blue Coat. Management is very good at recognizing you for hard work but not that good at rewarding you.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward your top talent with a raise occasionally. It will help with morale and talent retention.

Pros

Excellent people (whom I worked with)
Very flexible working hours and conditions (work from home, etc) - as long as you do your work
Great opportunity to learn new things, technologies
Excellent technical competence in on the Engineering/Systems/Support side
Adequate compensation and benefits
Casual dress code

Cons

Process is not transparent and broken (which has not been acknowledged)
No direction - trying to do too many things at once
Believing in numbers that DO NOT make sense
Measuring performance based on the numbers above
Too many chiefs that get in the way of doing the job

Advice to Senior Management

Seriously, stop spinning stuff and insulting our intelligence - state your goals and directions clearly AND transparently. Get rid of deadwood and review processes and for goodness' sake, get rid of the useless processes that generate all the wrong numbers which you measure us by.

Pros

- Solid core product for web security
- Fairly decent channel coverage
- Heavily embedded in the Federal space
- Most colleagues are nice, professional, well adjusted individuals
- Some honorable initiatives that generated a lot of goodwill (K9 for home use etc)
- Nice office, nice location
- Free soda?

Cons

- Solid core product that got fanagled into doing too many things at one time
- Great vision for ADN which managed to fall flat on its face due to horrible positioning, lousy execution and underestimating the gap that exists between the security buyer and the network infra buyer
- Too many acquisitions, then doing nothing with them (where's the Shaper integration with SG?)
- Lost focus on security in the face of increased, serious competition (PA Networks etc)
- 2 steps behind Riverbed, and still 2 steps behind, 5 years later
- Losing a sales organization with plenty of tenure, both inside and outside, all in more or less a single swoop, whilst keeping on useless mouthpieces at the top on for years at a time

Advice to Senior Management

Get bought, ASAP, before even the SG loses its luster. No RIFS nor fancy accounting will help the stock price at this point.

Pros

Great technical experience and exposure lot of learning and contribution. peers are helpful. Somewhat brand recognition in industry. Extensive labs

Cons

Politics lots and lots of it if you are good at it this is the place to be. There is no LIFE WORK balance you are treated as slaves with 60 -70+ hours avg work week. Startup environment without the potential. Favoritism is like no tomorrow. If you are hard working your work will be recognized for sure but that's mostly verbally and when it comes to anything else favoritism kicks in. Benefits are bad and RSUs are a joke. All the real recognition and promotion/opportunities are for ppl who have time for politics not for ppl working with their blood and sweat.

Advice to Senior Management

recognize real talent and get rid of middle management which is sitting there for years and is stale. even new hired mangers are now following same footsteps.

Pros

Excellent Pay, Decent benefits
Great CEO
Very Competitive Engineers
Excellent Product and Program Management Teams.

Cons

Mid Management needs to show better leadership and communication
IT is a huge mess

Advice to Senior Management

Fixing Communication Issues is the key in taking the company to the next level.

Pros

market leadership
dynamic
technology
great customers
vision
great people
fair rewarding

Cons

high pressure
level of support
management ability to improve support quality
executability towards vision

Advice to Senior Management

listen and act to people that matter to the companies success and not only the "popular" ones

Pros

-Really good communication between escalation staff for technical issues
-Some very smart developers
-Product is enjoyable to work with although challenging

Cons

-Since product is challenging it requires excellent DOC which is not always there
-No clear path of where the company is going due to re-orgs
-Sometimes we hear one thing and something else different happens

Pros

Stable and profitable.
Provides good working environment.
Reasonable benefits.
If your life is about enterprise type of products, network security and bandwidth optimization - this is for you then!

Cons

Management shuffles business units and employees between them. If you work for years on the product, know your code upside down, invested personal energy and passion into it - prepare to loose all of it as company will take it away from you in a year or two. Just to kick you out of your comfort zone. Due to a business need, of course. You don't like it - you free to go.
Strong executive authoritative vertical.
Target customers are not a consumer market: you have to love enterprises and corporate America.
Politics: you can't move your finger without it. You have to know rules of game.

Advice to Senior Management

There is no trust in management: any talk shall be filtered. Treating engineers as their opinion is nothing does not add value in development and production.