CyberDefender Reviews

Pros

There's a lot of smart people at the company, who work very hard. You will probably learn a lot working here.

Cons

Company might not be in business (at least in it's current form) much longer.

Advice to Senior Management

Improvements in the software need to happen much more rapidly.

Pros

some pro's included not working very hard when we get a case for simply installing their antivirus software on a machine.

Cons

Management and sales would often say that their tech support are Microsoft certified and that we could fix anything. Sales would also lie about anything to get a customer

Advice to Senior Management

show tech support more respect then you show your sales agents.

Pros

There is work/life balance, fair benefits (but not great), the downtown location is fun and pretty easy to get to from anywhere.

Cons

The "C Team" is completely dysfunctional and most of the executives under these three have left the company. The call center is like a college dorm (with all the drama), and the non-call center employees are completely detached. Not a real software company at all.

Pros

Startup, High Pressue, Fast Paced and Lack of Structure might appeal to those looking for some flexibility in how they perform their jobs. There are no reviews, tracking or accountability, so if you are looking to escape, good at playing politics, but not producing, you might be able to get away with a lot.

Cons

There is no real accountability. You are sort of at the whim of your superiors. Every group is different, but generally management is very poorly trained and improperly picked.

Advice to Senior Management

A clearing from the top-down would be the best way to ensure that proper professional management practices are put into effect. All new upper management is the key.

Pros

Pay appears to be reasonable.

Cons

- Total chaos. Projects you work on often get scrapped at the last minute
- Most of the management appear to lack technical knowledge
- The blame culture rules here; before we fix a problem, make sure we know who to blame.

Pros

I can't speak for the other departments in the company, so chances are it's not nearly as dysfunctional outside the engineering teams. I do know their revenues were climbing quite steadily and I'm sure the executive team is eyeing an exit soon.

Cons

For an software engineer, CyberDefender is pretty much an unmitigated disaster. In the short time I was there, the turnover rate was fairly ridiculous among the engineers; among the team of 15 or so, 4 left in the time I had been there and another 3 have left since I've left.

It's basically a company that treats engineers like disposable, fungible resources. I never interacted with anyone else in the company beyond my immediate team and I was constantly berated for trivial things, like having a personal package delivered to the office. Any attempt for resources (a second monitor, books, etc) were a huge hassle to get. I worked on the most inane projects possible, such as "don't let the user leave this web page when they close their browser window and annoy them with a half-dozen pop-ups instead." In the event engineers couldn't make a (unrealistically set to begin with) deadline, we were expected to simply remain in the office however late until it was complete. 60 hour works were standard. Every employee was essentially treated as a child (arriving late/leaving early was immediately criticized, you had to "get a pass" to go to the bathroom, and everyone some spyware installed on their computer so management could yell at you for spending 3 minutes on espn.com).

I have absolutely nothing good to say about the company. Don't work here.

Advice to Senior Management

Given CyberDefender has no interest in being a "technology company" and sees the engineering team as a cost center, they might as well go the whole hog and just outsource everything to India or something. I doubt I'll ever see a company as badly managed as this one and I've pretty much committed to spending every opportunity to I have to tell every software engineering professional I know to never work at this godforsaken company.