Digimarc Reviews

Pros

Digimarc has a culture of treating employees with respect and trusting their judgement. Mid level managers are very respective to work life balance of all employees. Generally only the best are hired after a reasonably grueling interview process. While there is a cubicle environment the overall atmosphere is well done with high quality cubicle hardware and large spaces.

Cons

The benefits are decent but not great. There is almost no 401K matching and bonuses are very spotty. Digimarc almost never gives out significant performance perks like spot bonuses. There is often a big company culture even though at its core Digimarc is still a relatively small company.

Advice to Senior Management

Find new ways to leverage the incredible IP the company has. Let the thought of selling the watermarking business to another large company fall by the wayside.

Pros

Excellent intellectual property team. Fantastic engineering team. Good people working at the company.

Cons

Huge gap between employees and CEO. CEO quite introverted with little willingness to finance productization of his technology. However he has created quite a lot of value for shareholders through various non product related business deals so can't complain too much.

Pros

Interesting concept, but odd execution. They may send you to places for support of the clients, but it will be badly timed and for unknown duration. It's a very diverse workforce, so that's interesting...getting to know people from other cultures and lands.

Cons

lots of unscheduled work, missed deadlines, etc. They are very dependent on clients purchasing their solutions, but these solutions are older and retrofitted in many cases. Clients are choosing larger national companies, rather than sticking with these guys. They have taken senior managers and made them individual contributors, because of the bosses inability to understand their markets and customers.

Here's a good example of the management's problems. A few years ago, the company came to within a few weeks of having their stock symbol delisted by their exchange.

Advice to Senior Management

You say you are Six Sigma ... but what do I see? Zero Sigma!

Pros

The best reason to work for Digimarc is the technology the company is centered around is very good. The IP is solid and the work is challenging.

Cons

The main downside to working at Digimarc is that there is too much cronyism in upper management. They come in and make bad decisions based on incomplete information and then expect top performance inspite of the bad decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

I would suggest that all members of management Sr. Director and about actually sit down and read the company values and then actually practice them and take them to heart.

Pros

Good salary and an excellent benefits package.

Cons

There's no adequate carreer growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

The senior management makes a great deal of trying to communicate with the dispersed teams. However, sometimes it can come across as condescending, particularly all of the recent communications dealing with L-1 acquisition. Again and again it is repeating the same language to us "now is the time to focus," "This is a recognition of your efforts,", "Until done it is a business as usual", and repeating our "purpose" over and over has worn out and become meaningless when it appears the same way in coutnless meetings. With expectation of the reorganization and a real possibiltiy to go through layoffs again it does not make everyone feel better.