Pros

Symantec is a company with 25 years of history and all the positives and negatives that go along with that. Some of the positives includes established products and brand name, interesting market opportunities, and a generally nice bunch of people to work with. You can see that the company has very valuable assets and that those assets can lead to incredible opportunities for the company.

Salary and benefits are generally in inline with similar sized public companies.

Cons

A company that has been around for 25 years sometimes begins to calcify not only at the top, but in the middle. You have employees who have been with the company for 10-15 years. If they have been consisently great performers, then they will have risen to the ranks of senior management. But unfortunately, there were many significantly average employees who were perfectly compotent, but completely non impressive. They were serving out their 9-5 sentences and doing what they needed to keep their jobs and that's it. That makes the company a less fun place to work.

Symantec (as with other large, well-established companies) was very specialized. What i did not like was that people were not interested in knowing too many things outside their narrow areas. Since almost all problems in company involve complicated problems that span a range of functional groups, it made it very difficult to get anything done. No one quite knew enough.

The company was built by acquisition, and I think that mentality has made them forget how to develop products internally. This usually takes discipline, planning and money. A company with well established products always has to be careful about how to invest their resources. It is always easy to overallocate to established products since a 10% return on a $100M product is much larger than a 100% on a $1M product. This can hurt short term profitibility. But without those kinds of investments soon you have no product pipeline. You can sometimes acquire your way out of it (and Symantec has done a pretty good job of that), but if you are in the product development org, it makes the job less fun. You are only integrating and updating (improving) rather than developing.

Advice to Senior Management

With John Thompson's departure, the senior management culture may improve. Under his watch (over the last 5 years anyway), it's been a culture of protecting friends at the expense of getting better leadership for the company. That is something that i hope changes under the new CEO.

Figure out what kind of company you want to be, and go that way. Hire the appropriate people to get there. Don't hire (expensive) builders, if you just need (cheaper) maintainers. If your real value add is in the M&A space, then invest heavily there (like Cisco did) and really make that a differentiator.