Pros

Fair Isaac has a good number of talented, dedicated employees. The Arden Hills location is a pleasant place to work, genrally speaking.

Cons

Employee morale can sometimes suffer due to less than optimal communication from upper management which results in a feeling that the company lacks directional focus.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees. Realize that the level of performance you receive given staffing levels and compensation is outstanding, and that rewarding your exceptional employees is vital to retention.

Pros

Saturated the marketplace with their scoring solutions.

Cons

FICO has lost their way. Focused on the quarter by quarter bottom line, not on long term strategy.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop strategies and start managing for the future, instead of today.

Pros

- Very intelligent employees
- Flex time
- A lot of autonomy whule working on projects
- Good benefit program

Cons

- Poor communication in senior and mid level ranks
- Lack of knowledge of all offerings lends to poor focus

Advice to Senior Management

- Streamline offerings and have learning/knowledge sharing sessions of remaining products to arm sales with an array of more options to potenial clients.

Pros

Flex time, Nice offices, Public what they do (credit Scoring), co-workers are friendly

Cons

Uneven decision making by senior management, Middle management is not managed thus make very arbitaray decisions and senior management will not step in and correct poor decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Get out of offices and talk to staff. Provide training to middle managers and follow up on expectations

Pros

Very willing to allow employees to work from home office virtually. Great team environment in certain pockets of the company.

Cons

Not alot of understanding of the "whole" business i.e. many different fragmented products and services that end up competing in the field. The Client Partner model isn't really working.

Advice to Senior Management

Vertical strategy needs work...too many of them. Products need to be integrated to remove overlap. Product competition at the customer needs to be resolved.

Pros

In the technical/scientific side, the intelligence and friendliness of most of the co-workers. Hiring for good personality (lack of aggressive arrogance) and high ability. Willingness to help and share.

Few egotistical mainpulators I've come in contact with on my side.

Science + tech types who get their job done well.

Cons

Internal computer support for scientific needs is woefully underdeveloped (hardware and software) far worse than even basic academic labs, much less a Yahoo or Google. Essentially they have no clue and no distinction between some random app-server and hard-core scientific cluster simulation. Continuous downscaling about what IT will support or offer or install, enforced centralization, and of course totally forbidding science or devel to administer their own systems & software installation (i.e. be root).

See "advice to senior management".

Advice to Senior Management

CEO talks about how analytics are 'core' of company (indeed without modeling nobody would buy the mediocre software, except maybe Blaze---and that was acquired externally), but it still seems to be viewed --- or at least acted upon --- from the very top as just another random software company, which it isn't.

Major new product upgrades/releases get designed and decisions made with hardly any of the scientific staff knowing what is going in or having any input, and as a result, most decision end up being made by software engineering, with all change driven around their needs. Modeling is often just a

Where is the Chief Analytics Officer? Somebody with fundamental machine learning/modeling knowledge and the clout to drive long-term fundamental progress both from top-down ideas, and sponsoring individual scientist ideas (the "entry level" science is pretty good) to go from idea to product.

Fundamentally, scientists seem to be ignored by the rest of FIC management / business except when there's a bug (either FIC's fault or client's fault) and clients are whining. They just plug models into the small, obsolete, box set up for them by the software development design.

There is no communication from the FIC business side---most of the client partners seem to be inept in interaction and absent otherwise. Scientists don't even know whom to talk to about any specific client, and don't even know whom to ask. Many data problems come from client misunderstanding, but there is no push from FIC business to convince them to fix problems (as it would help the models they get).

There is no communication whatsover about what features competitors have and that we might think about working/improving on---indeed no communication about what the names of the the competitors even are, except through informal grapevine and employee departures.

Pros

Fair Isaac takes care of its employees better than many other companies i know of. Work can be technically challenging and satisfying.

Cons

Company is personality driven, not process driven. One can get away with murder as long as your supervisor is happy.

Advice to Senior Management

adopt more processes. Trim the management. 50+ Vice Presidents are way too many.

Pros

There are some really amazing people at Fair Isaac, and the company has a strong value proposition to offer the world.

Cons

Someone once joked that Fair Isaac feels like the "Fisher Price My First Corporation" - and I couldn't agree more. In their struggle to be the 'everything to everybody" company, the leadership team seems to go from one initiative to the next while seemingly hoping that the latest furniture rearrangement will somehow solve the bigger problems. If only the leadership would make the hard and tough decisions around restructuring the business and focusing on only the core opportunities, it could be a really great place to work!

Advice to Senior Management

Focus. Focus. Focus. Either replace the COO or consider seriously limiting his sphere of influence - he's more in the way of change than a champion for it.

Pros

Life/Work Balance is solid and reasonable. The team that I work on is kept small and manageable in that everyone knows well what everyone else is doing.

Cons

Salary and upward mobility can be lacking. There is no rhyme or reason to salary increases or promotions. Truly incompetent employees are kept around for seemingly no reason. The company is currently in cost saving mode and some of the personal decisions have been down right baffling. Clearly competent employees have been let go while terrible ones with MUCH higher salaries keep there jobs. The value added ratio does not compute. It is quite an amazing thing to watch. Also, benefits are being slashed and were just so/so to begin with.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to salaries and who is doing good work.

Pros

referral bonus. and depending on which team you join, some teams are well managed. I dont have so much to say so i'd just like to keep it short and sweet. ultimately based on which teams you join, you will be treated different. its disjointed this way. so access your interviewers well. beware sales positions as they tend to be just brute force sales man. at least in AP. So i hopw thats enought for your to decide if you want to work in such an organization.

Cons

its too sales centric. and thye seem to have grown too quickly

Advice to Senior Management

Stream line their processes. Innovate as an IT company should. Pay attention to your customers as most of them are unhappy about post sales issues