Parallels Reviews

Pros

the people here are great!

Cons

lack of organization and follow-through with policies

Advice to Senior Management

get more headcount

Pros

growing and expanding industry with so much possibility and opportunity.
fast paced environment.
high energy
competitive compensation
booming industry
amazing opportunity

Cons

commuting in can be challenging given that the headquarters are in Renton but it is manageable.

Pros

Very exciting and energetic place to work

Cons

Not much structure in place.

Pros

Flexible work schedule - most development resources are on Moscow and Novosibirsk time, so tele-conferences are usually early morning or very late at night.
Work Environment - casual, friendly -- never a question of whether you will get the tools and hardware you need to be happy and productive as a developer
Cool technology - provisioning the "building blocks" which enable cloud computing

Cons

Communication is challenging - lack of respect for diverse ideas/opinions, local and remote management not always on same page.
Goal setting and lack of accountability.
Career opportunities are limited State-side as a developer.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep focus on long term prospects - devotion to targets and metrics are well and good, but take your people (and culture) into account, hold people accountable for mistakes, and continue to reward innovation and initiative. Be more aggressive in the enterprise space. Make a deeper investment in Parallels Automation.

Pros

The right industry to be in right now. Some of the technology and products. Customer base and customer list. Many of the employees are top notch, bringing previous work experience to the game. Most employees are a joy to work with in spite of the corp culture. Tools and methods are improving.

Cons

Negative corp culture driven from the top down (not the bottom up). Employees pitted against each other. High turnover. Lack of best practices. Unusual organizational structure and behavior for a middle aged, mid sized ISV. Immature executive leadership in many cases. Some of the products are showing their age.

Advice to Senior Management

Agree with other reviewer - in summary, grow up.

Pros

open minded, creative, musik-interestet, culturel

Cons

unstructured, to less budget, unprofessional,

Pros

- nice start for students to have a record in their CVs
- quite good salary and good additional benefits

Cons

- ineffective management
- poor tech specs and massive feature creep
- lots of unpaid overtime job
- lots of kludgy solutions

Advice to Senior Management

Find managers, who can make realistic project planning and tech spes.
Stop overtimes. Making job in haste doesn't make the result better.

Pros

Parallels technology is incredible competitive. OS virtualization provides lots of benefits and if the company made an attempt to really market it, VMware would be nervous.

Cons

Senior management had NO communication down at all.
At one time, this company owed me 12 weeks of salary and I never received an explanation why this happened.
Russian founders brought their culture to the US. They frequently lay off and rehire if anyone does any thinking or questioning about strategy. They pit people against each other and just expect you to work and be grateful for a job.

Advice to Senior Management

Grow up. Don't spend the profits on your "toys." Spend it on growing the business and learn MBWA. (that's wandering around not wandering away). Understand that when the economy gets better, you will experience the workforce voting with their feet.
Serguei makes very irrational decisions based on emotion and then expects everyone to do whatever it takes to match his "world view"

Pros

- Good place to work for top managers.
- Nice startup for students to have a record in their CVs
- They are on their way of building proper infrastructure and processes.

Cons

- Unawareness of technicians about the processes inside the company
- Some of positions are dead-end.

Advice to Senior Management

Look more at the people and their opinion. Even very floor man can propose a good idea for business. Make meetings more efficient and understandable for all the parties if they are related to.

Pros

Parallels makes great products for many markets segments. They have a great name in an exciting growth industry. Lots of great people learn from both engineering and management.

Cons

With a small organization you wear many hats and switching them so much tends to lead to loss of productivity.

Advice to Senior Management

Some advice would be to involve the little people more in the planning and provide more notice of major changes.