Pros

Great reliable 2FA security products

Cons

Tried not to compensate fairly for 2FA sales. Comp plan was focused on tired product lines that were hard to see since the company would not invest to keep them up with competitive function / features.

Advice to Senior Management

Go back to bread and butter and build off the 2FA success.

Pros

The people are great to be honest. There is a lot of agreement among non-director level personnel and people like to support one another.

Cons

Management... do not always understand where the winds are blowing and make the wrong strategic decisions - a shame because the potential is huge but it disappears due to politics.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop to think about the future.

Pros

All the security knowledge you can learn.
More often than not the tasks at hand are interesting, so you can actually work on something not so bad.
The people around you are generally good ones and honest workers.
working hours are flexible so you do not have to be there 9 to 5, but rather whatever time you want to work, as long as you finish up what you got got to do.
from time to time you can get a few gift certificate for getting your job. it is nothing biggie, like $100 amazon certificate, just to make you feel better.

Cons

Promotion is hard to come by. People can work real hard and did great job, but only got promoted very late. Of all the years I have worked here, I have only seen 3 promotions.
the work could be interesting for a while, but sometime it could be tiresome if you got to only work on one component year are year after year. Good that most of times you can just apply for another project and get to work on something else.
engineers got to manage their own project team, including release, doc, qa, so it is kind of cool.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize the heavy hitters and promote

Pros

RSA Security offers a very good compensation package and benefits. The healthcare is especially generous. There is a certain brand recognition and cachet to working there.

Cons

RSA, as a whole appears to be in decline. As they continue to grow by acquisition, the company becomes more fragmented and segmented. As a result, there is a difficultly communicating between business units. There seems to be a level of unresponsiveness throughout the organization. In other words, it's often difficult to get people to respond to inquiries.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't just talk about communication, practice it. Require your mid-level managers to talk to their employees on a regular basis. Make sure that your managers aren't just managing upwards, but rather helping drive their teams to success by enabling them with the tools and information they need.

Pros

Opportunity to make a difference. Security is hot with strong products in multiple product categories. Strong leadership team with mix of RSA executives and infusion of new talent from EMC. RSA has a small company feel with the benefits of being part of a larger entity (EMC).

Cons

Lack of resources to do all of the work required and management doesn't want to make the call on what cannot get done. Little to no funding for training or travel given the current economic climate. Work/life balance varies greatly from group to group. Constant re-organizations which causes too much internal/inward focus vs. customer focus. Too many meetings without agendas or clear action items coming out of the meeting.

Advice to Senior Management

Determine real source of RSA competitive advantage and align the company strategy accordingly.

Pros

Great Team,Innovative projects,Hot technology , brand name and research and developement

Cons

some parts of the company may need to be revamped

Advice to Senior Management

Keep fueling innovation and bring in cutting edge changes

Pros

Great people to work with, very talented people that have a strong work ethic.

Cons

Same talented people don't get rewarded when HQ is in Bedford without a clue as to how much we keep this organization afloat. With every new acquisitions there is more integration work without a clear and precise outline as to the process. RSA creates great products but the marketing is horrible,thus there is not real passion for the "trench-workers" for their everyday battles. Also the new managers need to take a Management 101 course for your employees should never have to pay for a manager's lack of leadership skills.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate the direction....even when you've just done it last quarter.

Pros

This is a good company to work for because of the culture and people. The RSA Conference is always a blast if you get to go. The technology is pretty interesting. There are opportunities to grow

Cons

The downside to working at RSA is that the company really hasn't learned how to grow beyond a token factory into a software and services provider. It doesn't have a lot of the process and controls in place to manage a larger company. At time this makes day to day work frustrating.

Advice to Senior Management

Get some real talent to lead your software engineering organization. Get rid of some of the incompetent managers. Invest more in high growth opportunities and markets where you have a presence that could get larger. Think beyond tokens.

Pros

There is nothing positive I can think of

Cons

It is a typical big company. There are meetings about meetings at this place. Everyone thinks they are doing a great job, but the company results don't show this. This company has not made much money for EMC since it paid $1.6 Billion dollars. There is a lot of strategy talk, but no one cares about execution. No one wants to tackle problems staring at your face, but they talk strategy. Lately, some key people who have worked there for many years have been shown the door - these were folks that did the real work.

This is not a company you want to work for. It was a real torture working here. The management seems to be more interested in renaming business units (they recently renamed one of the business units - IAAG - go figure what it means to a customer - no one internally knew what the hell it meant either) - Well one of the VPs in charge thought it was very important to do this.

This company has had one successful product - SecurID - nothing else has ever come out of this place.

Advice to Senior Management

It is time for change. EMC wake up, clean this place up before the talented folks left there will also leave. The leadership sucks here.