Real Reviews

Pros

Real Networks offers a great work life balance ... but it seems to have come at the expense of people not working very hard. If you work for the right boss, you can get things done and get significant senior management exposure. Great opportunity to work on digital media, games & music are fun.

Cons

Pays below market average, longer you work there, more underpaid you become. Company acts like it's a well oiled machine while it barely breaks even. Management decisions have not helped bottom line or stock performance. Too many employees. Company could perform better with half the headcount.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay middle management better instead of overpaying (and hiring) too many VPs.

Pros

Real is an exciting and dynamic market.
Real creates Interesting Technology and has a very innovative culture.
Lots of smart people at the company.
Financially very strong, which means that even if the economy really hits a wall the company will be a safe port in a storm

Cons

Because Real is in a very dynamic industry means that things change a lot, so one needs to like/thrive when there's a lot of change. Lots of big competitors means that Real has to be very nimble, which also creates a lot of fluidity. Music industry in particular can be a challenging partner because it is such a dysfunctional industry.

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate more, especially in times of change.

Pros

RealNetworks is a very very challenging environment to work at within the Engineering area's, if you like a challenge then this is a good place to spend a LITTLE time.

Cons

The most steeply political environment I've ever worked at, no inter-department communication, tons of finger-pointing. RealNetworks tries to maintain the dot-com feeling that we all loved during the nineties, however, upper management has a corporate outlook that is incompatible with a dot com culture. Re-orgs happen constantly, and the turn-over rate is surprisingly high. There is a ton of legacy systems and no real documentation to support it, and the personnel that originally deployed the solutions are long gone, leaving current employees holding the bag.

Advice to Senior Management

Quit so that someone qualified can take your position

Pros

Great people! Great location in downtown Seattle! The products are compelling, and they are starting to figure out the business models in the area of music.

Cons

Sometimes the expectations are unreasonable. Poor middle management- nasty, bad attitudes, no oversight. Really bad salaries, by comparison. There does not seem to be a cohesive strategy for some parts of the company, specifically the systems business, and it seems to be languishing as people leave for other companies, or other positions in the company. Review never results in any more than a 3 maybe 4% increase.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay people a little more and your following would be loyal as hell! You can't go on forever with the "world call people don't care about money" philosophy, or wait on the stock. World call people DO care about money. And financial security! I know so many people that would have stayed for just a little more.

Pros

Great work/Life Balance. I rarely have to work long hours and have the chance to go home and be with my family. They won't take your life away from you. To date, I've gotten plenty of feedback on my performance and know where I stand with my manager. Salary compensation is also pretty good, even if benefits aren't up to the standards that I'm used to. There are lots of opportunites for learning and development within the company including a slew of classes and seminars that you can take.

Cons

Very steeped in tradition and tied to the success with their core demographic of 35-50 yo women. The company is also very silo'ed. You are often unclear about what other parts of the company are up to and collaboration across business units is very minimal. Management seems take a long time getting projects moving and aligning things across the organization, hence the work is sometimes chaotic and not well planned out. People are often running cross purposes and/or political infighting because each division just wants to do their own thing and doesn't want to be bothered with making sure they play nice with other parts of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

More alignment across divisions -- break up the silo mentality and get people working together. Also, implement a better system for identifying and promoting talent within the organization. Whenever a position comes open, it's always hiring from the outside. Learn to develop as well as hire talent.

Pros

Cannot think of any, as this is an organization in total paralysis.

Cons

Mediocrity of executive team - no skilled exec talent will work long term for a micro-managing CEO like Glaser. Look at the history of the revolving dooe at that level over the past 10 years.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop a strategy, and actually communicate it with a focus and clarity of diection.

Pros

The corporate culture actually isn't horrible. Every employee gets a $100/mo spending limit and they don't nickle-and-dime as badly as other companies sometimes do. It would be pretty laid back and a good place to work if your immediate management was any good. A lot of the individual people that work there are pretty nice people.

Cons

The current management shakeup has left a pile of jerks running a lot of the departments. Blamecasting and threats to fire the first employee that messes up are managements idea of how to run the company. Do not take a job as a system or networking engineer at this firm. The jerks that are currently running this company are the kind of people who like to try to solve complex problems by kicking their dogs -- they take out their problems on the lowest employees. It used to be just kind of incompetent, but now its just mean.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management is the problem. Just give it up at this point. Sell off the games division and pocket the cash. Shutdown or sell off the rest of the intellectual property (streaming, helix player, music, etc). Then take the cash and turn it into a VC firm or some kind of small-scale Berkshire that buys and sells companies since that seems to be what Glaser is interested in doing.

Pros

Free Rhapsody and SuperPass. Laid back pace. The space itself is very nice and the location is great.

Cons

They're addicted to layoffs and reorgs. Endless flip flopping of org charts and departments. VP's who employees hate will stay around for years.

Advice to Senior Management

Be willing to get rid of Sr. VPs.

Pros

Pleasant seaside location and delicious spaghetti right next door. There are a lot of really smart people, even if they don't stay too terribly long. There are some good interesting tech projects. Very diverse work means that if you want, you can look around within the company. Oh and duh, free Rhapsody.

Cons

Very disorganized, with G&A surprisingly low-tech for a "high-tech" company. The organization as a whole is very disjointed as well, very siloed structure really doesn't facilitate cross-group communication, which can lead to frustrating bureaucracy. The cafeteria could use some work, especially since there are so few restaurants nearby.

Advice to Senior Management

Fix HR please. And c'mon, get G&A into the 21st century! Cross-group communication is non-existant.

Pros

There are a lot of very intelligent, competent and friendly people "in the trenches" at Real who take a lot of pride in their work. The constant fire-drills are are also great opportunities to expand skill sets beyond the current job description. These are great for career advancement, just not within the company. Overall, the hours (while many) do have some flexibility and the location in Belltown is great.

Cons

Under-staffing and chaos from upper management lead to a high rate of burnout and turnover. Only 20% of the people I work with have a longer tenure than me and I have been here less than two years. In this same two year period, my group has reorganized 6 times. The under-staffing and chaos also lead to shortcuts to meet deadlines that often result in massive post-release clean-up efforts that require more resources than the initial launch.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on employee retention, not more poorly-executed partnerships and products. Staffing is already so thin that every departure is crippling, both in terms of productivity and the loss of institutional knowledge. Pounding your fist on a conference table doesn't change the fact that no one has the knowledge or bandwidth to deal with the problems.