RealNetworks Reviews

Current Employee – been working at RealNetworks full-time for more than a year

Pros – -Great benefits (5 weeks of vacation, free drinks, subsidized transportation, subsidized lunch)
-Decent location (Belltown)

Cons – -Too corporate-y for our own good.
-Poor leadership. A bunch of bean counters that don't really seem to care about their employees, just want us to grab a bucket and help bail out the sinking ship that is RN.
-Low morale: Everybody is just trying to survive...there is hardly any passion here.

Advice to Senior Management – Hard pivot. You are no longer (relative) good at media. Find another niche because some other giants have far surpassed the RN of yesteryear.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – I have never worked with as wonderful of a group as this in my life. I have learned a lot over my career here. If you want to be mentally challenged this is a great place.

Cons – Perpetual layoffs.
Failure to innovate. On a good day we are always about six months behind everyone.
Goals set are out of scope for the man hours required.
Far too much bureaucracy to be efficient.

Advice to Senior Management – Manage expectations.
Provide clear direction.
Do not wait until the last minute to tell us news.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks as a contractor for less than a year

Pros – It us an interesting industry space

Cons – I did not enjoy the culture of the company. People were friendly but still did not invest much time in creating group culture and chemistry. I think that if the team is united and creating work relationship it helps the execution level and collaboration.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than a year

Pros – The company has a cloud system that is global in presence and well-designed, it is a great environment to learn the technology, partly because there are too many tasks and not enough technical people to carry them out, so asking to be part of something that is outside your specific task set is generally welcomed.

Cons – While the technology side of the company is able and agile, senior management struggles with finding an identity for the enterprise. The game portals have very loyal customers, but they don't seem to promote them anywhere online. The mp3 selling business (Rhapsody) was spun off last year. They have some interesting streaming business lines in SE Asia, but it's a small percentage of there business. One of the business lines is selling ringtones and ringback tones, with smartphones very few people need to buy ringtones anymore.
Intra-departmental competition over who controls network operations and monitoring has frustrated the attempts of middle management to lower network costs.

Advice to Senior Management – Follow Amazon and Google into the Cloud, you have the infrastructure to create new opportunities yet you have been trying to buy something, anything, that looks like it might be a 'hit'. To the board; Rob Glaser said he doesn't want to be CEO, you should listen to him. You've had two short term CEO's in the last three years. That should tell you something about the process you're using. Find a better search agency and have a review of your top-level relationships. There are some revolving door relationships which seem questionable in the Director/VP range in Seattle.

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – free on site gym, 25 cent arancianta, bowling alley, intelligent and interesting coworkers, in my case-amazing supervisors : real leadership, real genuine, and real humanity.
paid ORCA card, affordable in house cafeteria, convenient downtown location

Cons – All the amazing, intelligent, people who you will learn from and become part of your family will get laid off. Then you will get laid off. Every year I worked there, I witnessed a Christmas layoff and eventually fell victim to the same fate in the Spring. Management seems to miss the mark all the way around and don't understand the value in personnel.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than a year

Pros – Real used to be a solid company in the dot-com era. They were smart; they built a lot of good technology, media players and founded Rhapsody as well (still their best product IMHO). There were smart people who worked there and they treated their employees well.
They still have a good work/life balance and some decent benefits. Plus the location in downtown Seattle is great.

Cons – The political infighting was really hard to deal with - there were many power struggles that caused people to stop focusing on what was important - getting the job done. Also the senior management changed 2x while i was there in two years and it was very hard to maintain a solid direction. The management would not listen to the plans that their senior managers and directors would propose and often changed direction very quickly. Morale is also very low.

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your employees. You hired them for a reason right? Then let them Do Their Jobs. Get some senior management that cares and give them some rope to make real decisions and improve the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Great people and great ideas

Cons – Ideas never used or just help on the back burner
HR lacks professionalism and is behind in the times with compensation
lack of morale and energy due to bad management
Hiring friends to work for you that have no experience is so wrong
no management training

Advice to Senior Management – hire and keep the smart people who make an impact

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Great location on the waterfront and great restaurants.

Cons – Their management is all about skating to where the puck used to be not to where it's going to be. They seem to have an insecurity problem and want to be cool, but have no idea what cool looks like.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – During their early years the place had some of the most wickedly smart people in Seattle tech and digital media. Their ideas were 10 years ahead of the industry. They still have several distinct businesses that with the right focus and ideas could individually be successful. RobG is a blessing and, well, not. He's incredibly smart, driven and competitive and had a lot of chutzpah to compete against well capitalized companies much larger than Real.

Cons – Tough location for bus commuters or eastsiders. Lots of senior management churn (voluntary and involuntary) hurts their ability to set a course and go after it to win. Their businesses have no connective tissue today. I'd love to see the math on value shareholders would receive vs current stock price if the company just spun off all the business units and distributed the cash.

Advice to Senior Management – Real needs a product breakthrough to become relevant again. Hard to see that happening at this point.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at RealNetworks full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – -Great work life balance
-Good benefits
-Hires smart people

Cons – -The Chairman/"interim" CEO keeps coming and going, and sees people as a never-ending resource to lay off and then go hire a new crop
-The company keeps trying to "re-invent" the same old RealPlayer instead of heading into new territory
-The company can get overly-invested in outdated processes
-Antiquated infrastructure

Advice to Senior Management – Recognize the value of the people you have and quit having almost annual layoffs; find a CEO that doesn't keep installing his cronies; spend some of your money on upgrading your systems to be more efficient.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend