Research in Motion Reviews

Pros

The culture is pretty weird, maybe thats why it had to lay off 2500 people. Depending on the team you get to travel once or twice a year. The salary is decent.

Cons

Management needs to be changed, new faces and new ideas. Needs to give stock options and discounted blackberrys to employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to be changed, new faces and new ideas. Culture needs to be changed and more interaction between different teams and groups. More good looking faces too.

Pros

- Some very smart good people
- fast pace hi tech environment, constantly changing
- used to be good to employees

Cons

- not good to employees in the recent bad times
- little work life balance: their moto is: "Always on and Always connected" so you are always on call
- in a very competitive business

Advice to Senior Management

- Good Luck
- legal delays, are killing company growth in moving forward
- product delays, stop allowing multiple delays in getting product to market, = still no 4G, other have had it for a year.

Pros

* Work/life balance - flex hours and very little overtime. You are judged based on the work you do and not your work hours, appearance and other superfluous things.
* Overall competent coworkers and lower management - you get to work with some very bright individuals whom you can learn a lot from. The management of my team and group was fairly well done; whatever issues we've had generally came from upper level. My managers were approachable and listened to suggestions, and tried hard to ensure their subordinates are satisfied.
* Good exposure to relevant mobile technologies - depending on the team you work, you will learn about a lot of standard hardware and software components used in phones and other embedded devices. The knowledge you gain here is transferable to other tech companies working on gadgets. You can learn a lot if you want to.
* Wide impact of the work you do - I worked on smartphone features that are now used by thousands of customers worldwide, which most developers will find gratifying.
* Good benefits/perks - decent health plan (on top of the standard coverage provided to all Ontario residents by the government), subsidies on gym memberships and health-related spending (e.g. fitness equipment), you get a free BlackBerry smartphone and a voice+data plan (Rogers) for the duration of your employment.
* Main campus is in a semi-suburban location, yet still walkable. A good number of restaurants and services are within reach.

Cons

* A lot of uncertainty re company future. Upper management doesn't seem to have definite plans or fails to communicate them with employees.
* Lack of innovation and emphasis on hardware (a variety of devices in subtly different form factors) and market expansion (e.g. third-world countries) as opposed to software and R&D. So you may end up working with outdated technologies. In the past couple years we have consistently failed to deliver on our promises. Generally we're playing catchup with market leaders (Android, iPhone).
* Compensation not up to par with certain software companies in the US (e.g. in Washigton, California). This may not be the case for other (non-software) positions, though.
* Working with third-party vendors can be frustrating: too much bureaucracy and they are often slow to deliver what's required, and you may have to debug third-party solutions.
* Kitchener/Waterloo doesn't have as many activities/entertainment as bigger cities (e.g. Toronto).

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on R&D, in particular coming up with innovative features and improving software quality. Be open and honest about the company's direction. Study competition and market trends. Be willing to invest into hiring first-class developers and designers by providing offers competitive with the US high tech industry, and take staff retention issues seriously.

Pros

- The pay & benefit are almost matched to most of the competitors. Possible bonus at the year end depend on company's revenue. After 5 years, you got 4 weeks vacation.
- Friendly co-workers. Most of them just just to do a good job but lack of motivation.
- One week per year of external training - courses from Learning Tree, for example.
- During summer time, you always get free ice cream on Friday.
- A lot of technical Lunch and Learn sessions to learn different technology from other department within RIM.
- Encourage to file patent for ideas but it takes a lot of time and energy to do the following up work with in-house patent lawyer. The reward is insignificant.

Cons

- Depend on some projects, you will get unrealistic deadline to meet. You have to work a lot of weekend to meet the deadline for the duration of 6 months. Lack of work life balance.
- No overtime pay and no in lieu off as well. for example, on Friday, the management just implies that you have to complete the code in order to meet the Monday build. Also implies that you should work over the weekend in order to meet the deadline. This style of "implying" is the norm in the culture of some of the projects. You can record the overtime of working on the weekend at the time-sheet, but nothing has ever been done with compensate of your work.
- Not allow to talk about the strength and weakness of competitor's openly. Ie., Iphone. If you don\t know the strength of your enemy, how can you deliver a feature/product better than your enemy's.
- Pay lip services to promote innovation. Ie., you have to file your ideas to patent but have no concrete policy of promote innovation. Someone has raised the ideas of "Google 20%" to senior VP but unfortunately, no action has ever been taken to establish a concrete policy to encourage and promote innovation.
- Only a small group of people to do prototype work in total secrecy. Majority don't know what is going on.
- Unqualified person being promoted quickly to manager, director positions.
- In fighting is normal between department to graph new projects & more headcounts. The victor is usually the person who has past record to always meet the deadline but ignore other factors such as being able to deliver product with high quality.
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Advice to Senior Management

Stop copying or doing catch-up acts to your competitor. Set up concrete policy and reward program to promote innovation from bottom up. Look at "Google 20%" to motivate your foot soldiers and everyone in RIM to innovate. Out of that 100 ideas, 99 % may not make it to the final product but this is how you get your "killer app" from the 1% of ideas.

Stop bashing the features/products of your competitor with past achievement of BlackBerry. Acknowledge the strength of your enemy( Iphone, Android, Ipad) and the weakness of yourself(BlackBerry, Playbook) in order to create a excellent future product.

Quote from The Art of War by Sun Tzu:
"If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself."

Pros

You think and work independently. People are friendly. Nice place to develop your skill. Consideration towards family. The proud and philanthropic nature of the CEO/Founders

Cons

They are not geared up to face tough competition from Apple. People are laid back and lack fire in them or killing instincts.

Advice to Senior Management

Please develop new technologies to lure the consumer. Set the fire in the minds of developers. Do follow Apple but offend them with different technology

Pros

A wonderful company to work for just coming out of university. You'll learn countless new skills quickly. You'll be valued and there are a endless opportunites for quick career advancement. The workforce is young and career driven - very fun!

Cons

There is a lack of solid middle management. Employees are promoted because they're knowledge experts - not people experts. It takes an average of 5 months to hire a new employee internally or externally.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't allow yourself to be promoted into a position that you're not ready for. They're are far too many 20-something year olds that don't have enough experience with people to be managers.

Pros

Learned lots from really smart people from around the world, as well as in areas that you can apply at many companies outside of RIM.

Cons

Very silo'd working environment, where many colleagues are not trustful of one another. Need to have a lot of corporate savviness to advance.

Advice to Senior Management

RIM is in a bad sport right now because many members of our executive leadership and senior management are resting on their laurels to justify business decisions and strategy, when clearly RIM is in needs of a new direction to compete to viable threats to its business.

Pros

Great work/life balance. Nice people, challenging but reasonable workload

Cons

Tight and inflexible teams. No pride in the software/hardware that gets sold to customers

Advice to Senior Management

Too rigid in terms of management styles

Pros

they had good work environment

Cons

Their rotating shift work schedule

Advice to Senior Management

no comments

Pros

Fast paced development, enjoyable environment, interesting and rewarding products.

Cons

Lacking communication and collaboration between teams