Research in Motion Reviews in Mississauga, ON (Canada)

Pros

Good compensation, nice colleagues, flexible hours, and lots of perks

Cons

Promotions are very difficult to get. All people are equal which means your title might not change for years even though you are promoted...

Advice to Senior Management

Transparency would motivate employees and foster synergy within the company. Respect employees by letting them know what is going on, and make sure organizations work together. The vast human resources of RIM operate in separate islands and not as a big unit...

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

- Big Company
- Mature environment
- Amazing Management
- Friend environment. Not tensed a at all. You are measured based on your project dead lines not 9-5 job hours.

Cons

Learning growth isn't good. If you are in the start of your career then you wouldn't learn that much. If you are in mid of your career and wanna have a satisfied relaxing job, then go for it

Pros

1. Comfy working environment
2. Teams communicate a lot, and people are usually willing to help
3. Immediate superiors do listen to advices, even from co-ops and interns

Cons

RIM tends to acquire smaller companies to boost their software product line, and hire tremendous amount of junior developers/co-ops/interns to maintain the code base until these products fail to compete with others. In short RIM spends bucks to acquire companies rather than hiring hardcore devs, resulted in poor innovation.

Advice to Senior Management

Balance more toward human resources, rather than technology acquisition, especially for software R&D

Pros

casual dress, nice work environment, good pay and benefits

Cons

No much communication between different levels and among the team

Advice to Senior Management

More communication

Pros

Fairly relaxed culture, with Fridays being ice cream day on the summers. Team was mostly friendly and ate out a lot together during birthdays and other celebrations. Work was simple, and standards were low.

Cons

Management was hesitant to resolve disputes between workers, and generally seem too soft in these situations. Due to the low standards and the lack of knowledge by management, work was sloppy at times. Appeared to have little opportunity for professional growth.

Advice to Senior Management

Find management that knows what they're doing. Promotion should be based on merit. Be prepared to discipline bad apples within the company.

Pros

Great culture where a new grad can easily build his/her portfolio. A very young and eager crowd. Seniors are very helpful and friendly.

Cons

If you're unlucky enough to get stuck on a really boring, uninteresting project, there's not much you can do. Like any software company, it's about the project and the people so it's hit or miss.

Advice to Senior Management

Not much to complain about the seniors. They are quite friendly. Maybe even too friendly as constructive criticism is very healthy in a professional environment.

Pros

Work/life balance, pay is good, there is great opportunity for learning and growth, rewarding experiences when working with dynamic and creative people.
Fast paced, dynamic, requires self motivation.

Cons

Poor people management: great individual contributors promoted in people management roles, effort is not recognized with praise, attention to personal development is not a high priority for managers

Advice to Senior Management

Take greater care into who you promote as people managers. They have a huge impact into who remains with the company or your group, how engaged and productive your people are.

Enable better communication between engineering and product management teams. Hire better, technically sound product managers.

Pros

- free blackberry (and sometimes yet to be released) with voice and data plan (no voice mail for some groups)
- working on a product that is used throughout the world by a growing demographic
- get to work on things you're not qualified to do

Cons

- no ESPP, or RSU or options -- come on!
- RIM requires employees to sign a waiver for every little retarded social event outside of RIM or working hours
- RIM IT blocks/firewalls any social networking site (Facebook, LinkedIn), as they're afraid employees will get poached. Lame.
- product development process is messed as it doesn't scale at all
- starting to become a "me-too" company by biting Apple
- RIM is a whipping boy to the whims of the Carriers
- good ol' boy's network feel (or more aptly good ol' farm hick boys network)
- too many inexperienced Team Leads
- some groups don't provide laptops
- none of the Canadian offices have a cafe on campus
- parking spaces in Waterloo and even in Mississauga
- horrible bush league OD/HR department

Advice to Senior Management

- treat your employees like adults
- trust your employees, don't police them
- don't discount the fact that your technical engineering staff may have insights in other areas (ie. business, marketing)
- STOP hiring every unqualified ATI/AMD, Nortel reject
- hire individuals who are FLUENT in English