SafeNet Reviews

Pros

Great people, flexible hours, work is rewarding, awesome benefits

Cons

Lack of good leadership, little staffing support

Pros

Flexible work environment
Nice people
a few rock stars, especially in sales leadership

Cons

very high tolerance for ineptitude
senior management sits back while a small band of people ruin the company
morale extremely low
no motivation
penny-wise pound-foolish
way too much process
not good at integrating acquisitions
Floyd was a pretty mouthpiece for the company but provided no leadership

Advice to Senior Management

Consolidate engineering teams and projects geographically. Teams scattered about US, Canada, Europe and India is a failure.

Pros

SafeNet manages to hire the best of the best. Professional courtesy and sound judgement accompany your daily business interactions. A great group of people focused on making a noteable difference in the world we live in today. We make a direct and very profound contribution to our nations homeland security and I for one, am very proud to be part of this orgaization.

Cons

It would be nice if there were an onsite cafeteria, there are limited options for grabbing lunch anywhere nearby, without having to travel to the mall. But many of the employees actually travel to Torrance to take advantage of the labs down there, so it's probably not economical for them to consider that option at this point in time.

Pros

Nice Work Exposure
Good Working Hours

Cons

non transparent management
Bureaucratic nature in the management

Pros

A nice place to work in

Cons

There is always bureaucracy going on

Pros

Global organization with some great people as well as challenging and interesting projects to work on. Somewhat flexible hours and benefits.

Cons

Limited budgets and personnel to get things done. This and global nature leads to long hours, travel, and the need for 24/6 digital availability.

Advice to Senior Management

Get the IPO done.

Pros

The health benefits are excellent; good PTO leave policy; flexible scheduling

Cons

Lack of communication from upper management; no consideration for employee opinions; unfair promotion and hiring practices.

Advice to Senior Management

* Recognize and promote good people from within; do not assume that outside consultants or new hires have all of the answers;
* Share information more frequently with employees; listen to employee comments on how to improve the workplace.
* Revamp the HR department from the hiring and recruting practices to the promotions practices.

I worked at SafeNet for almost four years and I watched a steady decline of the work atmosphere and the morale of the employees. During that time I had been through three corporate acquisitions and two divests. There is barely enough time to catch your breath between one major disruption to another and to assimilate work flows into your daily routine before another incident occurs. The corporate controls are lacking and the senior leadership considers all employees dispensible. When I first started there the working culture was very different and employees were respected and their opinions counted for something. At the end it was the complete opposite. There is no promotion from within the ranks and the compensation is and hiring practices are all based upon who you know or how much you are favored.

Pros

Good work life balance and great people

Cons

Needs more direction in terms of product

Pros

Working on something totally new (Peer to Peer networking). Exposure to both c++/ Microsoft .NET programming.

Cons

Working in big company was not exposed to financial strength of this particular department I worked for. Working for my previous company the CEO would periodically tell us the financial position of the company (it was a startup company).

Advice to Senior Management

The leadership did retain the employees during difficult 2008 downturn. I found later the business group I joined was not generating enough revenue as per its potential.

Pros

Their benefits were sufficient and at a seemingly fair cost.

Cons

During my time with this company, I can honestly say that this was the most unprofessional company I have ever worked for. In case you didn't read their history over the past several years, this company has been focused on buying other companies in order to create one ultimate internet security company. I can't speak for all of their mergers, but I was part of one of their mergers. Before, during, and after the takeover, I was appalled by the little attention SafeNet spent getting to know my company's capabilities and its people. It seemed that there was no transition plan developed (or at least not followed) because there was little to no communication about what was going on and changes were implemented without consulting anyone. Their HR department was especially rude and lacked preparedness in almost every single encounter I had with them. After the takeover, they let some valuable employees go and the ones that were "lucky" enough to stay around eventually left on their own due to the poor management of the merger. If our experience is any indication of how they treat the rest of their employees, I would say that someone in this company needs to take a good, hard look at what's going on and make some big changes. Or, stop acquiring companies that are not a good fit.