Sophos Reviews

Pros

Interestingbtechnology. Need new leadership to compete.

Cons

Lack of educational programs. Lack of career options for those not in sales.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on culture, and long term vision. Hire leaders not managers.

Pros

Due to better days, there are still a lot of good people there to work with. Even new hires (when hiring isn't frozen, which is rare) are good - people care a lot about making sure they pick good people. There's still a strong culture of caring about doing what's best for the customer.

Cons

Constant context-switching as more and more new projects are launched before others are finished. Increasing lack of autonomy for each department as upper management seems to panic about falling revenues - every little decision has more time/effort spent on it than it would take to do it, realize you did it wrong, and fix it.

Advice to Senior Management

Pick a strategy. (Wanting to hit a specific revenue target is NOT a strategy) Decide what you _don't_ do.

Pros

smart people abound. This is a continually changing place to work - new challenges are guaranteed. Stable financially, very pleasant office, open culture from most perspectives.

Cons

No advancement internally past the glass ceiling. Chaotic processes. Poor salary increases, entirely divorced from performance review. Arcane budgeting practices leading to distorted behaviour to work around meaningless restrictions. Self-defeating focus on hitting the dates for a project regardless of the quality of the outcome married to an inability to go back and finish anything.

Advice to Senior Management

Strong cultural revisions needed especially around performance management, professional / best practices, pay and reward, and remove the glass ceiling. Organisational maturity needs to be advanced dramatically, or the company split into smaller self-contained units.

Pros

Benefits are good. Standard time off and great healthcare (once you figure out how it works).
Solid product and industry know-how.
Some offices/locations have great perks (others don't).
Vancouver and Abingdon offices have it better than other offices (morale is better in these offices).
You can wear many hats if you want to.

Cons

Salaries are under industry average. Bonuses are definitely not guaranteed.
Long hours, no work-life balance.
Politics abound in the Burlington office.
Low morale, esp in Burlington office.
Managers/Directors too busy having pissing contests with each other.
Micromanaging of employees in some departments.
Meetings are a way of life.
There have been layoffs in past year+.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop the unnecessary politics. Listen to your employees. Fix morale problems.

Pros

Drinking out a fire hose - you will learn a lot, and quickly, because you have to.
Most people are quite nice, there's a sense of "in the trenches" comraderie

Cons

HR and management are completely shameless in how much they underpay US employees, especially in light of benefits given staff in other locations. Burlington branch is expected to work, work, work and sacrifice work/life balance while everyone else at other locations can take a one month sabbatical because "that's just how it is". Especially nauseating when you see the basic quality-of-life perks that other locations get without question.

Structure is a mess, goals are unclear. People constantly spinning their wheels with no real target in mind. Endless piles of work with no sense of fulfillment. Thinks it's a huge company but acts like a tiny boutique in terms of backstabbing internal politics and string-pulling to get bare necessities work done or prioritised.

Infrastructure is pathetically behind basic requirements, no matter your department. It's a company of 2011 expectations with 1991 infrastructure.

Pros

Concerns are listened to and acted upon, promotion for hard work and dedication happens, morale is good, salaries are generous, staff are generally cheery, pressure is usually relative, benefits package is good (bupa, travel insurance, pension etc) and nice pastries and coffee to top it off.

Cons

Deadlines can be very unrealistic, staff perception of IT department is not always great despite working our extremely hard (and therefore under-appreciated by co-workers which is very disappointing.) Information when you start can be hard to get your hands on. Overly complex infrastructure with almost departments designing own environments and expecting IT to fully support it!

Advice to Senior Management

There are way too many meetings. Meetings need to be condensed and then communicated in a more appropriate way. The same goes with general communication at the company - the use of email is way out of control, then there's IM and phone, mobile... it's not productive to spend half your time organising your inbox, messages, phone messages, mobile messages etc.

Morale in some departments isn't great but it's improving. The dependence on IT for literally everything has to be reduced and made more realistic. IT staff don't generally go into IT to perform lots of administrative tasks...

Other than that, it's a great place to work with good prospects :)

Pros

Free coffee, free bun and free anti-virus, great to install on your mother-in-law's PC as it will for sure annoy her everytime she actually tries to use the computer.

Cons

Working for Sophos or selling your soul to the devil? An easy question, unless you appreciate free buns, endless meetings and no career progression. Solid technical advice is ignored and critical enterprise applications are often developed by hobbyist programmers in their free time, however, you are still supposed to support these duck tape applications. Relatively simple software services are often hugely complex as layer upon layer of complexity has been added over the years witch each layer having a dependency on pretty much every other layer.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire a CTO to sort out your technical debt. Without restructuring your IT infrastructure will become a bottleneck to sustain your growth.

Pros

- challenging technical tasks
- great office location in downtown Vancouver, close to everything
- openness
- I trust my manager

Cons

it's a big company with many locations and HQ in the UK -- the communication flow and coordination of effort could be challenging, but this shouldn't be surprising.

Advice to Senior Management

Go and beat the hell out of the competition :-) Hire more great people. Keep the innovation momentum. You're on a good track.

Pros

Good corporate culture overall. Loved the people.

Cons

Not the greatest pay structure

Advice to Senior Management

Improve pay structure for internal transfers.

Pros

Clear progression
Reasonable Pay
compassionate environment of teamwork, provided by the junior and middle management teams, though this varies significantly based on where you are located

Cons

Lack of recognition, Incentives are sometimes hard to acheive without everyones effort being up to par. Lack of compensation for work done.

Advice to Senior Management

When improvements are needed, appreciate and initiate action on feedback from front line employees. We feel left out of alot of key decisions being made. And the unions doesn't represent the whole of your workforces perspective