Sybase Reviews in Kitchener, ON Area

Pros

Co-workers are talented, experienced, and friendly. Everyone is always willing to help. Great for learning and acquiring new skills.

Office building is very nice, with individual offices for everyone.

Management is non-toxic. Little to no micro-management. You are given a relatively large degree of freedom.

Cons

Relatively little product direction or product identity. It was not at all clear what the product was trying to be, what niche it was trying to fill, the size of that niche, whether the niche had a future, and so on. Engineering or marketing initiatives would be heralded as the next big thing, only to fizzle out within a few months.

Room for career growth was limited after a certain point. It did not appear to be much of a concern for management.

It was very easy, and tempting, to settle into a comfortable routine and to be lulled into complacence. However, such complacence has a price where professional growth is concerned.

Advice to Senior Management

Figure out what problem the product is trying to solve and what the market for the product is.

Pay more attention to employee morale and professional growth.

Pros

- Many talented engineers with diverse experience
- Competitive benefits package
- A wide variety of available work
- Flexible work hours in most areas

Cons

The communication between divisions is entirely non-existent and this behaviour is perpetuated by senior management. Subsidiaries are treated differently from the parent company including stark differences in compensation and due credit.

There is no willingness to innovate remaining as senior management is primarily concerned with buzzword acquisitions and keeping cash reserves high.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on innovative products not re-branding old technology to save on development costs. New products will fuel future success, the current line of offerings focuses too strongly on commodity technologies.

Pros

perfect 9 to 5 job.
never over work employees
people are very nice and all willing to coach you.

Cons

too traditional in the term that 80% of the employees work there over 10 years.
treat people with their seniority but not ability .
too safe

Advice to Senior Management

encourage young engineers to design, treat people with what they can do but not how long they stayed in the company

Pros

- Great atmosphere ( free drinks, foosball tournaments, flex hours, laid back, etc. )
- Great people ( very friendly and able to communicate well )
- Salary is above average
- Personal offices to maximize productivity
- Very young office, consistently hiring new co-op as well every 4 months
- Work was challenging and I was given the chance to leave my comfort zone to learn new technologies many times
- Work always felt important even during the less exciting tasks
- Very easy to see the big picture of how the work contributed to the project

Cons

Not much to say here
- Went through some slow periods from time to time, but this is expected at any job

Advice to Senior Management

- More real time feed back is needed. Sometimes I learned that there was something I could have improved on, but did not discover it until the review period. A 5 - 10 minute talk before this period would have helped set me on track much sooner.

Pros

Sybase is a slow moving company with few ideas but skilled people. This means that the products and offerings that we do work on, are well thought out and usually beat the competition in terms of performance and robustness. There is pride at working at such a level.

Sybase also seems to offer better than average salary. It was reported last month (September 2008) that the average tenure at Sybase is 7 years. This seems extraordinary for a technology company in California. I think the balance of work and life that Sybase strives for, along with the good salary and low stress, allows for many people to enjoy working and building their "Work Family".

There is another positive to working at a slow-moving conservative company. You have the opportunity to try new ideas and tactics at a slower pace. It may seem like a contradiction, but if you are a go-getter with some new ideas, they are still well-received, and sometimes they get funding. This allows for some big fish to try things out in small ponds. And your job isn't dependent on the outcome.

Cons

There is very little aggression in terms of growth. If you are looking for cutting edge, research-driven, design-driven, competitive environment, you should go to Google.

Also, there is a theory that Sybase is suffering from averaging-down. The best employees go elsewhere looking for higher risk-reward, leaving the unexceptional to create a new average.

I personally work with some of the best people in the business, so although I can philosophically understand the idea, I don't see it happening around me.

Bonuses and other non-salary compensation are pretty sparse.

Sybase also tends to buy companies that then either have to be integrated (AvantGo, Extended Systems) or act independently (Mobile 365, XcelleNet). This can create some problems in both directions. With integration, you are sometimes looking at a dwindling team that is being managed remotely and is unhappy. With the independent company, you may be asked to work on a cross team project without sufficient training or resources.

Advice to Senior Management

Loosen up! I would love to see more ideas being thrown around the board room, class room, training room and development war room.