Symantec Reviews

Pros

Stable, structured, disciplined, good coworkers

Cons

Cost conscious, narrowly defined jobs, bureaucratic

Pros

Symatnec is technology leader
Good work life balance
Good in employee benefits
Provide ample opportunities to work on diverse techonologies.

Cons

bad senior management
incompetant senior management

Advice to Senior Management

Hire competant senior management
Do not promote people for just sake of doing it unless he is really capable of it.

Pros

Good compensation
Good benefits
Projects can be interesting

Cons

Political, too many managers vying for power
Cut-throat, backstabbing culture
Too much energy is siphoned into internal politics and power struggles

Pros

great people, great benefits, flexibility!

Cons

departments tend to be siloed, although the company is working hard to break them down.

Advice to Senior Management

keep up the good work

Pros

Work Life balance
Good Compensation
Work From home

Cons

If you have issues with your manager they have thousands ways to spoil your Career. if they can't do anything on performance front COC is powerful kit in their hand.... they can fire you for clicking photos inside campus as well... / if you manager is good then best place to work.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't Hire mangers from service based companies. they do a lot of misuse of power given to them

Pros

The company is doing OK.

Cons

The company has lost its leadership in anti-virus market segment.

Advice to Senior Management

The company really need to focus in an important and emerging market segment, and become a leader in that segment.

Pros

Good HR policies. Open work culture. Possibilities to work on core technologies. Oppertunities to work on diverse technology.

Cons

Bad senior management. Heartless company.

Advice to Senior Management

Change your approach. They appear to be businessmen and not the technology leaders.

Pros

In general a good place for diversity: for a technical company the environment is friendly to women and minorities. It was a very good company in the past but unfortunately silly decisions by executives have messed up a lot.

Cons

Very poor management (to be diplomatic) in technical support, too much layers of largely incompetent, only self-serving management. Have seen serious case of bullying at work as well as signs of corruption and favouritism. It seems that senior managment has lost touch with reality & looks only into statistics. Clear lack of leadership. Company is loosing lots of talents because of horrible managers and other idealess seniors - a significant brain drain of talent to other companies has taken place already.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce layers of managemernt and hire for management real manager, not incompotent clowns. Work on feedback from the employees

Pros

Interesting technical work and technical people from around the world. Opportunities to learn--although you'll need to do it on your own.

Cons

Too many tiers of largely incompetent, self-serving management deadwood who are mostly uninterested in the people and products and markets they ostensibly oversee, instead just working on brown-nosing their way to the next step up the ladder. The "cost-cutting hero" type seems to be a prevalent management type.. The number of VPs in particular seems to be metastasizing: the company has gone from having 5000 employees and 3 VPs to 18000 employees and over 100 VPs! In conversations with my peers in other product groups, we all could think of a number of well-paid, senior-titled people who don't actually appear to be doing anything--and they've been doing it for years.
There is an odd tendency to assume that because someone was a VP at a smaller company that was acquired, they are qualified to do the same on a much larger scale; this mistake has happened over and over again, with disastrous results for employees and potential profits but oddly enough hardly ever for the VPs. These people seem to subscribe to the micromanaging bully style of management, replete with unrealistic deadlines and a tendency to rely on the judgement of their buddies from the acquired company (whom they often promote into positions they are unqualified to fill) rather than on that of skilled experience Symantec employees with actual product knowledge.
All of the above gets further complicated by the incessant product and management reorganizations--it's not unusual to go through 2 different managers in a year. Sometimes it's just all opaque--you get some email announcement about a management change in your organization, and it's all musical chairs between people you've never heard of.

Advice to Senior Management

Go work somewhere else! Failing that, please get your act together and:
1) Get rid of all the excess management--you're too top-heavy and it's killing our ability to compete
2) Listen to your technical people
3) Treat your technical people better, reward them better

Pros

Work life balance is nice

Cons

lackluster leadership, multiple groups focused on the same tasks reporting to different management groups.