Symantec Reviews in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN Area

Pros

pay and benefits are very competitive (in the roseville site specifically, cost of living in the midwest is low)
managers are genuinely caring and helpful, almost all have a software engineering background
private offices for nearly every employee
very good engineering support (test equipment, project management, issue tracking, etc.)
great perks like free drinks and a nicely equipped company gym

Cons

product is very old and tangled, development is painfully slow and developers get burned out after a while
hours are long, mostly due to coordination across time zones. 60-hour weeks are pretty common.
some weird competition between internal groups that are doing basically identical products.
these problems are not the fault of middle management, who seem to know what's going on and do their best to make things easier

Pros

Good Pay and nice benefits.

Cons

Managers are not honest - even on small items that do not really matter - can not trust anything that is said

Pros

Benefits are good
Pay is competitive
Excellent company to work for, outside of the support organization

Cons

NetBackup support is poorly managed by people looking only to save their own skin, not service the customer.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of all of the management in NetBackup support from the top down and replace them with people who care about both the customer and the morale of their employees.

Pros

Very nice people to work for. Innovation is, for the most part, supported and encouraged. Adequate award system for management and employees to utilize. Best benefits of any company I've worked for. Training is adequate.

Cons

Some legacy products are very old and are challenging to maintain as the product management group doesn't respect the complexity of their application and the effort required to maintain it.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop off-shoring your talent -- even the India engineers are wary as their jobs are going to China. Don't lose focus on your core products that are the bread-and-butter of your industry.

Pros

Decent benefits and facilities. Includes real offices, small gym, and cafe.

Cons

Middle management is run very "old school", where a history/relationship with the management is more important than performance or skill.

Career growth and development within is nil.

Advice to Senior Management

Follow through for a change.

Pros

- Flexibility - Family/work balance
- Many growth opportunities to move internally within departments

Cons

- No or very very less number of promotion/ salary raise in the last 3 years...

Advice to Senior Management

Promotion,,, salary increase.. motivation...

Pros

Flexible work schedules, ample opportunities to work on cutting edge technology, very smart and fun people to work with, good salary, nice private offices and good managers make it a great working environment. Product we work on is a market leader, the work we do has a direct impact on how customers use the product and that provides a great deal of work satisfaction. This office site offers various forums to mingle with customers and learn from their experiences and feedback; it helps you keep abreast with latest technological demands and make improvements in the product. I love my job!

Cons

Junior developers don’t get bonuses.
The product is so advanced and diverse that it hard to keep up with all the developments and enhancements.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire more people in Roseville. The team is getting a little too thinly spread. Reduce the frequency of org changes.

Pros

Nice benefits, flexible scheduling. Nice offices. Out of band pay raises. Senior level developers get very nice bonuses.

Cons

Limited vision and too much communication from management. Micromanagement. Way too many reorgs. Frozen salary for the last year for the majority of folks. Promotions seem based on how much you are liked by upper mgmt than actual skill. Junior employees get no profit sharing / bonus.

Advice to Senior Management

Spend less time reorging and forcing employees to sit through needless "Symantec is You" ra ra morale exercises.

Pros

Good benefits and pay.
Stock and applause awards(bonuses) are used salary freezes to give the illusion of a pay-hike.
Local employees are nice to work with.
However there seems to rivalry between sites making large projects spread across sites hard to work on.

Cons

Salary freezes, but that's the reality of the situation.
Engineers who make it past Senior often become so disconnected from the real technical work they couldn't write a "Hello World!" program if their life depended on it. For fresh graduates or people with a couple years experience it can be really painful to watch people who get paid twice as much but have lost all their relevant technical expertise. Management doesn't seem to mind because they have the belief that they know alot about the product and have large intangible skills and knowledge. Wake up management! If the person can't write and read code they sure don't know anything more than you do!

Advice to Senior Management

Vet out the upper ranks of engineers and keep only those that still have technical abilities. You don't need to be paying top dollar for an engineer who is no longer an engineer. Call them a technical analyst and pay them less, or hire a real engineer.

Pros

I think that it is a place where you can work and be rewarded but it does require a lot of perseverance and patience as positions and promotions don't happen overnight.

Cons

Symantec is a large company and so the ability to stick out from the crowd and be noticed is very difficult. Additionally management doesn't always pick the correct person for the job.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a hard look at why you are doing and/or changing things and truly make changes for the good of the employees and the customers. I think too many decisions are based upon knee jerk reactions without any thought of what this may affect or how this could impact lives of the employees.