Symantec Reviews in Mountain View, CA

Pros

Lots of career development training available to employees.

Encourages employees transferring to different career opportunities within the Company.

Cons

The finance organization operates in many silos that can make it difficult to complete tasks involving different departments efficiently.

The con side of encouraging employees to transfer within the Company is you can have management level employees who don't know what they are doing.

Advice to Senior Management

Needs better incentives to non-management employees.

Pros

dynamic and complex, good learning experience

Cons

top heavy and siloed, poor cross functional coordination

Advice to Senior Management

Quit empire building and over staffing and fix basic problems

Pros

A Lot of free time. Good people, bad management, some discount perks. But definitely not my cup of tea. Look elsewhere.

Cons

Nothing challenging. People do not get recognition. Nor do they get raises and promotions s promised. Forget bonuses and things like that.

Advice to Senior Management

You have a very large company and need to actually make it smaller. For one persons job, you have a team of 20. Really?

Pros

Excellent work-life balance. Great group of people to work with.

Cons

As a specialist SE, it is you are working on a few products and don't get much exposure to other products. Seems like there is a lot of biased promotions and praise.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a closer look into the promotions methods. Also, find ways to better reward specialists. Everything seems to be slanted to the Account Teams.

Pros

Overall Symantec is good place to work. The compensation package is pretty good --Salary and decent Benefits package. There are flexible work arrangements.

Cons

Senior Leadership and Executive Management need to really get it together. The company vision and identity is confusing ... too many products that don't relate to each other.

Advice to Senior Management

Create a vision that is clear for everyone to understand. Company has too many products and focus on too many things ... it reminds me of CA (Computer Assoicates). They should really try to be a microsoft / google ... the other products (ms office, OS, etc) all come under the MS brand and complement each other. Same w/ Google (search, gmail, docs). With Symantec, the branding is the opposite ... the products are more recognizable (Norton, Veritas, Altiris, etc) ... and its hard to describe what Symantec really is / does.

Pros

Good work/life balance, diverse product portfolio great cafeteria & a good gym

Cons

Execution needs to improve. Senior management needs to be more cohesive and provide a cohesive vision about the diverse product portfolio (storage & security).

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management needs to be more cohesive and provide a cohesive vision about the diverse product portfolio (storage & security). Invest in people, invest in culture of the company, and provide a simple vision staff can rally around.

Pros

good pay for a job

Cons

no diversity----low-mid-top management are mostly India-born with a culture that is more of hierarchical than innovative.

Advice to Senior Management

1. bring diversity to the company and management
2. less bullshxt (victory plan...that changes every 6mon with "leaders"), more hard work.

Pros

Pay
Benefits
Career mobility
Will do well in a good economy (just need the economy to turn the corner already!)

Cons

Not as mature as you would expect for a multi-billion dollar company.
Lots of room for operational improvements.
Doesn't do too well during economic downturns.

Advice to Senior Management

Expand acquisition activity to a more diverse set of products. Security software is important but sales are overly sensitive to the business cycle.

Pros

Symantec was a high flyer in the IT technology sector. It was a dominant competitor and rewarded its employees, not only with money and perks, but with respect and a trust that they were experts in their jobs.

Cons

All the acquitiions diluted and corroded the Symantec culture (to the point that there is no real SYmantec culture). Acquisitions were not integrated into the company, each new acquisition considered itself an island into its own and resisted integration and collaboration efforts. The company became increasingly siloed, with each business unit fighting for its own success, not the overall company success. When lay offs begans to be the norm, the trust factor went way down. Symantec these days has a "watch your back" culture based on paranoia and distrust of its managers. It is not the company I joined 8 years ago.

Advice to Senior Management

Become experts on M&A acquisitons...you should have the expereince by now. Get some enterprise product marketing and sales talent. Symantec should be a strategic vendor instead of a mismatched collection of acquisitions and product solutions. Take a look at the innovation of the consumer group in marketing!

Pros

If you want to have spare time to pursue hobbies, work here :)

Cons

You can wither away wasting your time. The organization is not dynamic, the management is too busy fighting within themselves. You will not be rewarded for hard work, or for great results. Don't waste your time here.

Advice to Senior Management

Grow a brain. Take the time to understand the technology you have, and put the political crap aside. Reward competence and hard work.