Symantec Reviews in Portland, OR Area

Pros

Symantec is the third ranked software company on the fortune 500. The business culture combines the professionalism of IBM with the relaxed nature of google. Symantec embraces the concept of corporate responsibility, working to treat it's employees and vendors well, and taking active organization wide steps to reduce its carbon footprint. In other words - for a big evil corporation, symantec is actually fairly respectable. There is a sense of pride associated with working for the globally recognized leader in security software.

This is an organization which rewards hard work, ability, and creativity.

Symantec tends to compensate very competitively, attracting top talent. Aside from the obvious direct benefits of above average pay, having highly competent coworkers makes everyone's job easier. It is easier to make a handoff when you can trust your coworkers to deliver on their end of the bargain.

Of course, against a backdrop of top professionals, laziness and incompetence stands out like a 75 pound schoolboy in the middle of a professional football game. Such employees are dealt with quickly for the sake of the whole.

That's not to imply that a single mistake will end your career, but a person who demonstrates a pattern of poor performance will not last long with Symantec. If this strikes you as a bad thing, you should probably apply elsewhere.

Cons

As with any large corporation, communication can be difficult in all directions - be it across different functional teams, different product lines, or even within the direct chain of command. The good news is that you are on your own.

The bad news is that you are on your own.

Everything moves slowly in a large organization. Which, paradoxically, can lead to being handed a lot of 'impossible' deadlines. Deadlines which could have been much more managable had management put you in the loop three months ago when they made the decision to move forward with a project.

Advice to Senior Management

Way to weather the storm guys. I'm moving up in a freefall economy thanks to your capable leadership. Stay the course.

Pros

Smart people and good pay and benefits

Cons

Hard to make change happen, endless meeting and organization ju jitsu, blocking politics, outsourcing, emphasis on "optics"

Advice to Senior Management

Get entrepreneurial and empower passion with the ability to execute

Pros

Symantec offers one of the best health insurance packages I have encountered in the past decade of job-seeking within the tech industry. It is not often to be blessed with such a low employee contribution (per pay check) AND good insurance coverage. Myself, my husband and my two young children are covered in a plan with $15 copays, $5 generic prescriptions, $1,000 deductible for less than $200 per month. Even the package I had previously, at Intel, was not this comprehensive and affordable. There is also an Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which provides a certain number of visits per year to professionals that can assist with anything from work stresses to marriage counseling, for free!

Cons

Upper management make decisions that impact the actual work performed by every employee down the chain. This is the common practice, of course. Imagine a place where the common practice is in place but there is inconsistent, limited or disorganized communication of the objectives of those decisions. Leaving the lower species to hobble around on the crutches of over-the-cube through-the-grape-vine information, which inevitably leads to inefficiency, lack of confidence and frustration. But! Often, before one can reach that point, new decisions are made and teams of dozens are suddenly redirected 100% to some completely new project. Or in some cases, an existing project that has been put on the back burner. If that isn't enough, consider that there is a jaw-dropping lack of established processes to get this work done (written or otherwise). Everything is just "wing it". This creates an environment where the idea of team effort goes down the tubes when things get stressful (as they can in any job!). Without sufficient guidance from our leaders, it is left to each person to lead their own work without any idea as to what their performance is measured against! Personal agendas are built, personal quarrels result, meetings are wasted time---OH WAIT! Forget that project, guys! We're moving to something else now. Delete those 500 emails that were critical to save. We've changed our direction once again! In summary, working at Symantec is very stressful and the environment is unprofessional due to that. If you're considering a position, please ask a lot of questions about the group and meet as many of them as possible before moving forward. People can make all the difference.

Advice to Senior Management

Skip a couple of meetings and spend the time typing a document that clearly outlines the upcoming projects on EACH level, and how that work aligns with the organizational and company goals. Pretty speeches, town halls, and quarterly emails do nothing for those several rungs down the ladder from you. Your direct reports (group directors, usually) don't guide their direct reports and they don't guide us. It's call the CHAIN of command for a reason...our links are busted. Either you're not communicating to your direct reports or they're just not following through with leading us as they should. At the end of the day, you are accountable, as you are the one who is supposed to be leading us. Ironically, you will not be the ones laid off when Symantec wants to clip budgets.

Pros

There are no cold calls when you work for this company. With the breadth of the product line and the name recognition, there always seems to be some reason to take a sales rep's call.
The people that I work directly with are very high caliber, as well as my team in general. While there are always co-workers that you don't care for, for the most part I find my colleagues care about the customer's needs and work hard to
The Executive management seems reasonably well connected to customer's needs and the direction of the market. It's a very interesting industry, and we seem to have a product line that addresses most of the needs of the market space that we compete in.

Cons

The size of the company and the complexity of the acquisitions we have made over the past few years have created a very difficult environment to do business in. Customers complain consistently about our inability to provide one complete view of what they own, that we aren't taking as good a care of product lines pre-acquisition, or that there are too many places to go to find the information that they need.
The compensation plan for the sales group this year is abismal. We will make significantly less this year if we provide similar sales dollars to the company. The consistency with plans, and the inability to be able to reconcile commissions in a timely manner is a huge black eye in working in sales for the company.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Revisit the compensation plan
2. Examine ways to pay for the work done vs. right place/right time
3. Align solutions to ITIL or some other industry methodology