Verisign Reviews

Pros

A company populated with some of the most technical people you'll ever meet. The pay in years 1-3 is competitive. You will have the chance to work on systems critical to the entire Internet, or, write the software that runs on them.

Cons

You'd better negotiate a high pay rate when you first join because that's pretty much what you'll earn your entire time at VeriSign. It doesn't matter if you're on your 10th year, you'll be luck to ever get a promotion, and "raises" barely meet cost of living for the area while your counterparts at other local companies often receive double cost of living raises. You will eventually need to leave just to keep up with your peers.

The non-senior management employees who have been around for 10+ years, and know they're never going to do better no matter how hard they work, and that new guys are being hired on at higher rates than they are getting, have mostly given up, and this hurts moral as people resent picking up their slack.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop trying to manage your most technical people with "career managers" who are not at all technical, and are only placed in the position due to their administrative abilities. Your sysadmins, your coders, your data center engineers, etc... these people need managers who can speak to what their people are actually working on, not what time of day they arrived at the office or when they're scheduled to take vacation. Your employees crave direction, and forward looking plans, not reactionary panic.

Pros

Good work, benefits and people around

Cons

Top heavy. Zero career growth

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce top heavy structure. Bring in young and new blood with varied experience. Make it less bureaucratic.

Pros

Among the best benefits in the industry. Top-range salaries. Flex-time to provide a great work/life balance. They provide the best tools so I can do my best. Many managers came up through the ranks as technical engineers.

Cons

Some managers are out-of-sync with the company. It's a high pressure environment ensuring that we continue to meet our SLAs.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to put our customers first and increase our investment in people (employees). Renew the focus on innovation to add new growth business lines.

Pros

Work environment was very friendly and dress was fairly casual.
Benefits were great and full time employees received stock options.

Cons

A lot of changes with the sale of the SSL business to Symantec; resulted in the Company headquarters moving to Dulles, VA and most employees in California being laid off

Pros

Benefits were above the norm.

Cons

If you were a (typically male) friend of a Sr. executive- VeriSign was a great place to work. You really didn't even need a job description to get your VP title and privileges. But for everyone else- it was next to impossible to get noticed, promoted, etc. There were more VP's running around who a) had no direct reports and b) had no job description but c) were protected by an Executive. Very disruptive to moral and to those who worked hard and did not get noticed. Additionally come annual performance time- managers were given a "funded pool" and could divide up bonus and stock payouts based on favoritism.

Advice to Senior Management

Assign specific roles and responsibilities commensurate with job title. Make bonus payouts by team not individual and leave manager to make sure everyone on team is playing to level of rest of team.

Pros

Great place to work with lots of opportunities. Great compensation package given to employees. Lots of opportunity to learn more and more things

Cons

Senior Management was not so forth comming in their future plans for VeriSign as a whole. Company directions kept changing and not enough investment was done to grow the business of one of their flag ship product where it enjoyed great monopoly one upon a time.

Advice to Senior Management

None

Pros

Compensation is reasonable with a complete package.
Business Direction defined for individual business unit.
Great individuals and team to work within

Cons

It is who you know to get things done
Divestiture has left VRSN too focused and all the old leadership is gone
Different company today than 2 years ago

Advice to Senior Management

Customers and Channel needs to be your priority, not internal agendas.

Pros

1. Building facilities are good.
2. Compensation and stock options are reasonably good.
3. Senior management in US doing their best with the changing strategies to keep employees happy around the globe.
4. Even during recession, employees were given proper salary hikes and bonus.
5. Brand very well recognized by most of the people.

Cons

1. All the time management is busy trying to showcase something or the other to US team, forgetting what is required for overall long-term growth.
2. Outsourcing model is yet to mature in IDC.
3. Most of the time, the management is busy with only meetings related to people or infrastructure issues with no much focus on growing the business here.
4. Environment is slowly becoming like service companies to keep US team happy at whatever means.
5. No clear career path for technical talents in IDC.
6. Team is shrinking to smaller over years, with potentially no sign of growth.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Hire a person who has strong technology or business background for leadership positions in IDC, who can take to next levels.

Pros

Good Technologies and Lots of work
You get to work on core products
Salary is good though not great
They provide Stocks which is a very good perk
Work Pressure is manageable, not very stressful

Cons

Very Unstable management, they sold many of their business units recently
Lot of attrition due to the uncertainity in management
Focus is not very strong
You got to have a good rapport with your managers to grow very fast, so obviously there is some politics happening like many other companies
Too much of meetings, since they follow Agile very strictly. Every one will be fed up of meetings and you get very little time to code.
Lots of late night meetings too.
The US team has all the powers, so they dictate what we should do.
Very rare onsite opportunities.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to Focus and keep the employees happy.
Strong leadership is definitely required.

Pros

Latest technologies and very friendly learning atmosphere. People do get promoted and they do get recognition . There are very reasonable people out there . Much better than bigger companies . ESPP , Bonus etc has always been great . Better than industry average . In my opinion very fair company

Cons

May be the managers or senior manager or directors need not not be that hands on . Not sure about it

Advice to Senior Management

they are doing fine