Pros
This place can be totally great if you’re in the right clique. There are plenty of young entry-level people here learning what it’s like to work for a big company that are totally happy, especially in Marketing and Sales. A lot of the old Checkpoint clan watches out for each other and does pretty well. I liked a lot of people here and didn't really have any problems with my co-workers.
Cons
This place is terrible for engineers and technical people from the security, brand protection, and fraud industry. The company makes an art of bringing people in, using their knowledge to train the existing team and spitting them out. They have an auto-immune disease to smart people. Both the new and the old management team have always had a very top-down, ego-driven, superficial approach to managing people. As a result, the company is way behind the times in terms of technology. The tech stack is totally ancient, and we had to spend a lot of time doing crap work because management is so short-term focused that they can never see any business justification in upgrading it. The company is two years behind on almost every major trend in the space. Search, Social, Mobile, you name it. The main focus of the company these days is on their domain business because that is what Thomson Reuters bought them for. Almost every other business area is just being milked. The place is like stuck in 2008 from a recruiting perspective. Think they can hire talented people, put them under less experienced people who can’t develop them and that nobody will care because everyone is so desperate for a job. Inexperienced managers can’t coach or guide anyone on how to do their job, so every year at 360 review time they just ask people why nobody did enough for them lately and put people in a circular firing squad to blame each other. My experience was this. It was one-way street for recruits in engineering. The company hired me for a very special expertise. Then they asked me to totally give my knowledge away so they could train younger, cheaper people from inside my manager’s posse. I didn’t even get credit for half the work I did. I am not a whiner. I sat down with my boss and spoke about my ambitions and how I wanted to learn more and advance my career. I told him I was committed to the company but I wanted to be recognized for my contributions so I could have a career there, that I wanted to advance. That’s when the mean streak kicked in. Without notice, I was assigned to a totally different area outside my expertise. My manager made his displeasure known to my team so I would get slammed at review time. Without warning, after a year of solid work teaching my team how to do what I do, I got terminated. It was humiliating. This is not going to be everybody's experience, but I’ve talked around now, and I know of at least maybe 10 other people in engineering and other technical roles who had similar experiences. Some of them have gone on to do great things, which makes me think the company needs to do some thinking. They seem to be really insecure about ambitious people. Maybe it's because the industry isn't growing enough to reward them, so it's part of their HR strategy to work them out. I don't know. I went on to my next job, and it has been like any job I’ve ever had. I work hard, people like my work, we share knowledge with each other, we advance the company, and we advance each other.
