Sophos reviews

No career development; can not retain the good talents; too many good developers and managers left after 1 or 2 years. Assigned to work in the areas which were not told or promised at interview time; quite often people are put in the wrong areas to work and not using their skills and experience fully. There are two cases where one of the new hires quit on the 2nd day and another one quit after 3 weeks. Used to be a flat management structure, now more tiers and managers are added in between; lots of micro management and people are requested to track every single hours spent; claimed to be a agile shop but it’s all dateline driven, teams often have to work backwards from the deadline to trim the features requested to meet the dates set up front. The communication between teams are very poor; lots of meetings on the same topic without any actions. People got promoted due to the fact that they used to work with the management at a different company before or are buddies of the upper manager. A key developer was pushed out door due to the fact that he wanted to do the right thing and disagreed the direction of a project from management’s point of view.

Pretty much too many to list, but here are some of the biggest cons. In over 6 years at Sophos, raises were far and few between. Being well underpaid seems to the norm at sophos and the way upper management sees is, that's just fine. They could care less about giving merit increases to good employees. Mostly you hear things like "hey at least you have a job in these tough times" and "it's pretty bad out there man". Managers giving you comments like these to make you think you have it good at sophos. You start to think you are worthless and getting a better paying job is just not going to happen or you. To my surprise I got a much better paying job so I left the dump in the dust. Micromanagement all over the place in sales, lay offs all over the place, a ceo who is known for driving things into the ground and feels out sourcing support is important even though he is making everybody think support is important. They fail to understand the over all experience is what keeps customers, your reputation is what makes customers talk about you in good ways to other customers. People are leaving left and right, I would bet in 2 years sophos is gone. Company has no direction at all, they make you think they are this big time player, but in reality they are a small fry trying to compete with the big boys.