software engineer

call center representative

customer service representative

senior software engineer

agent

Like many other students in this class as well as my teammates, I go into this internship not knowing a lot of things that my work would require.  School has taught me a great deal about computer science and engineering principles, but the specific knowledge needed for this internship is different from what I needed for a school project or a homework assignment.  The good news is that I did have the appropriate skill set to start off of and the ability to learn.  I remembered that the beginning of my internship was a bit slow, because the first task I had to do was going over documentation and debriefing of various products’ architecture, our teams’ development environments and the future endeavors of our company.  Being put on the innovation team requires extra familiarity with these details, as they would help me to decide how our products may evolve on top of such foundations.  My teammates also have the same tasks during their beginnings; I think we all agree that putting our heads into understanding the current state of things was the best solution.  So that was what we have done, participating in all the knowledge transfer sessions and hoping to catch up to speed as soon as possible with the rest of the engineers.  Yet problems arise when we fail to understand technical concepts and procedures on our first tries because of our lack of experience.  I had little to no idea what a blockchain is on the first project.  My method of getting progress in understanding was to imitate what others have done while plowing through the documentation online.  Since it was an open-source project, I was able to obtain a lot of resource on how I may get a handle on this.  When I came across difficult concepts, I would try to get started with simpler things and build up to the more complex ones.  Some of my teammates prefer to ask an experienced coworker for help first, but that usually would be my last resort.  I largely prefer resolving technical struggles on my own, because that shows ownership of my work and will make a deeper impact in my learning process.  Even though this is my mindset, I find that sometimes it is necessary to consult an expert on some topics in the interest of time and accuracy.  When I was developing for a web application in java, I realize that I was fuzzy on a lot of web development basics.  I decided to get help from my coworker on the same team, and the end result of accomplishing that task swiftly and elegantly showed me that it was the right choice to ask those questions.  My own understanding could not always accommodate my needs.

I worked very hard. I heard this is a slave camp, but that was my choice to work hard. most people did. that is morally the right thing to do, when you have a job. I rate job security/advancement very low, as I was laid off, rather than promoted, especially hurtful after 4 long years (of slavery). work/life balance very low too, because there was never talk about personal lives. company parties was as far as that went, and that is more a team building exercise than our true personal lives. wish we could support each other more! yes I believe a more casual environment is a better one. people need to thrive, not just survive. compensation was OK, I was happy, but want more raises. don't we all. culture/values is also poor. they had their core values, of course, but I don't relate well to them. what is brand? I had trouble with that. how about we just work hard and create a good product! thats what excites me. I prefer culture/values to address/acknowledge our personal lives, rather than corporate mumbo jumbo. maybe I am too casual, too personal, but I feel my company would be better in that regard. management is OK score, I had some competent managers and coworkers, which lifts morale, but they did lack in the sense of they all, all my managers, should have, could have, mentored me more than they did. I feel I should have been instructed more, led in the right direction at least. overall not too bad, I was glad to learn the things that I did. casual Fridays was nice. but I still got burned out. I needed MON off, for a whlie, 3 day weekend helped me recover. vacation time was OK, you could save maximum 6 weeks, but mostly it was the standard 2 weeks per year. a decent job, decent people, can't really complain. but I do want more out of it. I have to fault them on this. more personal, more mentoring, more interactive, would be nice. less dictatorship, yet I do understand the need for dictator, the work must get done, I understand that.

You can learn a lot at Symantec and enhance your tech stack repertoire. There are a lot of very bright people to learn from. 

Management is the big negative though. They like to think the run the teams as "Agile", but are in reality more of a hybrid - Agile when it suits management, Kanban when it suits them, Cowboy when it suits them. In other words, it's "just do what I tell and get done when I tell you, but I will most likely change my mind about what a release has to contain and when it must be done. I'll stress you out about finishing something by a certain date - only to change the feature requirements at the last minute and move the date out by a month; so that vacation you didn't take to get things done ... well, sorry, we didn't need it done by then after all." Then, of course, the employee gets criticized for lack of efficiency. 

Executives talk to everyone like we're a team and incentivize with stock - only to renege if they can be bought out and make the executives a boat load of money. Sorry "team"! You're only a team when it comes to the work; not when it comes to the reward. They will do incredibly stupid things, like take away your personal cubicle waste can "because the liners cost too much, as does the cost to have janitorial services empty them." So, just get up every time you have something to throw away and go to a common, shared waste/recycle bin. Of course, they're too ignorant to realize the lost time in productivity every time a six figure engineer has to get up, walk over to a common waste bin, and discard an item, far outweighs the cost of liners and low level janitorial wages. 

Finally, if you're a software engineer, thinking you were hired to write software, guess again. Half your time will be wasted solving process issues because you're stuck inside a secure development environment with no Internet access or ability to connect to anything else. Nevermind the fact that most of your code requires connecting to the outside your box. Plus, nevermind that some part of the development pipeline is always down or slow.

Symantec is a great company to work for because of the people.  The majority of the time I worked there we had an office that was involved in many of the corporate initiatives around volunteerism, philanthropy and community outreach and our leadership team was very supportive of all these efforts.  I would have to say these activities and this environment would be what I would consider to be the most enjoyable part of the job, along with the ability to travel and participate in the Worldwide Sales Conferences, Leadership Training and Technical Symposiums each year.  The hardest part of the job was the first year I was involved in the newly formed Global Sales Enablement organizations because rules of engagement had not been established between the global team and the local enablement teams leading to confusion in roles, responsibilities and best practices.  Overall, my colleagues and the majority of the leadership I interacted with at Symantec was great.  I had little to no problems with working with or for others and pride myself as being a great relationship builder, highly collaborative team player and effective communicator.  

The greatest takeaways I would share in regards to what I learned was that giving back to our communities lends to great morale and pride, actively listening and striving to make good decisions for our employees, partners and stakeholders is always top of mind and therefore within my organization and daily job functions, I work diligently to provide as much value as possible on a daily basis.

• Experienced in setting of High Availability and setting up of SOA Clusters
• Configured DB Adapter for querying the data from CDH and configured JMS Adapter to publish the queried messages to the topics/queues.
• Maintain all configuration files, including: logs, security, all types of adapters, endpointconnections, data sources and connection pools, build, deployment, environment files, etc
• Customized EBM schemas of customers for the data exchange between CDH and SFDC System used these customized schemas in the BPEL Transformation to transform SFDC data into CDH acceptable format.
• Used ANT to Build and deploy Applications.
• Configured and deployed Database adapter and File adapter into SOA 11g root.
• Created Datasources, Target pools, configured JMS target Modules.
• Created read-only domains and users for least access.
• Created java program to recovery the instances from manual recovery Queue.
• Created Disk monitoring script for monitoring the file system space in Linux box.
• Extensively used File adapter for logging Runtime faults like (remote and binding faults)
• Created UNIX and PERL script for automate deployment of BPEL process and automatic replacement of host names and port numbers from one environment to another environment
• Created various SQL scripts for creating tables, synonyms, indexes etc.
• Set up Managed server domains and configured BPEL / Mediator/ database properties in EM console for Better performance and fast transaction.
• Extensively used JMS adaptor to Produce and consume the messages.Created JMS Queues, JMS Topics.
• Define performance criteria and monitor to identify opportunities, and tune to improve application
• Performance, throughput, scalability and stabilityTune memory, heap and JVM settings to increase the application’s performance.

I have never felt so challenged at work, and that is a good thing. Fun work environment with plenty of time to decompress as long as work was being done.

Strong team environment and everyone was willing to help. We had a great director that was always willing to train because he knew technical skills can be taught, but personality cannot. He would always go up to bat for the engineers when sales or higher ups had issues with what they saw on paper as he grew from a tech job to being a global director and he actually knew what was going on instead of taking a glance and making a snap judgement. He could walk by your desk and see that you might have a sports article on one of your monitors, but he also had a great understanding of how much work you actually did and the difficulty of the job.

Management was fantastic and understood if you needed to leave for family, illness, or personal reasons and would let you work from home if need be.

Was a part of a location that had the highest CSATs in the company, but was laid off to make a company acquisition more attractive to a potential buyer.

Veritas was sold to the Carlyle group and they decided before the sale that they wanted to get rid of the Springfield Oregon support site laying off over 170 employees and flooding the job market with highly trained and paid (for the area) technical people. However, within the company, our region was the lowest paid for the Tech Engineers by a large margin.

If offered a position with the company again, I would take it in a heartbeat. I loved every day of work and would gladly do it again.

Joining Verisign presented me with an exciting challenge in building a brand new marketing organization for a company going through significant change. Starting from a team of six, I built a multifaceted, comprehensive marketing organization that was responsible for all PR, branding, digital marketing, MarCom services, analyst relations, event management, EBC development, and crisis planning.

Building an organization of this kind meant working closely with multiple stakeholders to ensure that resources and services were being applied to the changing business and new opportunities for the company. This resulted in my organization becoming an internal shop for all facets of marketing, branding, and press activities.

My management style has always been the promotion of "self starting" while providing guidance from the top. I feel that the best way to help grow an organization is to lead by example, promote teamwork as the way forward, but recognize the contributions of individuals that help us all to become better. I believe in empowering my employees to solve problems for themselves which results in building strong leadership and planning skills, but will intervene to ensure that decisions are all laddering up to the top line plan.

Launching a new brand campaign that set the tone for the future direction of the company, lead generation programs that impacted the bottom line, marketing accountability against the revenue, cost reductions while improving efficiency, and building a messaging platform that provided consistency and cadence were all results that we achieved and that I am most proud of.

•	Strong knowledge in C++, OOPS concepts, design principles & patterns, Linux and Windows OS
•	Experienced in advanced level programming in C++ including shared pointers, multi-threading, multi-processing, concurrency, TCP/IP, UDP, Socket Programming
•	Proficient with modern C++11 & C++14 including Lambda Expressions, Automatic Type Deduction, smart pointer classes
•	Experience in Algorithms, data structures, object-oriented design, Multithreading programming with modern C++ 11
•	Experience in developing applications using C, C++, VC++, MFC, COM/DCOM, STL, boost and Win32 API on Windows 
•	Experience in using SCM tools like Confluence, JIRA, and Configuration management tools like VSS, CVS, Perforce and SVN 
•	Strong Remote live debugging skills using VC++ IDE, dump analysis using WinDBG, dump creation, and used mostly Advance debugging tools from Sysinternals
•	Experience in developing application using Casablanca C++ REST library to access HTTP and JSON based Cloud RESTful Web Services
•	Experience in Database Systems like SQLite, Oracle, SQL Server, and PL/SQL
•	Good experience in performing/supporting Unit testing, System Integration Testing (SIT, Product Standalone Testing for all the windows OS related applications
•	Contribute to lead Architecture and Design activities
•	Familiar with Core Java and Unix operating system
•	Basic knowledge of scripting languages (Bash & Python)
•	Experience on Agile methodology using Scrum
•	Ability to apply Design Patterns and UML to design easily manageable and extendable applications

I have been with Symantec for a while, starting in the John Thompson era. In the beginning the company and the culture were fantastic. Over the years, the company has degraded to nothing more than a cash funnel for an inept board of directors.

People tend to point out the rotating CEO door as a major issue, and it would be, if those CEO's had any control. But they don't, the board dictates the business. And the board cannot see past the dollar. It takes money to make money, but they do not invest more money if the company is not making money. No new innovations. Look at Norton Core. It was a great idea, but it was never given a chance to get off the ground, because it did not turn out to be an immediate cash cow. So it is the same for many, many products that looked promising but never got out the door. As soon as the board realized there was money being dumped into something new, they put the hammer down and killed the program. 

They cut hundreds of employees every quarter, and have had a general hiring freeze in place for at lease the last 4 years. The effect being that those employees who somehow missed the hatchet, found themselves filling the ever increasing gaps. Just because there are less employees, does not mean there is less work. 

So, while the pay is great, and the benefits are fantastic, they are not worth what is expected of the individual contributor.

I loved working for Symantec. I felt appreciated for my work. Teams were happy. There was room to grow in the company.

A typical day included ensuring our global customers received their upgrades to their software products. There was a great satisfaction rolling out an upgrade with little or no post release issues - which means I had thought of everything, I had all the bases covered, and had planned for anything that might go wrong.

My team shared information on issues that cropped up on a per-release basis, so that we could ensure that each release was as clean as possible.

The hardest part of the job was discovering issues that could not be fixed because of the company budget. This meant putting bandaids in place that would have to be torn off for the next release. This was not efficient, and often caused customer confusion, system issues, etc.

Over time things changed, and Symantec seemed to not care about their employees. They company attitude and goals had changed. Management wanted Symantec to become an acquisition company. All the nice little perks and benefits seemed to dry up and go away. The software that Symantec was great at creating, took a back seat.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Software engineer 2 salaries reported	$35.00 per hour
Call center representative 1 salary reported	$19.00 per hour
Customer service representative 1 salary reported	$19.00 per hour
Senior software engineer 1 salary reported	$160,750 per year
Agent 1 salary reported	$19.00 per hour

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