General Bandwidth Reviews

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth

Pros – Great co-workers and opportunities to learn from different fields.

Cons – Too many lay-offs showed negative sides

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth full-time for more than a year

Pros – Genband bought out Nortel's VoIP unit and Salaries are same as Nortel's

Cons – They keep laying off people since taking over Nortel when the return on investment does not meet a target.

Advice to Senior Management – Smart up and keep the best people

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth

Pros – Good compensation relative to the market
Some very capable first level managers
Freedom and flexibility to work from home when needed

Cons – Lack of vision, no long term strategy for successfully growing the company
No organic growth; growth seems to only come from M&A
Employees are not empowered to make decisions

Advice to Senior Management – Develop a clear focus to grow the company and communicate it to employees. Empower employees. You have a very strong and experienced set of engineers, use them.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth

Pros – Salary is very competitive and lower level management do a great job.

Cons – No security, no clear direction and an ever increasing pool of executives....

Advice to Senior Management – Think long and hard about the "REAL" cost of sending jobs off-shore.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at General Bandwidth

Pros – Pay and benefits and technical talent around you are positive. There are lots of great people trying to succeed at the lower levels.

Cons – Sweatshop, extremely political environment. Very short sighted management team and direction. Direction and vision are unclear and therefore impossible to implement efficiently. Staff reductions are frequent and all management practices are "territorial" and guarded. There is no spirit of honest teamwork to all move in the same direction together. Management is old school fear based and nothing at all is progressive or innovative.

Advice to Senior Management – Your success will be directly tied to the positive motivation of the people that do the work. If you treat your employees great, they will do great work for you. There is no longer loyalty by default in this industry. You must engage and empower your employees in a positive manner. Get rid of old school fear based management philosophies and modernize your management team and style with professionals that know how to manage (not just whomever promoted to be managers and directors). Management and Leadership is a skill and talent that is sorely lacking at Genband.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth

Pros – Many top notch employees, including a number of stellar employees from the Nortel CVAS acquisition.
Lots of opportunity to work with cutting edge technology
Very customer focused.

Cons – Sometimes feel like we are an asset that is being "sweated" by our private equity owners, principally One Equity Partners / JP Morgan Chase. That is, the company is managed on a quarterly basis, with a short leash (e.g. if revenues are lower than expected in a particular quarter, cost cutting is immediately announced).
Some functions are understaffed, to keep costs down.
Not very progressive with respect to work at home employees.

Advice to Senior Management – Pay attention to employee satisfaction, as this typically has a direct bearing on customer satisfaction. As a minimum, conduct an annual survey and share the results.

Current Employee – been working at General Bandwidth full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – good benefits and promising salaries

Cons – office looks like a yard..Very depressing (billerica)

Advice to Senior Management – work on long term plans

Former Employee – worked at General Bandwidth full-time

Pros – this company had possibilities and did show growth for several years. There are some very good people there.

Cons – Entire culture is driven by ego of its CEO and all employees cater and kow tow to him. It is a sick environment and the culture is as close to a dictatorship as it can be The company has underperformed recently and apparently has no answers to remedy its plight

every employee is aware of the fickleness of the CEO and just tires to keep their heads down and stay out of his cross hairs.

Advice to Senior Management – Get a new CEO.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at General Bandwidth full-time for more than a year

Pros – Very competitive salaries and benefits. Good communication from top down. Good group of employees to work with.

Cons – Company has big challenges ahead to stay competitive. Sometimes it appears that projects are not coordinated. Overall objectives sometimes not very evident.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at General Bandwidth full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Lavish parties and vacations for senior management
Senior executives get lots of perks

Cons – Company has never met its targets yet continues to lavish executives with perks
CEO is a nice person but incredibly arrogant and never misses an opportunity to self promote
The strategy for the company is to expand to drive growth and then slash quickly when that fails

Advice to Senior Management – When you are not hitting your targets cancel the Bora Bora trips and have your management meetings in a hotel conference room somewhere in Frisco
Stop pretending that you are the next big thing; Your business has shrunk every year for the past five years.. you just masked it with acquisitions.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company