RealNetworks Reviews

CXOs - There are companies with bad cxos, then with terrible cxos. And then there’s RealNetworks. Paint a rosy picture, carry out re-orgs to show progress, re-jig the team culture and keep fooling the employees. After 4 months it's back to square one with more quarterly losses, more budget cuts and more layoffs. The CTO is highly incompetent. Not seen one good technical initiative come out of him. Same with the President of the company. Fire these jokers guys right away. Social embarrassment - Each time you are asked in social circles "So, where do you work?", you better be prepared with a good line to answer follow-ups like "Really, is that company still around? What do they build now? Does anyone even use those products?". Career Growth - Not much once you get comfortable in your role. You will work on features that lag competitors by several years. Nothing impactful about the projects you will be working on. With experienced developers/architects having left there is not much to look forward in terms of learning and mentorship. Zero technical leadership. Lowest team morale ever seen. In technology group - Anyone who’s joined relatively recently (within last 2 years) were smart enough to quit quickly :) Compensation - Below market pay. Annual raises is peanuts. No bonuses. Nothing great about benefits either. Products - Not a single good and innovative product. A media player, a realtimes app that can’t survive the competition. A ringtone product in today’s world? Why God why?!! Optimized codes, that no one gives s*it...good luck! Marketing - Between the bad cxos and bad products, is the complete and utter disgrace that is the marketing department. Did nothing during early launches to seize the market and doing nothing even now. Please get rid of those clowns. HR - Height of passiveness. Zero initiatives. Monkeys in the hands of the CEO but maybe with a slightly longer leash than what the other VPs are on. Layoffs - Every 4-6 months. Started with individual offices at Elliot Ave. Now, downsized to 1 floors at the current space. Each time the ship is close to sinking management will offload some individuals.

- RealNetworks on the resume is a liability. If you're still at Real in late 2016, good luck finding a job somewhere else. - Inflated titles. VPs from RealNetworks go to other places and become regular managers. - Constant downsizing. At 2601 Elliott, Real cut their way to a fraction of their current office space and sub-let their building. We then moved to 1501 1st Ave S, took over 3 floors and now we are back to looking at a small portion of one floor. Going around in circles and repeating the same old procedures of cost cutting should give an idea of how insane this is. - No more good people left. Between layoffs and people leaving, we've pretty much lost all the good talent from the place. We have customer service doing product testing. - No transparency. Ever. - No real product. Still relying on scraps from Google and other small fish to make money from bundling a product the rest of the world stopped using a decade ago. Yes, RealPlayer for PC. Any other product is pretty much a failure at this point. We are still trying to make optimized codecs. Seriously? Yes, we are. - We could've been Netflix or the maker of iPod or a leader in casual games or a dozen other things but we weren't and will never be. Why? The CEO has the vision of a gnat and the execution...well, there's really no execution. The CEO is awful at his job. - Do I still have room here because this list is infinitely long. Real is a terrible place to work.