Left that annoying Brown stain on the chairs though (of blood)
Brown came in and destroyed what Bennett had worked very hard to turn around. He carried in with him a troll army hell bent on destroying &/or kicking out anyone 1-2% higher than salary averages to fill shareholder pockets. Then the same trolls set out zapping high-performers in whom the company had a modicum of a chance of turnaround, for suck ups from Oracle and other companies. If you've ever seen the George Michael video of the poodle (Bush) bumping Blair's leg, imagine you had to be the poodle to Brown's leg to have any chance to stay.
Under Brown's reign, it quickly became a culture of staff who would rather stab their co-workers, and give up your remote job = you must live/work in MTV or Pune to have any chance in some divisions. The only people left in most field offices are the sales/SE's and a few marketroids + the now-dictatorial HR departments.
Fun is a word totally gone from the company -- go sit in their car park and look at the workers faces going in & out. It is of dread (will I have a job at the end of today?), fear (who do I need to watch out from being stabbed by!) and confusion (what's Mike and Co's latest lame idea for a direction?).
The Veritas staff are lucky to have gotten out -- they've a realistic chance to fix their future. The Symantec staff are on the bus to hell if they're still there!
Customers who I've had call me since my departure are clear they're looking for other products and will be leaving them soon! My personal prediction is that Symantec's revenues are likely to be like the NiN album "The Downward Spiral" for a long time to come.
Symantec fucked over so many top performers in Support, SEs, Product Management, and Engineering that the shell of a company remaining now is like a kitty litter box full of brown poo. The ex-Oracle crowd who came in took no notice of key contributors and instead instituted a new level of managers who were more akin to "Merchants of Death" looking for any excuse to get rid of folks. The most trumped up of lame reasons were given when many were given notice of redundancy.
I'm confident Brown will be in the press soon coming into a.n.other company to help fix their "challenges". I hope for those companies' staff sake they do a few searches on Google, then immediately update their CVs and start looking as "The Company Buster" will soon be up to it again.
Those of us who were cast aside like chattels have landed in a brave new world that strangely sees us happier, no longer looking over our shoulders constantly, and having a bit of fun + looking forward to going to work. I myself now am in a company where people respect each other, can have a passionate discussion w/o HR getting involved, and jokes/humour are rampant in our office.
There's a special place in hell for Symantec, and soon they'll all be there.