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Global Reach
with corporate machines and all kinds of policies that the company computer is
not for personal use, but like most of us, they don’t want to carry around two
machines, so they put personal things on their work computers. We’re looking
at ways to allow consumer-owned PCs to access the enterprise safely and to
segregate work and personal information on the same computer.
A Young Workforce, A Broad Portfolio
Symantec’s division of labor among its global locations is a function of legacy, security, cost, and
talent. Veritas legacy products remain in Silicon Valley where the company was founded. Security
products are developed in Culver City, not far from the Santa Monica location where programmer
Peter Norton wrote the original version of the Disk Operating System (DOS) in 1981 and
the later set of Norton Utilities to improve system performance for Microsoft’s MS-DOS. Some
security program work is kept in California due to cryptography or other elements with U.S.
Department of Defense export control considerations.
The India facilities, Bregman says, do some work on more than 80% of Symantec products—
mostly through the captive Pune and Chennai centers, but also through outside vendors. Most
engineers and programmers working for Symantec in India have five years’ experience or less,
owing to a combination of the company’s fast ramp-up and H-1B visa difficulties in terms of
bringing Indian nationals here. But he adds that the employees the company would like to recruit
and bring to the U.S. “would be in the dozens, not the hundreds or thousands,” and would
ideally have 10 to 15 years’ experience. This might include recruitment of doctoral graduates or
visiting scholars and researchers at U.S. universities who are prompted under current visa
restrictions to return home instead.
“The educational system and the engineering culture in India is very industrial process-oriented,”
Bregman explains. “When you meet with a developer team in India, the first thing they want to
tell you is that they’re CMM (Capability Maturity Model, an industry process capability measure)
Level 5 or higher. A developer here listening to that would turn and walk away; on the U.S. side,
in many cases, it’s an artisan culture. Both are important. As a company we would be unsuccessful
if we decided to hire only in low-cost markets. The same would be true if we restricted ourselves
to hiring only in the U.S. We would not get access to the full spectrum of talent.” More
experienced Indian engineers bring a cultural balance between the two extremes, either through
direct work experience or by virtue of overseas education and employment.
Symantec has gone through a learning curve in growing its captive centers, gradually reducing
attrition by giving technical staff interesting and specialized work, increased responsibility, and
real career opportunities. It has also developed strong ties with faculty at the IITs and other
educational institutions. Pune and Chennai offer the multiple benefits of lower real estate and
utility costs, access to specialized software talent with lower attrition rates, and growing Tier 2
customer markets. India in general offers staffing talent, cost savings, proximity to a growing
source of global malware, and location in a time zone allowing 24/7 global client response.
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