Check Point is a tired old man slowly fading into death.
Pros
The company is very stable and that has a lot to do with how they manage their finances. Check Point has a lot of cash and maintains healthy product margins. Work life balance is good, but it depends on your territory. Check Point can makes really great security technologies. (See below why this isn't enough). You can have a decent and stable career at Check Point, but if you want to innovate and grow this is probably not the place for you.
Cons
Almost all decisions are made by Gil Schwed and to a lesser extent, Amnon Bar-Lev. To illustrate this point, Gil personally approves all new hires. As a result, managers have little to no autonomy to innovate and actually grow their business. Upper management also seems to have little patience and a short attention span. Attempts to fix missed sales goals are never successful. This is because they either abandoned their plans because move on to the next gimmick or they are impatient and don't give things enough time to succeed. As I said above, Check Point can create great technology, but they suck at packaging and selling it. The technology is good, but the actual products suck. They miss basic features that all other competitors have. They keep trying to lock customers into the Check Point eco system. CheckPoint will create something great like SandBlast (bad name BTW) and package it in a way that it only really works for existing customers. That's not a way to grow our business. Central management is great, but the reality is that customers don't want to put all of their eggs in one vendor's basket. Final statement on Check Point. Overall, everything is just more difficult with Check Point. Whether you're a customer or employee, everything is unnecessarily difficult. Licensing--huge pain. Tech Support and troubleshooting--pain. Internal sales and quoting tools--huge pain.
