NetApp

Open "cube culture," where even top execs have cubes instead of offices.

Frequent "all-hands" meetings, where execs address employees directly and in-person, help to boost morale.

Perks like a company gym, bagel Friday, and monthly beer bashes also contribute to boosting morale.

Single product company with life-cycles so long that your children might someday see the feature you were working on. Some of the process tools used are OK, but many are so bad they are preventing a significant amount of work from being done (e.g., QC).

I really do not know how long NetApp can sustain this. I was so glad to go to a place where I work on something and ship it in the same few months. At NetApp, the product I worked on for almost two years finally shipped 6 months after I left.

The performance review process is, to me, completely unreasonable. 60% of all employees are given a "3" rating, which basically means you get to keep your job. If you're lucky, you get a cost-of-living raise.

The top 30% or so get higher raises, and the bottom 10% better start looking for another job.

The big problem is that this is "rolled up" through the company hierarchy, so people deciding your rating could be 2 or 3 levels above you who in no way know your work.

Since I was a manager, I had the opportunity to see how this worked, and I saw many instances of gross unfairness.

Some other manager could be a better cheerleader to his boss than me, so my tight, productive testing team with great engineers would get the low ratings, and a bloated team that contributes much less would steal the 1s and 2s.

There are poor middle managers throughout NetApp who are contributing to suffocating processes that make it no fun for an engineer to work. You reward engineers who fill out wiki pages all day and punish those who actually write code. You are losing your best engineers at an astonishing rate. There are addressable reasons why this is happening, and pretty easy solutions to some of them.