NetApp

Good work/life balance.

There is a culture of transparency from upper management.

Very good benefits.

Lots of training opportunities.

The upper management seems dedicated to making the company a great place to work.

Pay is average or below, and advancement is very slow.

As an engineer, it appears that the sales and support organizations are running well, but product development seems very broken.

Huge amounts of unnecessary process burden all aspects of the product development cycle, from product definition down to the level of the individual code check-in. This results in some of the lowest productivity per engineer that I have witnessed.

The engineers are working hard, but it is very difficult for them to get anything done.

The upper management seems to want to change this, but the deep layers of middle management are so risk-averse that they seem to be locked in stasis until an EVP commands action.

The HR policies are stuck in the 80's, with an oppressive annual review process (complete with annual goals), stack ranking, and a black-hole applicant tracking system that seems to grade every applicant unworthy of consideration.

For those rare individuals that do get interviews (usually because the hiring manager bypassed HR), the risk-averse culture demands multiple rounds of interviews. I know of people hired only after running a gauntlet of 15-20 individual interviews, organized into 3 or 4 rounds.

Ditch management by (annual) objectives; it kills agility and makes people do stupid things.

Shake loose the cruft in middle management.

Empower people by actively battling the climate of fear that is killing good communication, e.g., don't kill the messenger.

Take some time to really talk to people two or three layers below you.

Apply the culture catalysts rather than just talk about them.

You need to convert the bias toward inaction into a bias toward action.