NetApp

Ten years ago, this was truly a great place to work. Even now, there are plenty of challenges. Certainly, there is room for improvement and innovation in the product, if only management would get out of the way.

It depends to some extent on which group you work in. There are a small number of business units where the micromanagement has not yet become oppressive. If you can get into one such group, you may be very pleased to work here.

The company has lost its way, stifling innovation through policies of overtaxing employees to the point where there is no time for creative testing or creating innovative product features, unless one is willing to give up any chance of work-life balance.

Over the past several years, the influx of former Cisco VPs and upper management has changed the culture to fear-based management. Their policy of requiring that a percentage of each business unit's personnel receive a poor focal review rating, even when performing well, has turned the culture from one of cooperation between peers to one of competition.

This has led to backbiting and unrest, loss of productivity, and a decline of the once-great culture. Correlation is not causation, but it is interesting to compare Cisco vs. NetApp 5-year stock charts as Cisco shed these knuckleheads and NetApp brought them on board.

Raises and bonuses have been pathetic across the board for several years. Much of the best talent remaining after so many good, high-performing people were laid off has left due to feeling underappreciated after the latest performance review cycle.

The company killed off 7-mode ONTAP to push C-Mode, when many of the top engineers felt that there was nothing C-Mode accomplished that could not have been accomplished in 7-Mode. Why? Apparently because C-Mode requires updated hardware, and somebody thought that forcing customers into forklift upgrades would boost the bottom line.

Too bad they overlooked the fact that when faced with a forklift upgrade, customers will look at what other options they can forklift in. There are other products out there with better innovation roadmaps.

Get back to making NetApp a great place to work. It really was a great place to work not long ago.

You can see the result of offering an extra day off in return for good GPTW survey input has left you, as opposed to Dan Warmenhoven's approach of actually making it a great place to work.

Stop the nonsense of giving people poor reviews just because you insist that a percentage get poor reviews. When someone is performing and this happens, it really makes them feel unappreciated.

Full disclosure, this happened to me, but my more recent reviews were much better. Why did I get the better reviews? Because I stopped going out of my way to help and mentor others outside of my group, so the people who should have been doing that no longer felt that I was stepping on their toes and stopped dreaming things up about me to complain about.

Stop worrying so much about fine-grained metrics and minutiae. There seems to be a belief that if only the right metrics could be gathered and analyzed, then the right decisions could be made.

What you don't see is that you have created a huge black hole that sucks up creative time. Gather simpler metrics that don't take so much time from the business at hand, and find ways to reduce the process overhead.

When it takes a dev engineer over a week to navigate all of the process overhead to implement a simple bug fix, you leave them little time to truly innovate.