F5 reviews

F5 has far too many initiatives and all have unrealistic timelines and expectations. Their top performers are burnt out because F5 will not bring on adequate resources. Middle management takes on zero responsibility, yet has a control freak out whenever Agile is mentioned. There is no career path for anyone. Promotions are random and based purely on relationships not goals or performance (in spite of what the CIO openly states). If you are a woman with a strong view point, you will not be wanted in this org. Yes, they want women, but only those that fit the male ideal of what a woman says and does.

So yeah, the RIF sucked, but I don't fault the C-levels for it. F5 needed to start it's digital transformation years ago under the previous regime and they flitted away the time. Now a new regime is here and they have to make some major strategic changes to not be left in the dust. Are they making those changes? Who knows. I work in IT and that's the department I know so this review is just the IT department. The IT department is without question a dumpster fire. There is very little-to-no vision or leadership coming out of the top (CIO and Sr. Directors). We have yet to embrace the cloud technologies (though apparently that's coming), agile development processes, or Devops culture. What little culture we have involves laborious manual processes and a deep fear of risk. Most systems are special snowflakes so automation is minimal. When we have postmortems, it is usually to assign blame and point fingers. We are also off-shoring talent to India. All this has crushed the moral of most of the IT SMEs. Many of us are working on boning up what skillsets we can to find jobs elsewhere. Working here is like being in an abusive relationship. If you are looking for a rewarding career in an IT organization, looking to do new and interesting things and solve problems while not buried by a mountain of technical debt, I would recommend (strongly) that you look elsewhere otherwise you will be sorely disappointed.