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 (ex: 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 no way know your work. Since I was a manager, I had to 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.
