Of my 1.5 years at NetApp as an engineering manager. I spend close to 50% of my time working on a stupid spread sheet for bug forecasting; a week by week forecast of up to 16 weeks or more of how many bugs you will have each week. They call this an art of "voodoo" themselves. Yet the senior management will come down on you so fast and merciless if you exhibited any signs of unwillingness in doing it. "We have been doing this for years and years" is what they will say to you and that itself is enough reason to justify why they are doing it still so it seems.
If you went above your forecast, they want you to figure out why and where these bugs came from. If you went below your forecast, they want you to know if you padded your numbers and perhaps you should re-work your numbers re-forecast so you are not constantly below.
They seem to think making you spending all your time on bug forecast will help with their product quality, of which there are certainly many escalations exist including bringing down Apple's iTunes down frequently.
It seems all the good people who can think independently and cares about what they do have left the company and the ones who can not, got promoted to be manager/senior managers. Of cause there are exceptions.
Bonus and merits are good means for managers to retain talents. Here it is abused to play favoritism. I have seen my manager withholding both to drive away a key talent in the team on a mission critical project. When I tried to put in a significant merit increase in a desperate try to keep the employee around, I was told I should never have done that without discussing this first and given that it is my first time, he'll forgive me for doing it. I, as the direct manager, seems to have no right to even make recommendations.
The senior manager of the team absolutely does not care how critical you are to the project at hand and/or NetApp, we had 9 people resign from his team in the past 2 years of a team sized ~20, a ~40% turn over rate which is so alarmingly high that it will certainly raise eye brows anywhere else in the industry. But it has not here.
There seem to be no accountability. As the product the senior manager delivered last caused numerous field escalations including the problems stated at Apple. The issues was not narrowed down/sort of patched up till ~20 engineers-year later. This has starved all other developments in the team. Because he knows no strategy except a "pile-up" one which he is quite proud of.
He is still there, driving away talents and delivering products with questionable quality, and god forbidden, might be on his way to be the next director. It is pretty scary to think how long the company will last having this kind of people in charge of the most critical part of NetApp's product.
