Like most companies who have transitioned from an aggressive tribe to civilized city dwellers, the more experience you have and greater desire to 'make a change' the greater your frustration will be. That is unless you have moved passed this onto your Sunset life plan of being an invisible COG whose sole purpose is to meet about the meeting you are going to meet about. In the early days the company was great, almost too good since it ruined people working anywhere else. This came from the leadership in place and the passion they instilled into every person that worked there.
Open Door Policy,... it was actually an open door policy to anyone you wanted access to but at the same time you had to be prepared to hold conversations as to not waste people's time. People aggressively challenged ideas, not to tear you down, but to ensure that the idea was fully fleshed out before impacting customers. You were treated like an adult, with an adult's career and with the expectation of doing the right thing,... like an adult.
This also lead to a 'middle out' company where the middle portion of leadership ran the day to day decision making process with the execs providing overarching strategic views. Although execs got involved, they were wise enough to use their power in a limited fashion rather than crushing the people driving their vision. Over time, this morphed into a top down approach as people fleeing from horrible companies further down the path to mediocrity could not wait to bring over the bad habits that destroyed their previous culture.
When you hear people speak positively about NetApp they are either,
a) Reminicing on what it used to be
or
b) Early in their career and it is absolutely an awesome time for them much like it would be anywhere they would work since,... well,... they are early in their careers.
Like the title of this review states, you could track the erosion on the company culture on a timeline so it is not a surprise that it fell down into being an IBM/Hitachi/EMC/Cisco clone. Possibly a good thing, maybe the way things were was doomed to eventual failure, who knows, but that unique experiment deserved to continue on and it deserves to be noted as unique in an industry desperately needing originality.
