Poor leadership, communication, and policies
Pros
- Work/Life balance is team dependent. - Some teams work ~30 hours per week, some are regularly asked to work evenings and weekends uncompensated, some are asked to make several 9:00pm meetings per week. - Peer Individual contributors are generally good to work with
Cons
- You may have your role changed underneath you with no input allowed. Simply told, "Next week you will be working under X person on Y project." - Pay is middling at best - If you fail to meet 3 days/week in-office expectations they will deny raises, bonus, and equity grants - Performance reviews occur in March, comp adjustment isn't shared until May, and payments aren't made until mid-July. - I have worked here for 15 months and have yet to see a *yearly* bonus. - Leadership - "Rules for thee but not for me", a teammate had their 2 week honeymoon scheduled since the Fall questioned by new manager due to team deliverables, followed by the new manager taking 6 weeks off so far in 2026. - Communication and response times are bad to non-existent on documents. Design documents regularly go unreviewed until implementation is complete and pushing to production is gated on approved design docs. - All decisions are top-down. Even if a data backed proposal is made by an IC, it will be prioritized under an offhand request from a VP. The person who is right in a room is almost always the highest level male. - Direct quote from Director, "It is not your job to hold me accountable. Only I hold you accountable." - You are a cog. An "Engineering Resource". Nothing more. - It is more common to be referred to as engineering resources than as engineers or by name when management discusses projects between themselves. - Tribal knowledge: A lot of information about how NetApp systems operate only exists in the heads of long tenured engineers, it is rarely documented and documents are rarely kept up to date. -General lack of engineering rigour - Code reviews regularly drag on for 2 weeks - Design documents are rarely reviewed by PM/eng-leads/management - Blockers caused by someone bringing down an internal service are common. - Feature release requires 5 different types of tests, but only 1 type is run continuously after the feature is delivered, the rest sit unused as soon as code reaches production. - Syncronous global culture: Rather than communicating during each person's working hours, NetApp regularly schedules meetings for 9:00pm+ so that communication can be done face to face (doesn't generate written information that can be used later)