NetApp reviews about "upper management"

The morale of the teams has generally declined a bit over the last few years as some of the better experienced employees have quit while most hiring has been confined to college graduates with no experience.

The company has lost its way, stifling innovation through its policies of overtaxing employees to the point there is no time for creative testing or creating innovative product features unless you are willing to give up any chance of work-life balance. Over the past several years the influx of former Cisco VPs and upper management has changed the culture to fear-based management and their policy of requiring that some percentage of each business unit's personnel be given a bad focal review rating even when performing well has turned the culture from one of cooperation between peers to one of competition between peers. This has led to backbiting and unrest, loss of productivity and decline of the once-great culture. Correlation is not the same as causation but it is interesting to compare Cisco vs NetApp 5-year stock charts as Cisco shed these knuckleheads and NetApp brought them on board. Raises and bonuses have been pathetic across the board for several years and the much of the best talent remaining after so many good, high-performing people were laid off has left due to feeling under-appreciated after the latest performance review cycle. The company killed of 7-mode ONTAP to push C-Mode, when many of the top engineers felt that there was nothing C-Mode accomplished that could not have been accomplished in 7-Mode. Why? Apparently because C-Mode requires updated hardware, and somebody thought that forcing customers into forklift upgrades would boost the bottom line. Too bad they overlooked the fact that when faced with a forklift upgrade customers will look at what other options they can forklift in, and there are other products out there with better innovation roadmaps.

Pay is average or below, advancement is very slow. As an engineer, it appears that the sales and support organizations are running well, but product development seems very broken. Huge amounts of unnecessary process burden all aspects of the product development cycle, from product definition down to the level of the individual code check-in. This results in some of the lowest productivity per engineer that I have witnessed. The engineers are working hard, but it is very difficult for them to get anything done. The upper management seems to want to change this, but the deep layers of middle management are so risk-averse that they seem to be locked in stasis until an EVP commands action. The HR policies are stuck in the 80's, with an oppressive annual review process (complete with annual goals), stack ranking, and a black-hole applicant tracking system that seems to grade every applicant unworthy of consideration. For those rare individuals that do get interviews (usually because the hiring manager bypassed HR), the risk-averse culture demands multiple rounds of interviews. I know of people hired only after running a gauntlet of 15-20 individual interviews, organized into 3 or 4 rounds.

Worst direct manager I have ever had. Used bullying tactics to motivate employees. A constant revolving door of needing new employees for the Support Account Manager position. A sign that there is something wrong which upper management is not addressing. I was actually yelled at for doing what was asked of me. After constant angry looks in the hall ways, and break room I could not take much more, and left for less pay. This is far from one of the best places to work in the US.

Poor upper management and incompetent senior Architects.

There are generally no career advancement opportunities; if you want a "promotion" you have to switch jobs / departments. In my particular position, they have promised a promotion path for the last TEN YEARS but have never delivered. Upper management in particular is completely detached from reality. Even Marketing has no idea what their market is (with respect to pricing, etc.). New executives keep talking about what needs to be done but fail to provide any way to actually DO those things. After the most recent layoffs, any remaining trust or loyalty has been effectively destroyed and those that have not left probably should, as there are plenty of opportunities in the area these days. There are no raises this year and while we understand the "business reasons" for that, the bonus was terrible and you only gave small amounts to stock to favorites, including yourselves (yes, we noticed). Oh, and while the culture is still pretty decent, that's only because of the people that remain - it's NOT because of "management." Since you laid a lot of the good ones off, well.. The culture is going to vanish, too. Also.. Taking two mandatory "shutdown" weeks off every year for the last several years is a TERRIBLE way to manage a company; it's impossible to recruit anyone who will only get ten days vacation to start regardless, yet they have to use six of those at times that may not be convenient for them and their family. I've tried repeatedly to recruit very good folks but when they learn about that, they just say "no way."

Bureaucratic nightmare developing after several weak quarters. Development and release cycle is much longer than rest of industry. Company is falling behind in innovation, engineering staff has lost faith in the vision of this company. Upper management is playing musical chairs and seems more interested in cost cutting than in moving the company forward. Company is totally driven by quarterly results and has little interest in the future.

Takes time to come out with a release of a product

Lack of direction from upper management. Fire drills galore. You can be doing 90% of your job great but it is the 10% that you are not addressing that they will look at.