NetApp reviews about "upper management"

Middle management is in need of improvement

Challenging to work with product management and upper management when neither comes from engineering. The technical leadership (TDs) help overcome this.

Health Insurance, Stability - lay offs, no advancement, pay

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.

Now, it depends on who is the manager you are reporting to. Your direct manager makes a different on the experience of the company.

There are many mediocre managers who are interested in self-promotion and are not contributing to moving the company forward. Unfortunately, upper management appeared to not have a clue who these people were even though HR knows. They were unable or unwilling to eliminate bully managers who are detrimental to the company's success. Lots of political infighting.

Benefits lag comparable companies in the industry. Not much transparency into what the overall strategy is from upper level management. Management needs to take more risks and diversify the company through investments, M&A

You are away from Silicon Valley in California