NetApp Reviews

Pros

Challenging work and high level of productivity

Cons

slow growth and highly competitive

Advice to Senior Management

more recreation facilities should be included

Pros

Good Employer, work flexibility better workplace

Cons

Too many and unnecessary management layers.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to retain good talent.

Pros

nice working environment, nice people, onsite gym

Cons

career advancement and professional growth

Pros

-Good compensation
-Better career growth
-Good collegues to work with

Cons

-Hard to move higher in the chain

Pros

Top level leadership is impressive. Pay is decent. Benefits are decent. There are perks: employee gym, free Peets and Starbuck coffee, bagel bar on Fridays, free fruit on Tuesday - $.25 sodas, I believe subsidized food at cafeteria - and seems like folks order food all the time for meetings and share it with the rest - and a beautiful campus plus flexible work environment. There are a lot of smart, talented and friendly individuals. Extra holiday provided as long as company maintains best place to work status. Company parties are fun and generous. There is a lot of intent to make this a good place and top management appears to lead by example with is energizing.

Cons

Too much talk about being the best place to work - not enough proactive management to ensure accountability so that is actually IS the best place to work. In Marketing - it's clear the executive team is in disagreement with one another just through the conflicting directions employees receive on the same topics. Plus, the waffling back and forth over the course of months on topics is inexcusable from leaders. At the same time we are expected to work as teams - to conflicting changing goals that are rarely expressed in SMART fashion let along actually measured and adjusted for reality. Escalation of conflict to the managerial level means you are not doing your job - even though the conflict is a level or more above your role. There seems to be a pervasive habit of back stabbing and bad mouthing - disagreements are won in passive aggressive fashion and employees are stuck in the middle. This environment leads to fear - and fear based behaviors are prevalent. There is a lack of trust and also a lot of chatter about how bad it is and a lot of people looking for jobs - and leaving but offering to help anyone else left to get out.

Advice to Senior Management

Clean out the marketing house. Instill some accountability into the management chain and hold the leaders to task. There are real reasons why marketing talent (and exceptional talent) is fleeing. Provide surveys for marketing employees to SAFELY provide feedback because right now if you are suspected of giving negative feedback, you are punished. Make NetApp marketing an environment where asking tough questions is not only acceptable but desirable. It's a shame to hire talented folks and then ignore the wealth of knowledge and experience they bring but it's not appropriate to shut people down for thinking and trying to do the right thing by querying on perceived disconnects. Ensure that job descriptions you are hiring people to match actual job responsibilities.

Pros

Salaries are good, offices are very nice if you're at a major location. (i.e. not Wichita). Bagels free on Friday, employee socials on Friday, Good employees in many departments. Opportunity to coast in many roles, sadly, because management does not seem to be interested in your contributions.

Cons

If you are in a satellite location that is not headquartered there, you are in for a rough time. At Wichita, if you aren't in the new product development team, you're treated as a child most of the time, with little opportunity for recognition or growth. Many departments are very California-centric, so if you are in one of those departments outside of CA, you really are living on eggshells career wise. Many very solid employees have left or are leaving as a result of being ignored and treated poorly. Really a very depressing environment to work in, it started out wonderfully but nobody is living the corporate values we read so much about in about every tenth email.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a long hard look from remote sites how you're bringing people in. California office dominates many areas, suffocating career growth in the field. It does not need to be this way. Also, need to focus on creating a broader perspective on operations. Right now, lots of things are siloed, so that nobody has a global perspective. Long term, the company will fail if something does not happen.

Pros

work hour flexibility, friendly work culture, good work environment, transparency in management, supportive, many projects, varieties of work, flexibility to go beyond and explore

Cons

management is not mature enough, the planning should be done well with more focus, rapidly growing environment may loose the start-up character.

Pros

* Interesting technology
* full of potential

Cons

* Sweat shop
* Poor or absent management
* Constantly changing priorities
* Full of cliques and bias
* Not honest often full of spin

Pros

Salary is good.
Silicon Valley location is desirable.
Growing Company.
Nice campus and equipment.

Cons

Senior management not connected to IT challenges.
Poor project planning and the same mistakes repeated over and over.
Complicated infrastructure not supported with ample budgets.
Quantity is job one and everything is due yesterday - suprise and blame happens when issues arise. Just do it faster and don't make too much noise about it.

Advice to Senior Management

Try to understand the issues with the extremely complex application infrastructure and simplify, simplify, and simplify. This costing Netapp dearly in $$ and employee satisfaction/loyalty.

Pros

- great products
- smart people
- market leader
- good compensation and benefits

Cons

- Senior leaders are reactive, not aligned and constantly shifting priorities. Often times this indecisiveness stalls implementation of great ideas. Projects get thrown into holding patterns and teams churn multiple cycles and waste valuable time and resources because of this.
- Most people in mid-level roles are people with long tenures at NetApp and got promoted for sticking around. Unfortunately, their lack of openmindedness and immaturity stifles good ideas and keeps experienced and talented people in a box.
- Lots of reorgs
- constant state of reactive fire drills caused by indecisive management and competitive pressure
- A lot of red tape, for even the simplest of things.
- Lots and lots (and lots) of huge egos here, and that makes things difficult - too many people insisting it be their way or the highway.

 It's a shame to see politics and assanine processes halt progress. There are tons of great people and great ideas that - if implemented in a reasonable timeframe - would put NetApp ahead of EMC years ago and keep us there.

Advice to Senior Management

Hold senior leaders to account for executing against a plan and sticking to priorities. Abandon old ways of doing things and give people more freedom to execute.