Ixia Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – Fast paced environment to work

Cons – Need to listen to the people

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – Great technical learning on the job.
Lots of new things happening.
Opportunity to make a difference.
Work on the latest stuff.

Cons – Late hours .
No slack periods to de-stress .
Unmeetable deadlines.
Lack of transparency.
Passing the buck to others and often encouraged by certain managers to paint a pretty picture to VPs etc. about themselves.
Salaries not often at par with amount and complexity of work.

Advice to Senior Management – Sometimes the 'no' people are really the deserving ones who necessarily donot agree with everything you say , because the manger or VP is not always right.
Undeserving people abound and these 'yes' people ( better to hire parrots instead ) keep acting like they are doing all the work when in fact they are not doing anything useful at all and these people end up in getting promotions and great salaries as well.
Because of this you are losing some really good people , often with what looks like without a care in the world. The problems will come after a year.
Stop the 'passing the buck' syndrome. See who are really working and who are passing the buck all the time.

Former Employee – worked at Ixia

Pros – Very cool technologies.
Fast paced development.
Management tries to keep employees up to date.
Always working with big numbers
Nice benefits.

Cons – Life-work balance can be sometimes hard to maintain.
Sometimes quality can drop a bit in favor of fast paced development.
There are times when you have to deal with a lot of multitasking.
Occasional micro management.
Work is fun if you get into the right team.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the good work with involving people in new and interesting projects. Multi-tasking is rarely the way to go, you lose focus and quality.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Ixia

Pros – smart people to work with
you will learn multi tasking
Management promotes learning, they will set aside separate time for you to learn a technology etc
It all depends what team, what manager you are under. You might get lucky you might not.

Cons – Micromanagement environment, tasks sent out every day, status reports expected at end of day. They will tell you how to do something, when sometimes you know better. Kills your creativity.

emphasys on numbers, not quality. Some managers care about the number of bugs closed, thats all.

Slave driving and no appreciation for hard work. If you do 100% the following week expectation will be set to 110%, if you dont deliver the 110% you are below expectation, if you do the following week it will be 120%. If you want to work there forget about balance. Everyone works at least 10 hours/day, this is if you mutlitask and take advantage of every minute.

Advice to Senior Management – stop micro management, it kills creativity, and makes it not a pleasant place to work

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Ixia

Pros – Great company to work for when no one is dependent on you. You will definitely learn a lot within a short span of time, but work becomes monotonous after that.

Cons – Work becomes monotonous and no balance between work and personal life. From morning 9 AM till late night hours most of the employees are asked to work. And for some they do not have weekends

Advice to Senior Management – Please try solving the above problem. Till the employee resigns his skills are not recognized, the moment he resigns he is asked if he can take leadership position but why this kind of attitude? It used to be one of the best small compoanies to work for in the 2006-2008

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – Local team members are great. Personnel in the field are dedicated and smart

Cons – Lack of communication from executives. Relatively new mission statement is disregarded by executives. Complete disconnect from headquarters with what is actually going on with customers. Does not listen to feedback.

Advice to Senior Management – Start listening to people in the field, they are your customer liaisons. Show some real respect for your employees not just lip service once a quarter.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Ixia

Pros – Perceived as Industry leader
CEO strong on personal/company values
Financially conservative and well managed
Products are leading edge in most cases

Cons – Lack of resources in IT/application support negatively impacted ability to do job well.
Perceived some inequities in sales team quotas/expectations.

Advice to Senior Management – Encourage greater cross-functional interaction and problem solving.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – 1) Salary and benefits are on-par or maybe a bit more than industry standard.
2) There are quite a few really smart people.

Cons – 1) Absolutely no long term vision
2) Complete lack of respect to employee's preferences. You have to work on whichever module you are asked to, without any consideration provided to your interests.
3) Constant pressure and culture of patching up solutions in a hacky way. People are discouraged to think holistically and are pushed constantly to deliver private fixes within a few hours. Groups just tend to blame each other and push issues around because of this.
4) Resources are treated like manual laborers. Upper management cares only about people count and assumes that 'n' number of people will bring down the total work duration by a factor of 'n'.
5) Management is actually happy to lose developers in US so that they can backfill with more resources in India or Romania.

Advice to Senior Management – Please do not micro-manage and come up with realistic plans which are good for the long term. Or else you can see that the employee retention rate will drastically go down.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – good pay. some flexibility in working from home. people with good technical knowledge abound

Cons – main focus of each group, as directed by upper management, is to blame each other. everyne spends a lot of time on this. lot of effort is put into how bugs can be moved to other groups just so that at the end of the week, your team's numbers look good.
management follows an approach of lying about everything to people, and they actually think people believe them. Dishonesty seems to be the main tool used to manage people. management seems to want you to quit so that they can hire more people in cheaper countries. Probably this is why they treat employees very very badly, and have no qualms about messing with your personal time. In fact, you dont have "personal time". It all belongs to Ixia.

Advice to Senior Management – please try being a little more honest with us. might make a difference. though it might not come naturally for most of you.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Ixia

Pros – Bright and talented coworkers. Most of them would be nice to hang out with, if they weren't always so depressed about this place.

Cons – This might take some time
i) No respect for employees as persons
ii) No honesty in communication with the team
iii) No transparency in management
iv) No respect for work-life balance
v) No long term planning - shifting "long term plans" every few days
vi) Terrible competition amongst groups to switch the blame to each other
vii) Constant pressure year round

Advice to Senior Management – none whatsover.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend