NetApp Culture FAQ

Pros

Good perks, benefits and salary

Cons

Biased management and no transparency

Pros

This is a challenging, but rewarding position within the industry. A lot of hands-on application to learning.

Cons

I can't think of any.

Pros

Great culture, good benefits and great work life balance.

Cons

Future is a bit insecure product wise and the push to cloud business has been clearly communicated but not compensated to offset the lack of turnover in proportion to core business.

Pros

They fairly compensated me at NetAapp, and consider my pay above average. Benefits were decent, but not great. It's hard to find great benefits these days, though, so I'd call them above average. My manager was very helpful and supportive to the extent the company enabled him to be. I liked him, and think he was a good, honest person fighting an uphill battle to do a good job, just like the rest of the support organization.

Cons

Foremost is the politics. You had better be good at politics if you want to succeed as a TSE at NetApp, otherwise you'll wind up with every case in the support center assigned to your name. I've experienced nothing like it anywhere else. Bad relationships between teams, poorly defined roles, cliques, every negative thing about corporate culture you can think of exists in abundance here. The work environment presents itself as friendly initially, but the facade doesn't last long. Once you get pulled into the political landscape, and this is unavoidable, it quickly becomes hostile. The primary pastime in the NetApp TSE area was badmouthing co-workers. If you were not in the in-crowd, people talked about you like a dog. The support area is open with low cubicle walls, and you'd hear people loudly saying the most horrible things about their co-workers just a few seats over. I'm not talking about constructive criticism or fun banter, either. I'm talking about vicious, mean spirited, behind-the-back (and sometimes to the face) berating, intended to get people fired. Second is the complete lack of useful training. NetApp talks a lot about lateral skills during the interview process, but what they REALLY mean is "lateral concepts." You might be a 20 year Active Directory veteran, but your cases will deal with the NetApp implementation of AD, and how your customers have integrated it. Your AD knowledge will help you figure some things out, but mostly you'll be reverse engineering NetAp software, and troubleshooting bad customer implementations. What I received in the way of training was the following advice. "Get on the intranet and find some training you think looks useful." I had no idea what type of calls I'd be taking, so how could I possibly know which training courses to take? Even if I knew what type of calls I'd be taking, there was no (zero) useful training available to me initially in those areas. I didn't receive any training specific to my vertical until I'd been with the company for 9 months. So I took a few of the CBT's that looked related to my role, then was unceremoniously thrown into the call queue a week later. My phone just started ringing one day, and I was totally unprepared. Asking questions was highly resented, and doing so usually resulted in getting attitude from the person you asked, or as was common, they can't help because they're too busy. Learning and documentation were the second major failing. Knowledge is scattered throughout various systems, some of which I didn't have access to. Resources were not clearly labeled for which version of NetApp software they apply to. You might run across an existing bug, but there's no way to know most times, because there is an arcane and user unfriendly way of documenting things at NetApp that new people cannot possibly comprehend. In short, you are thrown to the wolves with no way to defend yourself. I requested books, or offline training specific to my role that I could do at home multiple times, but there were none. Being a new TSE was one of the most uncomfortable and unpleasant experiences of my entire life. I was frequently assigned cases from other verticals that I had no training, or experience with, and other teams refused to help or take ownership. I was assigned "secure" cases, since I had clearance, in which I had to troubleshoot with no logs, remote access, nothing but verbal communication. I was assigned cases where I did not speak the same language as the customer, and sometimes it would take more than an hour to get an interpreter on the phone. To sum it up, every case was a learning opportunity with no learning resources available. Needless to say, there was a very high turnover rate. Just going by memory, during my two-year employment, I can recall 10 people either resigning or leaving a 15-person team. I was hired on to cover a recent wave of turnover, as a matter of fact. Needless to say, we were constantly short-handed, and it takes a year or more for most TSE's to become useful due to the complete lack of useful training when you are hired. TSE jobs at NetApp were shift work when I was there, but it quickly became apparent I had to research my cases at home. When you are in the call queue, you constantly receive new cases. They assigned me a mentor who confided in me he quit for this very reason. You are expected to update ALL cases daily, and this includes customer communication. So once you get a certain number of cases, you can spend entire days just doing non-productive case updates. Some of your cases will stay open for weeks or months, even when it's apparent there is no problem with a NetApp product, because the account teams refuse to let you close them. Even when you're not working at home, it's impossible to relax or sleep because of the unmanageable stress levels during the workday. To put the icing on the cake, NetApp devices were (at the time) EXTREMELY opaque, and difficult to support. There were few built-in troubleshooting tools for my vertical, and no established troubleshooting protocols. It was the wild west, anything goes. The devices had GUI management that was notoriously unreliable and buggy in the support center, so you relied exclusively on CLI commands for NetApp's CDOT operating system, which is not similar to any other operating system you might be familiar with. The process for filing bugs was beyond any convoluted, almost intentionally quirky process I've ever experienced. Even if you manage to get your bug accepted, which sometimes seemed like a literal miracle, the engineering team was notoriously difficult to work with, and deeply resented any collaboration with TSE's. A co-worker had a case once that ran for an entire year before engineering accepted it. That's 12 months where this guy was on regular calls, sending case updates, collecting additional data, etc. So you wind up with a lot of cases where the account team and customers are pushing you for resolution, but engineering won't accept your bug, so the case stays in your ownership and you get to deal with an increasingly angry customer every day. The bug tracking software itself appeared to have been coded in the 1960s. It really seemed like NetApp went out of their way to make their devices as difficult as possible to support on the back end, and this just added to the stress. There was no incentive for me to advance in the support organization, because all the negative things about being a TSE were only amplified at the EE level. The only stated advancement goal I ever heard in support was to get out of support. Some people love working there, and more power to them. It's an environment that certain personality types can thrive in, but not mine. If you don't thrive in a highly political environment that is superficially friendly, but hostile underneath, avoid being a TSE at NetApp.

Advice to Management

My direct manager was actually very good, fair, and hardworking. He did everything in his power to help me, and I thank him for that. My perception is that the organization itself is so poorly managed above him that he just couldn't address the problems I needed help with. According to his metrics, I was doing a great job. What I REALLY needed to hear was where I was failing so I could work on those areas, he just didn't have the metrics available to give me that information. I only received positive reviews and feedback, but it felt like I was doing a terrible job, and I had no idea how to improve.

Pros

- colleagues are very supportive - several opportunities for extended education/training (including LinkedIn Learning) - salary - good and competitive products - future oriented - great leaders - great and transparent hiring process - diversity and culture

Cons

- visibility - not consistent job titles in comparison to the industry