Thread regarding Riverbed Technology Inc. layoffs

Anyone want to volunteer their time and update the leadership count?

Ponzi scheme at its best. Time to say bye to your investment, it will worth nothing soon and you cannot do anything about it.

Seems like leadership is picking our pockets in a different way or the whole shares motion was a Ponzi scheme

Riverbed and TB are not repurchasing Class A anymore, this means something.

Wow.. retention bonuses on one side and cuts (leaves, pay) on other side. Looks like they really dont care about low level engineers.

So it is essentially stealing money from low level hard working team members and paying the executives.

I wish someone asks this in AMA.

I think the OP is asking people for their thoughts on why leadership has setup Riverbed this way and what impression this would leave on us. The stocks and the IC vs non-IC is good info but doesn’t explain the 93+ (now 94) director+. One would think we’d spend it on US engineering or something.

For the record, No Directors get to keep any stock if they leave. When you are an employee a Director title or even higher does not mean anything with regard to ownership of stock or otherwise. Its not like a private business where you are an owner Director. So anyone who leaves, at any level, is in the same boat.
And regardless of the volume of leadership people, most of them have to also fill individual contributor functions anyway, so the maths here is a big exaggeration.

Having said that, yes there are a lot of people with titles bigger than their abilities

They paid out as expected when I left recently - think it was 8% PA return. The class B is close to worthless

I’ve always felt that this class A “founders stock” was just some huge Ponzi scheme. This will definitely be the case if Riverbed is sold for pennies on the dollar and you’re out your own hard worked cash. I wonder if the Ponzi’d money was used to parachute out the old team while floating parachutes for the new team. Either way, I just don’t trust these guys

Ex-Director and Up here

Left Riverbed about 6 months ago and they didn't contact me to rebuy stock. Guess I'm in for a payout in 2021 when the company gets bought out for pennies on the dollar

Go team Riverbed! You can do it!

@ ConfusedAndNotAmused

That is why directors at Riverbed managing directors. And this is only one win-win in the list for them. All others offered to work hard with salary cuts spiced with “we will go through it together” from our great chiefs!

RMB was brought in to deal with the disaster left by JK and PM, he's already starting out on a bad-foot because of the debt accrued by the forebearers. With the Q4 debt refinancing, I'd say that attrition is part of their plan.

The salary reduction is definitely being used to fund retention bonuses

Does anyone know if the pay reductions and furloughs are paying for these retention bonuses? It would seem like a major conflict of interest if this was the case - literally taking from peter to pay Paul scenario. I hope during the next AMA that they can clear this up because I would like (at the very least) to be given the choice on who whod get these bonuses to or not.

Seems like there’s a lot for leadership to explain between the top heavy management, reductions and retention bonuses and who or how many are on retainer. IIRC, one of the tenets of this new leadership was transparency but I’m not sending it right now. Seems more like skeletons building up right now.

Retention bonus or not, people should leave as soon possible. Riverbed has successfully destroyed its reputation and is now the laughing stock among major tech companies and our own customers. No amount of marketing, emails or executive meetings can fix this.

Our leaders ARE NOT top quality people. They are literally rejects, failures or do-nothings who survived on the name of the companies they used to work for (then got booted). Given this, Riverbed is a “loser” of a company based on the 90+ leaders we keep. It just disgusts me knowing these “leaders” know Riverbed is bombing and yet they still manage like SxHxIxT.

Our leaders are futile, they know it, we know it and the industry knows it.

@solArch

Does this mean that directors can leave the company, keep their stocks and still cash out when the company is sold off?

Win win for them

Just got a 30% retention bonus to stay with the company. This quarter looks bad and Q4 looks worse, C-level knows we are sinking

I'm just going to sit back, do nothing for a while then move company when the contracts expire. Easy life

“ What does this tell us about leadership?”

Based on what I know of Riverbed, this tells me those 90+ leaders are title grabbing for their next job somewhere else. Then add a little drop of nepotism or favoritism since we know they are someone’s friends who want a nice financial package.

In short, this tells me they don’t care about us, they’re more than willing to drain us dry of our talents and leave us out to dry when we close the doors or get sold off in pieces.

Options of those who have title of director and up don’t expire and not a subject for buyback in case of departure. Not like engineers who haven’t seen a single dime of any bonus in last 5 years. Work hard, think fast!

Riverbed is clearly using a corporate HR and Mktg hack to try and re-direct the broader thinking here. It is sad and funny. WANOPT has no functional need in the world any longer. Using MSFT O365 as the foundation for your value proposition is short path to failure, MSFT will fix it (and not buy Riverbed to do it). The visibility space is a black hole for Riverbed. Customers are moving to public cloud for economic reasons, Riverbed has no visibility in these environments and even the product functionality is limited for private hosted apps. 2021 is a blurry vision for Riverbed - not even sure if they can stay alive to see it, that is a sad truth. Partners are dropping Riverbed from their vendor list. If you don't have a retention bonus, ask for one - but be prepared if they say no. On the next AMA - ask for a product development roadmap - with timeline (even though they never make the timeline). Nothing will be delivered - they can't even make up something to build.

As THE premier leader in WANOPT and modern visibility, scaling our executive team is SUPER important. Our leaders comes with a century’s worth of experience ranging from technological invention, direct connections to Fortune 100 CEO’s and CIO’s, process automation and optimization expertise and multi-generational leadership. Why is this important? To put it simply, as 2021 approaches, we need to have the right leaders in place first in order to scale our teams. The size of the team is an indication WE ARE READY for hyper growth. Our next generation products and long-term roadmaps are SO BULLETPROOF we need to ensure we have enough people EVERYWHERE in order to process the millions of orders (and dollars) that WILL happen in 2021.

Don’t be fooled by the number one bit. We even went the extra mile to hire the best business and market consultants, whom all were Rhodes scholars, has guided us in this manner. Even the best minds in the world know what Riverbed has baking for 2021 is going to change the world!!

#RiverbedWorldTakeOver

You won't get a straight answer from the AMA. Difficult questions aren't chosen, and if they are, it will be corporate BS

Good question to ask during the AMA

Most banks require you to work there for 15 years before moving into an MD role. Similar requirements for all titles including an executive director. Banks have a high number of MD’s mainly because the financial system has a ton of moving parts unlike tech companies. So I’d understand if banks had 300 MD’s for a 10-30k workforce because they need it. As for Riverbed, depends on what we are doing in 2021 will justify, at least to me, which this top heavy organization.

Banks use a different management structure that placates to egos. Banks have associates, VP, SVP, managing directors and C-level. Also banks usually employ 10-50x more than riverbed, just justifies the ratio.

The question for @1cy, if the big banks only had 1400 employees world wide, would they employ 8 C levels, 35 Managing Directors and 50 Senior VP to run the company? The answer is simple, it’s “no” plain and simple.

Meaningless stat that has more to do with out of date job classification and salary grading, especially in high cost labor markets. Take a look at the banking industry and you'll see at least one "VP" working at every strip mall office.

I’d imagine IC directors and supervising directors get paid some sweet cash and probably offered some special bonuses that others below do not.

With this many execs, could you imagine their combined comp? Most of these people are clueless fuktards that somehow still have jobs here. Others are new, which I’m sure the brotherhood of mo–ns collective ensured their financial survival by bringing on board to riverbed (salary and parachute packages) all the white we get docked pay and vacation stolen.

With all these execs, have they solved ANY problem? Or come up with anything? Or are they just here to get paid for doing nothing?

Sometimes I think why the execs didn’t do any layoffs is because they needed us “to work” while they just hired their friends in.

How many of those 'directors' are individual contributors, or have 'teams' of one person?

Pointless ego inflation. Riverbed has become a joke

Exactly as it should be per Piter's Principle.
Or more like per Dilbert's Principle.
Nothing new here.

Let’s not forget the additional 5 on the job board.