With the peanuts netapp pays, who can afford to live close to office ? With RTO you will just lose young talent and not the ones you are aiming . Don't forget about the burn out due to commute. This is just d-mb.
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@1wv Not to mention the bad attempt at a Joke to bring employees back 6 or 7 days. So glad the execs find the RTO so amusing.
I literally laughed out loud when GK said the responses for returning to the office were positive.
Hats off to those brave enough to rage in the All hands chat under their actual names. It won't move the needle, I don't think, because the executives never listen, but I salute you.
Don’t forget all the SVPs in Seattle that don’t have an office they have to badge in to.
Do the minimum. Don't go in.
They can't PIP everyone.
@xv Do you think any of us here want to lose our bonus or cause dissent? Leadership is making objectively bad decisions that directly impact work life balance in a purely negative way. What other options do we have? Leave? Easier said than done. Besides that's what Leadership really wants. They're trying to get individuals to leave on their own term with no severance or benefits payout.
This is a game of chicken. And it's one that leadership has severely miscalculated. I'd like to see the executive team lead a company that's been stripped of it's own expertise by draconic return to office mandates. I'll gladly take being managed out over the next year or so and happily forgo any chance at promotion or bonus over voluntarily quitting or bending the knee to this draconic mandate. And with the last of the boomer generation entering retirement within the next 10 years, who will be left to carry on the torch when NetApp inevitably chases their younger employees away?
The board needs to change this and realize that remote work is never going away. The only thing this will result in is a dissatisfied workforce that seeks other roles or has reduced productivity. The ironic thing is that offering a truly remote option would make NetApp stand out amidst a multitude of hybrid or in-office roles. It's baffling to see how out of touch these people are.
Who the he-l would be motivated if there's a threat of layoffs every month. If your stack ranked against everybody and it's super arbitrary because the percentages are set in stone and forced. If you were actually hired on as a remote employee and threatened every year with the removal of that status. If not meeting some arbitrary in office metrics when you're nearest office has nobody you work with on The daily there means 0% raise and a bonus that you earned taken away. And every year some other benefit gets randomly removed. Who on Earth would be motivated to work hard? You could work the hardest out of everybody and still randomly be let go. Better to be let go after not working hard at all. That way you at least earned.
@xv management shill detected
@cc Only because they can't find ways to motivate. Employee's are equally accountable to get the work done and be motivated. The performance review recently implemented is not helping the situation. There is little to no innovation and the company is running on momentum, that is being eroded by the competitors. They are using the RTO to reduce the work force in the USA. If they could go to China they would, so India is the next cheapest place.
@xv George why are you posting here? Don't you have a company to run?
@n5 Go for it. Don't go in. Your teammates are cheering for you. First quarter missing the mark, you get docked 25% on merit, ICP. Miss it again and you get 0% merit, ICP nor promotion, and likely added to the NI list.
@fx with regards to the survey, they do try to understand who wrote what. I know this for an absolute fact and it is discussed at cstaff level +1. The smartest thing you can do is not fill it out. It sends a powerful message. If you ever had the feeling they knew what you wrote in your anonymous survey? They did.
I say the sick should come in and purposefully cough around the executive offices and conference rooms.
@wa You can be out for being sick but you better find a way to make your appearance days! Not to mention heaven forbid you have a sick kid. Force them into daycare (because you have to meet your facetime and badge rate mandate) getting everyone sick and then probably spreading it at the office too.
Colds, viruses, and COVID also run rampant when employees are held to an absolute standard for coming into the office. Pre pandemic, I’d work from home the whole week of being sick. Both for myself and the benefit of my coworkers. Now, I come in so I don’t get behind on days.
@qy The open concept is a bad business school experiment. You would think that folks would strike it down just due to the whole fact colds, viruses, COVID run rampant in a close proximity environment. I like you did not mind at all working in the cubes where you had some privacy and could concentrate. Once that was gone the office became an absolutely awful place to actually work and focus.
@qy Yes. Once the cubes in RTP were torn down I had to start working from home because I could not get any work done. For every meeting I had to drag my laptop into a small room so that I could hear the conversation and not interrupt others. And, I was then stuck working off a tiny screen vs. a larger screen if I needed to reference something during the meeting. We used to have cubes with sliding doors for when we needed to be on a call or not interrupted. It was a good environment with co-workers to interact with in between sales calls but that all blew apart when NetApp moved to the open floor plans.
I work out of RTP. There are still entire sections of some floors that are completely open--i.e., no desks, nothing. Just network spaghetti coming out of the walls. WPX needs to get on the ball if they think there is room for all these hybrid employees coming in more frequently. Q1 ain't that far away!
Look, I get it. I knew in the back of my mind that we would eventually go back in. But increasing the once-a-quarter cadence (which I always exceeded anyway) for Hybrid to 39 times a quarter is just silly. Ease into it. Say once a week or something. That's a huge disruption that, I guess according to others, just do not matter to the company.
If we are going back to pre-Covid ways, put the cubes back up and give us our pre-Covid layouts. Let me shut my cube door so I can get some work done. The times I do go in now I try and make it on days where I am less likely to run into a ton of people. It's not because I am anti-social, but because I have actual work that needs to get done. They may not care about the nearly two hours extra I have to spend on the road now EVERY day I go in, but maybe they care about the loss of productivity because I have no privacy.
I think being 100% WFH set a high standard of productivity for me. Being asked to fit 4+ hours of driving per week and balance the cross-geo nature of my role challenges that.
I’m just going to need to get less done.
I can sometimes benefit from in person collaboration, but that’s not true 100% of the time for most IC roles. Many of us have long periods of heads-down production work that are harmed by the overhead of driving in, reserving meeting rooms, and handling office distractions.
@n5 Based
It's obvious NetApp Leadership doesn't give a sh-t if you live or die. Remote work is a life-changing, real benefit to so many of us. To rip this away without any real data is a huge fu-k you to their employees.
These so called leaders would sla-ghter their own workforce full of lifelong storage experts if it meant raising the stock price by a few basis points before they need to dump their stock units. Just look at how they stole PTO hours while rolling out Thrive Together! Leadership is no longer operating in good faith. Employees who can should artificially reduce their output and refuse to go in.
Do the minimum. Don't go in.
They can't PIP everyone.
@cc Let’s hope you’re a fantastic in-office worker who truly adds value. Don’t just be another coffee machine gremlin from the past. Even before Covid, NetApp was renowned for its open workplace approach. Managers were empowered to find the right balance for their teams based solely on results. Daily clocking in and out and simply doing basic tasks is fine in a factory but doesn’t suit companies like NetApp, AWS and so on. The current RTO approach to a team of mostly top talent in highly specialised high-value roles is either a recognition that our jobs are meaningless (okay, why not?) or that the company has finally missed the transformation curve. I can’t believe it’s the latter, as far as I know the people dedicated to NetApp and its enviable culture. Becoming just another hardware vendor offering average perks isn’t the right way to attract the best of the best.
And they have the nerve to send out a survey. We all know responding to it doesn't move the needle at all.
The ironic thing is that most of the company teams operate remote from one another. There are pockets of teams co located but for the most part folks are distributed. Also good luck when that ki-ler lease deal on the SJC office runs out. If i remember correctly it was a 7 year deal in 2021 due to Splunk contracting space.
GK has come to the conclusion that we can’t innovate much on top of
Ontap. Slowly pure storage will eat away at our potential customer base and finally take our existing base.
GK knows this. His long term plan is to lower costs (hire mostly in india, cut pto, silent layoffs) while slowing the bleed as much as possible.
@cc The mettle of remote work has already been proven during the COVID era. RTO is just another version of soft layoffs and to provide HR reasons for leadership to steal your bonus and withhold promotions.
NetApp used to be top of the line when it came to work culture and work-life balance. But the fact leadership refuses to truly embrace remote work broadcasts to everyone at the company that their leadership is stuck in the past and don't care about them. Instead they only care about lining their own pockets and making their friends rich.
Leadership could offer RTO as a selectable benefit, but then they would have to justify costly real estate when every young worker chooses remote. Instead they're being dictators. This will lead to terrible things and senior and junior talent will flee. Truly sad to see the state of this place and where it's heading.
People have been commuting for 100 years. Only a handful of companies allow WFH. Good luck finding one. End of the road for most to avoid the office for a reason