They just fired 120 people from the Product Org. It is a "ridiculously easy" way to "free up resources to accelerate work on higher-priority efforts."
The Russian roulette started. Now, wait for a few hours for an email from HR.
"For impacted employees, today will be their last of work at F5".
How "HUMAN FIRST"!
The very next day there were 100-ish Tech writer positions posted in Guadalajara and India.
Confirmed! 100+ products engineers were gone as F5 aka Kara (who owns the company now) to focus on new adventure
India team is not impacted because f5 has a hard time filling position in India as is. People has left F5 for a 40% higher pay.
US and EMEA affected but not India... sounds like outsource for cheap labor. The history shows that it never end well
Anyone know if Billerica is still around? Saw a lot of hiring for graduates.
As a follow on to the McKinsey post... But hey... "I have two degrees from MIT", aren't you impressed?
McKinsey’s incredible ability to mold the most arrogant, uncaring, and dishonest people in industry is only surpassed by the fact their protégés consistently make the worst decisions. I’m sure the books will look nice for one more quarter and the investors will be happy with the stock price for one more quarter.
Paying Slalom was a tragic comedy. It was one (now fired) VP's pet project and was d-mb at every level. While I agree F5 could use agile, there was no reason to implement it for the core BIG-IP product as it had a feature set 3-4 years ahead of where it needed to be so adding features faster wasn't going to generate more sales.
A leadership team without big shoes and red noses would've explicitly put the main product in maintenance mode with 30-40% of the staff it had previously and moved the affected staff to new agile initiatives. As the VP in charge was the epitome of a foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds, they pi---d away opex and employee (probably customer as well) goodwill for no reason and put all his faith in an architect who wasn't. Blue was a stupidity as well. Spend ~$130M (my guess) on a project without a real goal run by a power hungry climber who was in way over her head. They fixed that with "fu-k it, let's buy nginx."
Since the hardware chief in Spokane (loved by his staff) and RT (grudgingly respected by everyone) were let go, has there been a boss in development who was worth a damn?
What a clown show. You knew this was coming years ago when they spent all that money paying Agile consultants to tell them how to make the product worse. Bad decisions leading to even worse decisions.
Honestly, I would quit but I feel like they owe me a big severance so I will hang on until my time comes.
You can thank all the McKinsey input, hiring, and subsequent management.
Hate to say this, but glad to have been let go back in May. Able to get a gig, even though it took 5 months. It felt like they weren't done with layoffs. That feeling was sadly correct. If you just got laid off, my heart goes out to you.
This hurts but I'm not surprised. There's lots of solid technology and really smart people, but management is clueless. I was hoping to ride it out until something better but such is the life of a tech drone.
They're betting the company on XC, which is a clusterfu-k. All paid for by the long tail Big-IP install base. I'd be surprised if the company isn't taken over by PE and looted for those fat maintenance subs.
f---ed up 5
How ham-fisted of them...so glad I left when I did...
Be ready other orgs. Your turn will be next.
Because the people impacted would let the cat out of the bag before they could get in front of it.
Su-ks that it has to be this way, but there's no good way to do this.
so the rumors were right......
sigh....
Employees in the US and EMEA are affected; India is not.
Human first is a crock of sh-t... sounds good, they just outsource.. cheaper to replace you
what teams? i hear more notices might go out in the next 1-1.5 hrs... only product so far
There goes half my team. We were already barely treading water, jesus fu--ing christ.
Or they could just reallocate resources to those high priority efforts.
Why can't they just send out the notices first and let the rest of company later