…so many total a$$ whole s? Serious question. I’m friends with many in other companies without this problem.
12 replies (most recent on top)
Only the best and brightest work here..
@4mwp - What is a "high risk" program? What I saw in this last years crushing layoffs were the protection of SRG and ATD. Someone needs to explain to me why they remained relatively intact with their useless (and ZERO return) pet projects while groups working directly on HAMR integration lost 25% of their skilled staff. Now here is the real punchline, some of these groups are allowed to hire new-grad replacements to back-fill those critical positions. Guess Moseley has no problem sleeping at night while more 50+ yr olds got put out onto the street. Just another reason to hate this company and bide my time to retirement. Oh well, guess we can vent about it on our latest mini-survey.
I thank you for the replies as the original poster. I never hear from friends elsewhere having the experience I’ve had here. I feel like I better be perfect and support the current narrative or some a-whole will quickly jump in to pulverize me to dust.
So that's the other part of it. Sure HDD volumes are shrinking 10% a year for the last decade, and sure, Flash will dent HDD sales a bit over the next decade. But what that means is what I said about executives turning inward against each other to squabble and back stab each other for the scraps left over. If you're on a sinking ship, you're not trying to keep the ship from sinking, you're just trying to keep a life boat for yourself and be the last one to leave. For the masses, they just want to make sure they're working on The Most Important Project so they don't get laid off when downturns happen. This means either su-king up to your boss, and/or working on HAMR or other "protected" core technology projects. Certainly don't be working on a "high risk" program.
Question is will the company survive despite of it
What u said is mostly true except the part where there is no existential threat. Flash has been closing in fast and furious, and end consumers' shift to mobile phones and tablets cuts HDD demand by so much.
Instead of being in 5 or 6 market segwments, there is only one real Cloud left for HDD and even that is being eroded away as flash gets cheaper.
And right, customers won't risk being single source. That's a double edge sword for our Hamr drives no matter what BS tries to tell us.
Sure , the company will be around in 10 yrs but at what scale and how many of us would still be reading this page?
I've seen this time after time. This my sixth gig but first at a HDD company.
First, you have a company with no realistic existential threat. Seagate won't go out of business - customers cannot afford to be single sourced.
Second, you have an industry that basically has not changed what they do for 50 years (although some have tried) so tribal knowledge is essential.
And third, you have very little cross-pollination from other industries. I mean, if you're a FW or ASIC engineer why would you work at a HDD company instead of NVidia, Broadcom, etc?
When you combine all three of these, you get a culture that turns inward on itself as executives just strive to carve out a bigger piece of the pie for themselves instead of focusing on customers, new markets, innovation, etc. And any time you bring in people to try to do that, the larger part of the company's antibodies reject them. It requires courage, leadership, and an internal desire to break this cycle, and guess what - Heavy D ain't it.
There is undeniable tribalism as well. We'll leave it at that.
Hahah..Finally you realized. I have experienced the same thing many times over and over again.
decades of cronyism
from experience, the consolidation of this industry during the '90s and early 2000s consolidated survivors into what are now two domestic hdd companies, meaning many have been in this industry their entire careers and many possess an insular mindset
They get promoted to mgmt positions where they have each others back. Come layoff time, the cabal has no problem jettisoning experienced good engineers while protecting their own jobs and hanging onto brown nosers. Eventually that is all you have left, ash-oles and brown nosers.