Agree with the posters about AC, PS & PJ. AC was the real technical vision behind the OPNT's $1B ceiling. And, though I hate saying it, MC was the business and money vision, and the whip who drove OPNT's slave machine. Also agree that PS was nicer to his "underlings" - but thats the key word. You had to declare yourself as an underling and get you nose all nice 'n brown. But if you did, he would invite you to his annual new year sub-party.... Jeez what a sweatshop it was.
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Talking about suck ups: Cary office hosted anniversary event yearly. AC, PS, YG would drive down. There would be games for only these 3 ppl and all the other poor employees watched the rich highly paid upper management have fun, and by watching them, the Cary employees filled their heart with joy and felt blessed! Easy guess as to who in Cary was responsible for that decision!
now that PS is gone who is going to throw the party and send out the invitations? can I get an invite?
Man I missed the time when SPG was OPNET's flagship product. Small but happy and full of smart people who knows what they were doing and could sell it. Granted that market is small but enough to feed us all. Sadly it all ended when the last group photo of MODEV was taken in OPNETWORK.
Please do not use personal names, the admins will nuke the whole thread
This is not about party invitations!!!!! The point is PS was AC's lapdog. PS is a fairly competent engineer, I'll grant him that. But the whole OPNT culture was first - a daisy chain of suck ups, and second - a sweatshop.
Don't know about PJ but why the hate on PS? He seemed to be the nicest manager and treated his people well. If it is all over some party invitations that seems really petty. Are people really that angered by that?
Nice try PJ - still trying to take credit for other people's work and pointing fingers elsewhere? Why don't you follow Pradeep's lead and bow out? At least that was a honorable move. You made your millions already so why are you still around? Selfish prick!
Amazing amount of vitriol here against people other than RB. Guess anonymity will allow that. For the people talking about how great ACE Live was and can sell itself, if it didn't need any help from the OPNET team who are supposedly bizarre and clueless, why was OPNET able to acquire Network Physics for a song in the first place? It certainly was built into a terrific product, but it probably wasn't just the Santa Clara team by themselves who did that (although the vast majority of them are really good)....
Want to point fingers, plenty of blame to go around in downtown SF and MA when talking about cluelessness...
ex-Santa Clara engineer here. Can confirm PJ sucks. All the engineering leads here hate him to some degree. PJ's just a poor imitation of Alain, another first class first rate assh0le.
Opnet was just a strange brew of cluelessness, inflated egos, and bizarre behavior. Everything we did just feels shady and not quite right. From the way product decisions are made to how our performance was reviewed, nothing made sense and everything seemed so arbitrary, strange, and illogical.
Alain is just a manipulative, highly insecure, twisted little man. He seemed to love to have his d1ck sucked and his a5s licked, as there were brown nosers everywhere. Alain is strangely bizarre in a Bruce Jenner sort of way.
While I do wish those who are staying the best of luck, you should really consider other options if you can. Opnet was messed up to begin with and it still seems to be the case.
looks like this forum is sort of moderated...
PJ sucks. i left a while ago... he was one of the reasons. I don't think many people respect him, they just put up with his nonsense because they have to. the guy is more politician than engineer. If PJ works for you, he'll attend every meeting, answer every question, and brown nose with the best of them.
if you work for PJ, he'll skip most meetings, and generally ignore you. When he's not ignoring you he is a condescending prick and talks to you like you're an idiot. Very unprofessional guy.
His ideas aren't even good ones. If he weren't a manager, he would just be a mediocre developer. he's got legitimate ADD, and just pushes everyone to hack his crappy thoughts together that often aren't very useful and then we have to support it. The only reason he's still there is because he was lucky enough to be handed ACE Live -- the only product that sells itself. Santa Clara had the real talent, PJ just got placed above them by Alain and then took all the credit.
Pradeep was fine, Yev was fine, Alain was fine, PJ sucked. Now it sounds like he's the only one of them left. Does not bode well for Riverbed.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA stupid to let Pradeep go but keep PJ. YOU KEPT THE WRONG P JERRY! Good luck my ex-coworkers, your going to need it!!!! btw I tought Cohen brothers worst management ever but this tops that!!!
R u kidding? PJ is the worst manager ever! He drove Yev away and destroyed what was left of opnet with his incompetence and political games. I'm no longer there as it is a clusterfuck but for my friends who are left I am glad PJ is gone!!
you are entirely clueless, pradeep and yeb were both ALAIN's LAPDOGS! but PJ had a clue and singlehandedly keeped OPNT relevant. pradeep and yeb just did alain's biddings and did whatever crazy whims. PJ had the strong vision and will to drive the team and create great products. pradeep is a political beast who ousted PJ from management role which signal the downfall for me while yeb just want to run back to alain and be his bitch. PJ is only one who sees product trends and has the guts to stop development midstream and change course. he did this multiple times guiding us towards the future while pradeep toils on that crappy legacy product suite the market no longer wants or needs. PJ management style may be harsh and not always professional but mostly it is because some of the engineers are weak and cannot take direction from an intense personality. all you pradeep lovers are full of it!
No sane engineer who has any self worth would want to work for that egotisical bastard PJ. You'll love PJ's "style" if you want to be treated as a slave, with no clue where your product is headed and no clue what you are supposed to be working on or why. If you love a schizophrenic person barking out random orders out of the blue and changing your product direction based on some new random fad, PJ's your guy. Contrary to the BS AC spewed, PJ isn't even a good engineer. Just ask the people who had to fix and maintain his garbage output. AC dodged a bullet when he sold this thing to Riverbed. It was a piece of sh*t then and the profitability was clearly on the way down. I hate to admit it but AC and MC were the smart ones who conned all of us and then conned Jerry and made out like bandits.
I agree that PS probably angered folks who were not invited to his annual "close knit" parties. I worked under PS and I secretly longed to work under PJ after seeing his style. I think had I the chance to work under PJ, I would have soared. Under PS, I literally worked 10% of my true capacity and still got raving reviews. It was a joke. Some of the manual and repetitive work could easily be done using scripts which very few people under PS had a clue about. It was a sweatshop in the truest sense. Also, AC was the founder of the damn company! Anyone criticizing him here need to be real. AC was smart, sold it at the right time, cashed out and seems to be pursuing the 21st century business models. PS and his group is stuck in the 1990s products that came out of AC's bachelors thesis.
Let's be honest here. Aside from being good engineers, both PS and PJ are very political and sucked Alain's d$ck to get where they were. And PS was really obvious about it too, probably because it is more acceptable in his culture. That said, PS did care about his underlings and seemed like a better man than PJ who is all for himself, so I wish PS good luck. He can probably just chill at this point and doesn't have to work any more.