Rob R out and they reinstated 100% of our BCR as opposed to 50%. Seems like there may be a little birdie watching these posts. I believe that TB is done with us, scary to think what changes are coming in the next few months. If RB does pull the trigger on more layoffs so soon, I can’t imagine us not being acquired, completely renamed. I remember years ago I really wanted to work for Riverbed because of its Glassdoor rating. Well, this rating has gone to pot and risks dropping into the 2’s with more changes...you don’t recover from that as a company culture. And you certainly don’t incentivize the people who are staying. Small win RB but let’s get ahead of these rumors and give your employees faith again, you need to flip the conversation and practice the rumble conversation. May I recommend Brene Browns courses! Employees and companies perform best when they trust their organization and their leadership. This! In my opinion this is Riverbed’s biggest problem.
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TB won’t help. They took away any incentive for us to produce value. They just want their money back with zero interest in a healthy company. Riverbed is probably worth more in parts than as a mismanaged second tier company.
For centuries, the common folk have protested against leadership, only to become corrupt themselves when they get the seat. Time to escalate this to TB instead.
Old leadership already made their money during the internet boom. If they didn’t, then that’s their fault for not “walking into money”.
I agree, the aging leadership has got to go, there are others that can do their jobs in their sleep and be better at it - hence the fear and cronyism that exists.
We have mortgage too
Need to let go aging VP’s and directors - they’re a detriment to business. They’re busy trying to figure out how to be relevant vs working on actual problems.
Execs only get invited to deals that are ready to close or needs minimal fixing. This is just to boost their egos and to show people how much of a deal saver they are - but they're not. Get rid of old trash bag upper middle management so we can have a properly running org so execs can have more international trips on our backs.
I sure do hope they can manage to trick someone.
Execs are roaming around in apac emea. This road trip should bring in some $. Hope they are being frugal for hotels food drinks.
They went to the same place the promising Q1 pipe went. Vapor
There were 2 promising q2 pipes. Did they get censored?
Wow long thread. Common themes bringing teams closer. Where is RobR joining? Any sr dir openings?
How is q2 pipeline looking? As good as q1?
Don’t leave, it is a mean world out there. Riverbed gives me comfort of the known.
That’s just advice in general. Not saying riverbed is actually going out of business or will not give fair severances. But also not saying they will give fair severances. Evaluate how much you can risk and act accordingly. You need to look out for you.
That is determined by where you work. Some locations/countries have worker protections in place. Other locations do not. Even then there are often loopholes that companies can exploit to not give you additional money, like bankruptcy.
I would not make any plans that hinge upon getting anything beyond your base salary for time worked.
Is it possible for someone to get laid off (not fired) where severance is optional? The example is re-org'd where the position is no longer needed.
or do you mean re-org’d out to be a strong hint to leave by way of demotion?
Not true. Every layoff is for “business changes”, where the alternative is firing for cause. Bear in mind that what kind of compensation you’ll get is potentially limited by what region you work in.
For those thinking that you’ll get laid off with compensation then you “could” be mistaken. As another poster mentioned, if our VP moves down a rank, placing everyone beneath them one level lower, then you just got re-org’d out. This isn’t a typical layoff scenario due to business changes and your role is no longer needed.
Can someone confirm?
agreed, if you're not a director or above, you're out. everyone knows the VP's are the new director and directors are the new first lines. So goodbye first line managers, even though you folks actually keep this ship running. The knife of Brutus really hurts
I'm gonna guess first line management is next since upper management is already full of BS artists and people faking it to make it
End of Q2 there will be another round of layoffs. This is lottery, everyone gets a chance to win, and the prize is servance package. The supply is limited.
Looks like SE leadership needs shaking up too. IC’s are always good and SE leadership seems to always getaway unscathed.
Individual SEs have been cut. The previous two leaders were apparently forced out. The ones remaining are smart enough not to complain. WAN opt may not be growing but it’s still about half of the company’s business. Once you cut a WAN Opt SE they can never be replaced as no new hire will want to invest their career learning it
Why isn’t the SE org being cut? Looks to me that there’s room for upgrades there. I hear there are a lot of staleness in SE management.
Wasn’t this ML platform something we were doing?
Only people making good money is Sr. Dir and above. Anyone below, below market rate salaries. I doubt the other poster is Sr Dir+ because he/she seems like have some semblance of intellect. Rock star talent at riverbed stays because either they have no where else to go because employers think Riverbed isn’t innovative anymore or they want to see riverbed succeed.
What data does riverbed own that it can analyze? SH is passing through mostly encrypted traffic, and SC is mostly net flow/agents, that can be replicated by any startup (and they are doing it!). I am really curious. I want to learn what a distributed set of nodes can do that has not been attempted elsewhere.
These ML ideas are great ideas. Hope they are also solid from a business angle (i.e. solving a problem that people are willing to pay for). Start your own company if possible, especially if you are young. Rewards are great.
Remaining people are definitely paid well. Class A talent. Not too many complaints on blind-app or glassdoor.
I am curious what keeps the remaining rock star talent at this company. Is it because they are paid well?
Great post @YnnFVuQ-6qe and I know who you are :) For those who don’t know this person, he’s probably one of the smartest persons left at riverbed. It’s just a shame this person hasn’t been promoted to a major influencing role because things would be a lot different around here. Management really needs to start “talking” to people like this person because they’ll soon see that their promotion logic is deeply flawed.
To @YnnFVuQ-6qe .. do what you do to keep things together and all I can hope is people approach you.
I agree, ML isn’t mature yet. The Amazons and Google’s are simply just creating the infrastructure for (true) ML applications, leaving it up to inventors to define (and implement) the use case. I also agree many ML start ups are failing to product a viable product and I suspect it’s because they don’t own the data sources and that’s riverbed’s advantage. The data we own isn’t complex “human” data where NLP/sentiment or image recognition is required, it’s machine data, which is finite in complexity but infinite in storage.
I’ll say it here for people to copy my thoughts - what we need isn’t an ML “box” per se but a set of distributed ML “boxes” that can “talk” to one another. Meaning, let’s not model our ML implementation based on the utopian theory that “everyone should know everything” but model it based on human patterns today - eg, a siloed approach.
The kicker is, riverbed would have to invent some form of an inter-machine grammar that mimicks human/team interactions today. The innovation isn’t the ML portion, it’s the distributed ML portion that scales independently.
Step 1 is to remove sh--ty management in SteelCentral and promote and hire in real thinkers.
That’s ok. Cisco has 75k employees. We are lean mean 2k. We can do with less income. Cisco has to nail it to grow $52B revenue. We just need 2% of Cisco success to gain same $ revenue per employee. What’s the point of hiring $500k engineers if the $100k ones can copy that implementation within one year and win 3% share.
You guys will be loling so hard if you know how we are implementing our ML strategy inside engineering with no intent to hire any ML/AI talent. Compared to AppD whose ML guys are Stanford PhDs , rvbd guys have BIG 0 A-- experience, still asking questions like "How to get Tensorflow installed" trying to re-invent wheels. The problem with AI/ML is ANYONE can do it but bad ones have a negative impact on the business only the top implementations win.
Guess what guarantees a top implementation? Investment and Talent. Guess what we have? NONE!
And I guess SEs will have to endure whatever piece of c-ap engineering come up with for years. It will be SConnect case all over again. Sorry, plain brutal truth. RB is too small to win, too big to change.
Better discussed over tea coffee. There are many companies trying to make sense out of just basic encrypted packets. It is not a proven technology yet. It is not selling in large numbers. Lot of farts, but no sh-- coming out yet.
Data is cheap and easy to get these days. Just look at packets
For ML we need lots of data. I am not sure we have the data. The data today belongs to the customer on their own network. Or let’s move to Cisco ($55), VMware ($190) or ZS ($60). As soon as Riverbed figures it out, we can always come back. Those who think they can fix it should be allowed to stay back.
No we don’t. Even ML is being commoditized by the major cloud platforms. Everyone says they use “ML” now. You need something really brilliant to gain competitive edge here And you need incentive to convince really brilliant talent to work here.
I think SteelCentral needs to focus on building something brand new. The barrier to entry for all SteelCentral products is very low, if not commodity. I like someone’s other post about an ML-based data engine with advanced dashbaording or integrations but do we have the talent for this and can we acquire it?