Engineering management and the technical talent pool is of abysmal quality. If you are in engineering, you will not learn any good technologies or skill-sets that are transferable outside of Gigamon. The technology stack is extremely outdated, old, and boring. Even older bureaucratic companies like HP, Cisco, Juniper, IBM, etc., have far more interesting things happening in engineering and better culture that one can learn and at least find beneficial for one's career.
The company thinks it is a hip and hot security player in the market - but in reality is nothing more than a glorified packet broker. The company relies on its legacy solutions and hardware for revenue and is barely scraping through every quarter. It is struggling to grow or make a mark in the industry due to its poor software stack, complex fragmented solutions that are too difficult to deploy, and bad product management/marketing and engineering practices. The executive management and the technical leaders excel at consistently making bad strategic and people related decisions, poorly executing on revenue targets and baking overly complex products that do have much adoption in the market or translate into direct revenue. The company is essentially living in a bubble.
Many employees obviously knew about the problems for a long time but stuck with the company for the money through RSUs and ESPPs. Of course everyone had a massive windfall during the IPO many years ago and the privatization event this year. As expected, once the stocks were liquidated and RSUs dried up, the exodus started and is continuing since there is no more incentive to put up with all the nonsense that has been going on there. Along with individual contributors, many of the managers, C-level execs and VPs have left as well - The CEO is hanging on, The CTO who is useless will mostly stick around until the CEO is there and the remaining exec management are expected to hang in there continuing to drive more people out until they get their golden parachute and retention bonus.
The core of the problem in engineering begins at the root. Senior most management and directors are slave drivers who are untrustworthy and some even foulmouthed. People are pushed so hard yet berated at every opportunity after extracting the results. Cronyism is openly fostered and encouraged at every level and people are unfairly compensated, promoted without merit and discriminated at every level. The people who deliver results are never appreciated and the ones who take no accountability or caused trouble or made bad technical decisions are encouraged and promoted instead. The directors, product managers, and the distinguished engineers blindly enforce their own agenda without buy-in from everyone and make the whole place a political and toxic environment.
The engineering directors are bad people managers and leaders to begin with. Most of them got promoted very quickly two levels up without merit due to them being buddies with the senior management. They lack basic leadership skills like coaching and do not listen. Instead, their leadership style is command and control. Most of them do not hesitate to complain about people behind their backs and constantly intimidate people into delivering projects with unreasonable deadlines. Some even claim undue credit for revenue generating products for the company even though in their tenure all they have delivered are buggy products to the market that were late and/or struggling to get adopted and ended up burning out their teams.
There are insane amount of counter productive release and development processes that are forced down peoples throat and the teams are constantly under high pressure during every release. Except for very few projects where these directors have vested interest in or people they want to protect, almost everyone else gets micromanaged directly or indirectly. Senior management lies to team members that they are empowered to make decisions - but every small decision made is questioned and vetted by ten other people and invariably gets shot down in the end or worse people are blamed or attacked for speaking the truth. The directors themselves never make any decisions and hence they take no responsibility or accountability over anything.
The product management organization lacks focus and executes poorly. There is no accountability and no product or quality ownership by the PM. Product managers do not partner effectively with development and instead argue, blame and berate development teams in the name of negotiation. One line requirements are generated on a whim based on incorrect understanding of the market or a quick request from sales channel and dev teams are pressurized to deliver something with unreasonable time-to-market. The focus is purely on quantity over quality - They are incapable of prioritization and do not understand the concept of engineering cost to deliver something. Due to the child like temperament of the PMs and lack of any support from engineering management, dev teams keep their interactions with the PMs to the absolute minimum and churn out sub-par features release after release and end up suffering.
Finally, the DE org in Gigamon requires a special mention. The DEs withhold information, are insecure, territorial, have huge egos, look down upon others and behave like a know-it-all. Their daily routine is to come to office late, have water cooler gossips, have two-hour coffee breaks, take long walks, play foosball and go back home. Worse many lack basic communication skills - they are incapable of producing good technical documents or talks; they also avoid participating in technical meetings since they are incapable of holding productive conversations as well. These DEs literally have not produced a single useful thing in the past several years - not a single code library, idea, infrastructure/architectural improvement or any sort of technical content. Most of them mainly survive here due to executive management's protection - stupid ideas like building Gigamon labs or using crowdsourcing for development have been shamelessly promoted as innovative ideas by management without realizing that these folks have become a laughing stock in the organization. The money spent on their salaries and bonuses should have been redistributed to other deserving engineers since these folks have added zero value to the company.
Gigamon has so many problems that have gotten bigger over the years and have become unfixable due to its poor technical leaders and senior management. It is a ship that is sailing with no opportunity for growth. Joining Gigamon now or continuing to stay here is not a very sound decision for one's career. Most of the remaining good folks are looking to abandon ship as soon as they can.
