I feel bad for all of the folks laid off this week. I worked at NetApp for 10 years and left about 3 years ago. The reason I left was because I could see the writing on the wall. NetApp is a storage vendor. Storage is a commodity product. I don't care if you put shiny wings and a fancy slide whistle on it, at the end of the day it is still a commodity product. That means people will only pay a set price for it. That means NetApp needed to either really embrace being integrated into full solutions through strong partnerships or get acquired. They have never been great at partnering (Flexpod, ugh). And their tech isn't worth the acquisition investment. That means they will continue to hobble as a niche storage provider. Understand that this means you will continue to see churn and little room for career progression. If you can accept that, then stay. If not, move on. Don't hold on to some culture BS. You are a number not an asset.
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In your rebuttal of storage not being a commodity you didn't mention storage once beyond the first sentence. Yes Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, HCI, and other technologies are needed and worth investment but the underlying storage of those solutions is a commodity. No one is paying a premium for fancy new features on a FAS or VNX, or Pure storage device. They need a full solution. and want all of the pieces to work together. This is not NetApp's strong suit unfortunately. They have done a terrible job partnering effectively. Yes NetApp's cloud division may be doing well against itself. But what about against industry. Not so much.
Totally disagree with your perception that storage is commodity. That’s a legacy belief and one that is causing great pain in customer enterprises , especially those over reliant on VMWare and even more especially those seeking a hybrid cloud solution that protects and helps them move data workloads flexibly and fluidly. NetApp is the only company I know that acknowledges many customers need for VMWare but allows them to deploy it less expensively and without locking into VMWARE technologies.
I stopped reading after ‘left about 3 years ago’
You haven’t moved on?
Are you suggesting that NetApp's problems ("slow execution") are the engineers' fault? I suggest that it's not, but that NetApp needs to get rid of some directors & senior directors (& possibly more managers) who are a huge part of the problem.
And no, this is not coming from an engineer. They shouldn't be blamed problems that are systemic problems at NetApp.
On-Prem storage business is getting impacted, though it is a large footprint and will not disappear. Cloud has dramatic growth which definitely takes away from growth of On-Prem business.
IMHO NetApp has the best Cloud story out of all Storage Vendors. Execution is the key ..... which has been slow.... That is what NetApp needs to fix.