F5 Reviews

F5 Networks is probably a great company, the Network Support Engineer (NSE) job is just simply bad (a nightmare) as probably every support role in the company. Communication / Team spirit: No communication between NSEs, you are just coming and doing your job from 9 to 6. Your only friend is your phone and at some point you start hating it. You are assigned to a POD but there is no team spirit, your only role is to take cases and calls all day long. Workload: Handling more than 15+ cases is simply not possible, you can't focus or solve an issue without being constantly disturbed. The job is more about communication than true engineering (you are not here to think). Career perspective: Only stats matter. Your performance is based on statistics and surveys. Management does not care about the content of the cases or the time you spent due to the complexity of a problem. Personal development: You wake up every morning knowing that you will spend the whole day on the phone with "Engineers" from all over the world that do not understand anything about Networking/System Administration. You can easily be stuck during 8 hours on the phone. If you expect an engineering and interesting position, run away!

Company over-focuses now on HR matters (program after program after program) and appears to have lost it's laser focus on a clear technical mission. They spend far too much time talking about people programs and rarely talk about deep technology futures. We are a technology company that has become caught up in the West Coast Nice HR wave. Of course, people are important - we are what makes F5 great. But when every HQ message, company meeting and investor analyst meeting starts with 15 minutes of love-in about our Human First culture, or our BeF5 values, I really think it is turning off a large segment of the company employees and probably shareholders too. We all GET IT. We care about our people, as we rightly should. Now, let's turn to what technology is going to make us great again. The D&I agenda at F5 has gone off the charts. Yes, it is an important agenda and needs to be addressed, but it is as if the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. It took decades to get to where we are. Trying to fix it overnight isn't the answer. There is a large part of F5 who feel they can forget about promotion chances if they are a while male. I am all for affirmative action on a level playing field. But I really am starting to question if the playing field is level at all. The technology vision has become too wide. By trying to be in front of every app, anywhere, we are late in our release schedule or of poor quality to just about any app, everywhere. Insufficient investment is going into legacy maintenance while big bucks are being thrown at the $1.7B of investment made in two companies that will take years to show any real incremental value to the company bottom line. Elliot Capital has taken a stake in the company, I am guessing, for this very reason.