Appearance is more important than doing - Engineer NetApp Employee Review

Managers told employees that you need to physically attend all meetings in our functional group, not by con-call because upper management used physical attendance as a primary indicator of your value. So you learned that appearances were more important than doing real work. Upper management even told our group, that every employee in Sunnyvale has the "opportunity" to attend the quarterly All Hands meetings in person - really? Either have coffee and cake, while listening to the latest spin on bad numbers, or emailing the CM to get information on the root cause of this week's failures. I choose emailing, and I got laid off - although, I survived for 10 years. All of management were "yes" people, as other independent thinking managers quit or were laid off during the prior layoffs. Recent layoffs were to "change NetApp culture and processes", but the same processes haven't changed, and the towers between Engineering and Operations are still as separate as different companies.