Ixia reviews

Missing work life balance most of the time. Poor leadership and strategy.

When there is work to be done, which is most of the time, people are expected to do unpaid overtime and even work weekends. This stems mostly from unrealistic expectations and poor planning, as some projects failed targets from week one, but management can't (or rather, won't) adjust targets. For a software engineer, work is generally bug fixing, with the occasional new feature needing to be implemented as designed (poorly) by a committee. The overall system architecture is mostly undocumented, with knowledge concentrated in a few key people. This also makes debugging frustrating, as sometimes days of debugging reveal that the problem is someone else's responsability. Equipment is scarce and engineers are often pressed by unrealistic time frames before someone else needs the particular setup. Globally, there has been much change lately, with the acquisition of at least three companies in the past two and a half years. Each time higher ups makes speeches, talks about change, but at the lower levels that only means reshuffling of managers and slight panic as some people get kicked out. Finally, there are a few bullies who are known to most engineers. They have a good reputation with management and leverage it to push decisions which are not always correct, while diverting failed results on other teams.