Ixia Software Engineer reviews

The company is striving to recover from a serious downfall, which translates into a dishonest CEO resigning, and multiple people losing their jobs due to the greed and lack of long term vision of the management. Company culture is severely lackluster. Nobody actually believes in the preached values, and this is coming from the top level. I don't think that if you randomly pick ten people they will name correctly at least three core values. Due to the way that we traditionally know how to do our business, the company is Product Management driven, rather than Developer driven. If you are a developer and have good ideas, there is a good chance that you will be completely ignored. This leads to the "Yes-Man" syndrome, as it can often be observed in Ixia. Archaically internal processes, that probably made sense back then when this company was a start-up, but don't make any sense right now. You will likely stagnate after 1-2 years, stuck in tedious bug fixing, or generally repetitive tasks. There is little, to no innovation in the company, which generally translates to acquiring smaller companies, and integrating their products into our portfolio. Work life balance is inclined towards work. Management will set unrealistic goals, without any vision of planning, and people will be expected to work out of their minds to meet the targets. Rewards are rarely of the same amount as the work done, and of course it's your fault if you don't meet the targets. Some managers are the worst kind of people you will ever meet. They will verbally humiliate you, and make you feel unimportant, as take joy from it. They will even go far as to make you lie to other people in technical matters, so that you can shift the blame from them to other teams.

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.