Great company heading the wrong way...but not too late - Anonymous employee F5 Employee Review

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.