Sun Microsystems – “Sad to See the Sun Setting”

Pros

Sun was a fabulous place to work because it was full of smart, experienced, dedicated people. The culture in the trenches was respectful and professional with a good sense of team. Projects were challenging and encouraged thoughtful innovation. The pay and benefits were good, and the facilities were pleasant.

Cons

Unfortunately the Sun is setting on this once proud Silicon Valley success story, and it is increasingly less of a place to work at all, let alone a good place. I'm sure books will be written with 20:20 hindsight about what went wrong, how Management failed us all. In my view from the trenches of a would-be commodity product line, the company was too engineering driven. Innovative and clever, yes, but truly customer/market-focused? No. Sun has the well deserved reputation for creating spectacular technology, years ahead of the pop-computing market. However, Sun also deserved its reputation that, while you could do amazing things with their software, you had to hire a Ph.D. to administer email. There was not a serious enough attempt to shield the user from the complexity. At times I felt that developers took pride in the complexity and were, perhaps subconsciously, contemptuous of the user who was not able to appreciate (or not interested in appreciating) the technical intricacies of their solutions. Our market wanted plug/play/throw-away, but we were still serving up install/configure/administer/fix.

Advice to Senior Management

I guess at this point, start writing those books about what went wrong, learn the lessons, and move on.