Sun Microsystems Reviews in Boston, MA Area

Pros

Very good work and life balance.

Cons

You can be working silo for years

Advice to Senior Management

try and make some money from inventions.

Pros

Great place for innovation. Technology leader, leads in making revolutionary microprocessors. Good people to work with and allows good balance between work and life.

Cons

Need to figure out your own career path, take full responsibility for your own growth and learning curve. Engineering gets academic sometimes.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to execute on projects and get products to market when they are still relevant, and manage costs a lot more efficiently.

Pros

Sun has talented people and good technology. Employees are treated as professionals, and there is also good work from home policy.

Cons

After so many years of losing money there were layoffs at least annually and morale was getting pretty low. There were endless reorganizations.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management could not seem to come up with a way to profit from our high quality technology. Needed better marketing to drive engineering to produce products that could actually be sold.

Pros

- really interesting work - I was on on several great projects
- ability to grow professionally
- ability to engage with people throughout the company
- flexible work schedule / work at home
- lots of vacation time

Cons

In recent times, Sun lost direction. It was unclear where the company focus was. Big projects kept getting cancelled.

With some of my recent work, I had little management support or encouragement - proposals I made were met with skepticism, and with no help in how to improve what I'd done.

Advice to Senior Management

find the right small set of niches this company can do best and stick to that
(too late now)

Pros

Excellent employer. Good benefits compared to other IT companies. A lot of day offs, unlimited number of sick days. Flexible work hours. Warm atmosphere.

Cons

No bonuses. Poor salary increases. Failing business, and too many product lines. Lay off after lay off. Messed up internal search. (on internal network)

Advice to Senior Management

* Reduce bureaucracy, by removing steps needed to integrate code into products.
* Improve bonuses
* reduce number of products

Pros

good salary, boston area, good coworkers. Co-workers are very knowledgable and helpful. We work as a team most of the time.

Cons

long hours, multi tasking most of the time, should provide more training classes. Commute to Boston is very time consuming

Advice to Senior Management

Management should listen to employees, I think creativity is very important and Java is a great success in Sun microsystem

Pros

Very good benefits. Working from home is fully supported by management which is a great perk of working @ Sun. Not sure what happens to these benefits & perks once the Oracle acquisition takes place.

Cons

Over the years the numerous RIF actions have really put a strain on morale. Executive Mgt. expects one person to do the work previoulsy performed by three or more. Sixteen, seventeen hour days are the norm.

Advice to Senior Management

If you wanted to be viewed as being a Tier 1 x86 server vendor you needed to invest ($$) in human resources to deliver. You were blind to think we could compete with the likes of IBM, HP & (yes, even) DELL without treating x86 on par with SPARC. Solaris & SPARC still rule at this company.

Pros

Professional environment
Organized and structured workplace
Proud of product quality and employee moral
Decent benefits

Cons

Disorganized review process
Low profits lately....low raises
Non-performing stock.....options worth little

Advice to Senior Management

Focus more on fewer markets and products.
Don't try to be everything to everyone

Pros

Enjoyable people to work with. Good work from home policy. Flex hours. Interesting software projects.

Cons

Little opportunity to move jobs within company. No current eduction on current software technologies for employees. Upper management rarely visited corporate sites outside CA. Management heavy.

Advice to Senior Management

Company was too management heavy.

Pros

Very smart people and engineering driven company - Good. Fantastic compensation for interns and really cares about what interns want. Everyone is very helpful and friendly.

Cons

Burlington MA is a rather boring place. Employees don't have a lot of pride in using Sun Microsystems technologies. No viable plan for marketing products. Need business model such that there are profits and ensure its existence.

Advice to Senior Management

Get a viable business plan to market research products and make some money. Company needs more marketing and promotion to translate research into profit.