Sun Microsystems Reviews

Pros

Total flexibility in where you work and how you work, which promotes a strong work and home life balance.

Cons

Too much change and mismanagement. This created a chaotic work environment that ended up eroding the company year after year.

Advice to Senior Management

Know who you are as a company, and focus on what you do well in the market. Too many pet projects can destroy your credibility.

Pros

-Flexible hours
-"Work from Home" program
-Global environment
-Casual dress
-Excellent workforce in the company
-Much respect among co-workers
-Great work-life balance

Cons

-Long work days
-Many meetings
-Constant change in priorities
-Constant re-organizing of the company
-Reduction of Workforce was stressful
-Power plays and much maneuvering by middle management to be better positioned to maintain their jobs prior to Oracle acquisition

Advice to Senior Management

Should not have merged with Oracle

Pros

Fantastic flexibility and truly smart, innovative, and interesting colleagues. A wonderful sense of accomplishment and pride in the company.

Cons

Executive management makes decisions only to change them within months. No continuity in terms of corporate strategy. And a complete lack of fiscal discipline when it matters most.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on the real core competencies of the company and sell off the rest.

Pros

Work culture, transparancy, Technology, benifits

Cons

Growth, Marketing Strategy is poor

Advice to Senior Management

Aggressive in meeting the target reveniew on every quarter, charge for the software, should change from university mind set to professional way of execution.

Pros

Decent Mgmt Team; Fair people; nice colleagues; pleasant office space; generous raises

Cons

Somewhat anonymous due to size of company. Important to play the politics game to a degree - if you are well liked you can move anywhere in the company; if you don't play the game you won't go far

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize individual contributors

Pros

+ People
+ Environment
+ Challenges
+ State of the Art Projects
+ Social Events
+ Benefits

Cons

- Disruptive Management
- Political decision making
- Separate Project inefficiencies not working together
- Inability to affect change
- Lack of innovation
- Promotion process: leave company then return at higher level
- Learn what's happening from The Register not management
- Constant layoffs eroding morale

Advice to Senior Management

Hire an external CEO
Don't exaggerate positive and diminish negative in presentations
More transparency to employees

Pros

Good pay, had free food and drinks, allowed pets in the building,offices were open all the time and had the latest computers.

Cons

Management's idea of the company was flawed, they couldn't have been more wrong about how to restructure the company. They fired all their top execs and started from nothing.

Advice to Senior Management

Please try and get feedback from those in the branch, and also do not fire those who are the smartest in the company.

Pros

Some of the smartest people in the industry work there. It was pretty awesome to walk around the building and see the offices of, say, Solaris kernel developers who'd been working on the system for 20 years.

Cons

Every day at Sun there were fewer people than the day before. There were a lot of "lifers" at Sun. This is both good and bad. On the good side there was lots of institutional experience around me. On the bad side, there were clearly people who were just at Sun because they had been there forever, and their friends had too. And many of these people just didn't work very hard.

Advice to Senior Management

Do a thorough evaluation of how many non-technical people are needed to run projects. There were people on projects whose sole role seemed to be booking meeting rooms.

Pros

Excellent Technology. The best of the best employees. Iowa salaries in the Silicon Valley. A lot of interesting people work there.

Cons

underpays excellence. Management will tell other employees rumors about you. If you work 20 hour days no one in Management will suggest it might hurt you, They wouldn't hire people to help someone I know, but when they left, Sun hired 3 people to replace her. No raise for extreme excellence.

Advice to Senior Management

Develop some human compassion, reward excellence.

Pros

Flexible schedule
Offices - not cubes
Evolving charters meant new opportunities

Cons

Too much autonomy meant duplication of efforts
WFH went too far, loss of camaraderie and effectiveness

Sun doesn't exist anymore and it's a whole new animal under Oracle

Advice to Senior Management

Goodbye