Sun Microsystems Reviews

Pros

Sun's commitment to research and development, and the freedom and encouragement provided to employees to explore new avenues and develop ideas was why I loved working there.

Cons

Clearly, the company didn't manage it's intellectual capital very well. It failed to monetize on many technologies, and may well have been one of the worst companies at marketing it's value.

Advice to Senior Management

I don't know that this is particularly constructive given that Sun is now part of Oracle, and I don't know what advice I would give to Oracle management other than to take care to recognize the talent and technologies you've acquired. I have no doubt they'll do a better job of monetizing them.

Pros

The best part of working at Sun was how much respect and support they had for their employees. Great benefits, ability to telecommute is key, great vacation policy. Smart and committed team members for the most part.

Cons

Slow moving like any other large corporation, can be frustrating.

Advice to Senior Management

Finding a way to move projects fast enough without loosing quality.

Pros

Innovation, fantastic technology, flexible work conditions (can work from home pretty much at any time), great place for engineers, good salary, open to wide variety of educational backgrounds, lax culture, great intelligence.

Cons

Flexible work environment made it very hard to get essential face to face interaction which leads to growth, too engineering focused meant not enough business guys around that were needed to save the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Too many of you were kicking back when Sun was going under...in bad times, you should be more focused not less.

Pros

Lot of talented people to work with, opportunity to work in multiple projects, cross-functional teams, exciting technologies to learn, flexible work hours, working from home, drop-in center in san francisco.

Cons

Process-oriented, bureaucratic, politics, hard to get promotions

Advice to Senior Management

it doesnt matter.. Sun is set now..

Pros

Great work atmosphere
Laid-Back attitude and dresscode

Cons

A mess of information systems
Almost impossible to get details of technologies
Intranet is almost unnavigable

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate changes to policies and departmental structures if you want to avoid your employees loosing focus on actual work. Stop with the nonsensical cliches about how "great the momentum" is, when it isn't.

Pros

Sun can allow you to make a market and it was always possible to meet with senior people at customers due to their historical prestige. Well funded marketing programs also meant a decent amount of traction could be generated.

Cons

A victim of making their biggest strength their biggest weakness. A company whose "volume" partner and marketing strategy could have been written by children. A shame when such good products were ultimately let down my religious do's and don'ts instead of hard market facts.

Advice to Senior Management

They sold when they could. Four more quarters and they would have had to file for chapter 11. Probably have had the worst collection of strategic decisions in the history of IT. How the mighty have fallen.

Pros

Innovation, cool technology, opportunities to grow, great working environment, provides a good challenge for the engineer looking to expand their skill set. Typical tech vendor experience.

Cons

Poor choices by management, loss of direction and unclear intentions. Sale of the company to Oracle, which is in the process of eating the remaining young. There is a state of fear among all the legacy Sun employees, no one is willing to stand up and voice an honest opinion for fear of loosing their job, which sadly is already gone. Oracle has no idea what to do with what they've purchased.

Advice to Senior Management

Find the jewel that was Sun and nurture what's left. It will return profits to you as well as innovate in areas that were never consider. Sadly... the brain drain has already happened and what's left is middle management, covering their tracks and hoping to eek out a few more weeks of pay before the axe falls. No one has any balls.

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

good life work balance, relatively good benefits, ok atmosphere. The finance department is best of class, with highly professional individuals.

Cons

headless leadership, poor execution, not in touch with customer expectations. Good products but poor go to market strategy, Failed acquisitions

Advice to Senior Management

The only good thing management did at the end is to sell the company not only to the highest bidder but to the one that could generate value.

Pros

Entrepreneurial spirit, employee-centric HR policies, really smart, creative and caring people. Great technology.

Cons

Poor to just plain bad corporate strategy that spread the corporation too thin. Middle and senior management that didn't focus enough on business results and executed poorly on what it did focus on.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut down your ambitions. Focus on the Enterprise market. Abandon your open-source strategy.