Sun Microsystems Reviews

Pros

exposure to technology
opportunities to become indepth specialist in areas that you choose
breadth of different organizations to work in

Cons

retrenchments hanging over your heads
cynicism rife

Advice to Senior Management

be clear in your communication. empathize - there's too much going on around us. Having the threat of losing our jobs continually hanging over our heads is not exactly a morale boosting aspect of our jobs.

Pros

Sun used to be a great company: smart people and plenty of innovation. Laid back work culture. Plenty of opportunities to dive into interesting technologies.

Cons

Senior management never managed to get Sun out of the death spiral. The lack of insight at the VP level was startling.

Advice to Senior Management

No advice: let's see what Oracle will do with it. Enjoy your generous severance packages that you negotiated with Oracle.

Pros

Good Salary, Benefits, and Excellent Vacation and Holiday Schedule. (Bank holidays and Christmas through New Year's as part of Holiday).
Telecommuting encouraged and reimbursements for all work related expenses from cell phone to ISP to land line.
Telecommuting worked well for both employees and SUN.
Ability to work with new technologies.
Breadth of hardware and software solutions and pioneering projects should make most technology enthusiasts very happy.
The Good Guys for open source.

Cons

Too many re-orgs and changes in strategy and direction.
Too much reliance on partners for delivering key services and solutions that should have been handled in-house via Professional Services.

Too many layoff rounds that affected morale.

Software for a while was always less important than hardware and treated as such.
Too many hardware folks trying to run software with mixed results.

Open Source model was hard to make money off of. Some poor execution and missteps.

Advice to Senior Management

It was a great ride while it lasted. Thanks for hiring some great people when it came to technology focus and innovation. Management at various levels could have been better when it came to key strategic direction. Hindsight is 20-20 and it looks like there were some missteps.

Pros

Innovative tech environment, individual contributors can make major impacts to marketing campaigns, events, and technology evolution at their level (if self motivated), great salaries, shorts, jeans, barefeet, dogs, afternoon beer bashes, nice corporate campuses

Cons

Incompetent executive and VP leadership (from 2004 on) that have failed to execute any kind of monitiztion strategy for the company. Employees, mainly individual contributors, have kept this company going day by day (no stretch here). Management heavy, key individual contributor contributions get little to no recognition (one has to just be proud of what they are doing knowing they will not get any credit), intern programs were dropped years ago leading to noticeable drop in the ability to cultivate and hire young talent.

Advice to Senior Management

Movement under Oracle is the best case scenario to keep key Sun born technologies and dedicated employees alive and going into the future. Writing this at Sun/Oracle CIC -- Thanks ORCL Corp.

Pros

Challenging
Work from Home
Good training
Excellent Benefits
Opportunities to work in various areas.
Good Pay.
Wonderful, collaborative, brilliant teams.

Cons

Failing Company, uncertainty about job.

Advice to Senior Management

Should have focused on delivering high performing computers!

Pros

Schedule flexibility and work-from-home has to be the best perks working at Sun. Not only was WFH available but in CO, most folks didn't go into the campus if they didn't have to. There's a downside in that the campus could be too quiet at the beginning and end of the week but the flexibility was great.

Cons

Due to the financial struggles of the company these past years, training and promotions were pretty scarce. There were still opportunities but not at the level it should have been for a hi-tech company. Biggest disappointment was how they dealt with the global ERP implementation project coming to an end with the announcement that Oracle was acquiring them.

Advice to Senior Management

Not much to say here since as of end of January, many senior executives have and will be making their farewells.

Pros

Technical company, with very open and friendly people. Pay is adequate.

Cons

Company structure has far too many Chiefs, or management layers. Sun has become to me the RIF company, where 30% of the time you seem to be waiting for the next RIF announcement and after that, waiting to hear if your name is on the list. Senior (US) Management has no regard for the human factor of their company, although it is claimed that "people are our greatest asset".

Advice to Senior Management

Downsize yourself by asking if that many Management layers are REALLY necessary. Oh and btw: The biggest cost reduction would be to fire Management.. Not the (mostly very dedicated) engineers helping your customers...

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

Great, intelligent people
Work/Life balance
Remote/telecommute
Eco-Responsible company
Great reputation

Cons

No job security whatsoever
Poor upper management
Reorganizations too frequent
Lack of processes

Advice to Senior Management

Hopefully this is a moot point as it is now Oracle mgmt running the show.

Pros

Decent access to new products and technology

Cons

The company has a poor business focus. Execution is weak

Advice to Senior Management

First, think about the customer needs first
Second, think about how the competition is doing a better job at meeting those needs
Then think about how best to position Sun's products in a way that is competitive