VMware Reviews

Pros

Nice office space, friendly people

Cons

Some team has some politics.

Advice to Senior Management

System thinking

Pros

- good work/life balance
- stocks

Cons

- stagnating product line
- limited visibility outside product you work on

Pros

Industry leader. Fast pace. Lots of opportunity.

Cons

Often challenging to increase salary once on-board. One review cycle annually. Out of cycle promotions do happen - they are the exception, not the rule.

Pros

It's tech savvy, and pretty low level. Their expertise are at the OS level. People are friendly and mostly cooperative.

Cons

Sometimes people are too busy to answer your questions or help you out. Too many meetings is another thing that could be made better.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to what the engineers truly want. They may not be like what you think they are. Have team members giving genuine feedback is desired.

Pros

Flexible, Challenging, Rewarding, Autonomous, Potential for Impact, Visibility, Respect, Team Oriented, Fiscally responsible, aggressive, encouraging, technically aggressive and on the cutting edge of technology, remaining motivated to maintain market position and continue to develop new and emerging products that solve business issues for our customers.

Cons

They could use some work on back end systems/reporting/applications, etc. With as fast as we are growing it is hard to keep up with the explosive growth. On-boarding was a bit of a "welcome to VMware" and then off you go into the Abyss of work. But highly functional, motivated, experienced consultants should have no problem maintaining motivation and quickly get up to speed and find the right people to reach out to.

Advice to Senior Management

Stay headed in the same direction and don't change the upward trend. Gartner and our stock price says it all. Watch out for the up and coming competitors both small and large and don't make the same mistakes of previous market leaders that become complacent with their leading products and soon become vaporware.

Pros

Leading edge R&D, setting the standard in new computing technologies.

Cons

Disruptive company structure with constant chance through acquisition and organic product development.

Advice to Senior Management

Making acquisitions need to be well thought through, and assimilation plans understood and communicated from top to bottom.

Pros

Work/life balance. Beautiful Palo Alto campus. High salaries. Great leadership. Products that will change the world.

Cons

The job can be intense, no matter what position you work as.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the vision alive and well for the next 20 years.

Pros

- Stock options are now vested
- Company has name recognition
- Virtualization and cloud leader, for the moment
- Looks good on a resume

Cons

I've worked here five years and it's been mostly downhill. Pay isn't great and has continued to fall behind other top companies, benefits are less attractive than before, and the (imported) management team is worse than the old team. Nepotism and cronyism run rampant in senior and middle management and the Peter principle is turned up to 11. Internal reorganizations occur about every six months (seriously) and what little communication there is is muddled. This is an organization where the CEO once said we need to be laser focused on our core competency of virtualization minutes before announcing the acquisition of an email company (?) and where another senior manager got up at a company meeting to announce the best quarter ever, followed by an exhortation to eat less M&Ms to reduce overhead. If it were a Dilbert strip, you'd say it was unbelievable.

Advice to Senior Management

Figure out what the company is supposed to be doing, explain it in concise terms to employees, and then stick to the plan for more than 90 days. Start holding incompetent managers accountable.

Pros

Company Vision
Good Senior Management (EVP and above)

Cons

Mediocre Middle Management
Uninspiring Middle level Managers

Advice to Senior Management

Upgrade Middle Management with better Managers who excel at understanding technology
Should be supportive of pet projects towards work

Pros

- great products
- great energy
- great products

Cons

- poor IT management
- CIO hires his buddies and doesn't cultivate an environment that promotes within
- CIO buddies that are hired don't know anything either
- IT does a extremely poor job of recognizing the talent they already have

Advice to Senior Management

- If you hire a Director, let's make sure there are actually people reporting to the person.
- Stop handing out VP/Director titles like candy to external hires that were not even Senior Leadership potential in the company they left. BS!
- Hire leaders that have a track record of success in other companies. Don't make me name names.
- Focus on learning more about the talent that exists within the IT organization. Who knows. You may actually find out you have some very talented leaders in hibernation
- Stop handing out $150K+ salaries to every IT engineer that you hire. It is demoralizing to everyone
- Do 360 reviews. Find out who isn't performing and who is. Treat it with importance, not a checklist item. If things were working right, all the idiots would be gone. Guess what, they are still there.
- I can go on forever, but it will never change....