VMware Reviews

Former Employee – worked at VMware full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Smart people, great technology, good compensation. Not everyone gets a change to work for a company that defines the technology and changes the landscapes.

Cons – getting in to big company rut. with big portfolio simple decisions are also getting arduous. Facing classic challenge of big companies to keep talent motivated and on the toes. But surely they will come at top.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at VMware full-time for more than a year

Pros – The people are very easy to work with, the technology is cool. great hardware to work with and we are well supported by management.

Cons – Still a relatively young company so not everything is set in stone yet, if you like process this is probably not your place. If you don't have a voice then this not your place.

Advice to Senior Management – Remember your still growing our market.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at VMware

Pros – Market leader in virtualization space.

Cons – Salaries can be underwhelming depending on your job responsibility.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at VMware full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – By working in R&D you get insight into how a computer works. There's a diverse array of software to work on, from low-level coding to UIs to website development. The core visualization groups can be a good place for a new college grad to develop good software development practices.

Cons – There was a bulk exodus of R&D in 2011 when the equity grants from VMware's founding CEO finished vesting. That founding CEO was replaced with a new CEO that could offer a vision for the future, but no plan to execute on it (nor a plan to "re-green" people, probably because he came from Seattle and wasn't used to the high degree of mobility offered by Silicon Valley). He also couldn't be bothered with running a company and hired others to do it. In 2012 VMware spent $1.25B on Nicira, in effect buying back some of the people that left in or before 2011. Shortly after he resigned at his 4 year anniversary and cashed out $26M in equity--since Nicira was funded in part by his predecessor that suggests he didn't have a superior vision after all.

His replacement (the current CEO) is more geared towards running a company but hasn't done much from a leadership perspective besides jettison the web companies that VMware acquired under his predecessor's leadership. In the meantime R&D has continued to bleed the little talent it has left while replacing them with lesser talent (at least when permitted by headcount restrictions), thus resulting in yet another big software company that has a lot of people who know little and accomplish even less. This 2011 bleed likely contributed to vSphere 5.1 being the "Windows Vista" of virtualization releases, and it's likely to contribute to the next release being the equivalent of "Windows 8". The "Principle Engineers" that remain are less ambitious and don't seem to do much (and certainly don't set a good example or tone for the rest of R&D). The company has taken various surveys to find out how unhappy people are but never took any steps to determine the underlying reasons why or address them. The newer hires try to deal with the post-apocalyptic R&D that offers little in terms of guidance, a high count of bugs to fix and burdensome processes that have been put in place to try to avoid bad code check-ins.

Advice to Senior Management – It's too late to correct what happened in 2011. Reassess what the company is now capable of accomplishing in a year and adjust accordingly. Keep track of what's going on. There's now a significant culture where lower management won't report a problem to upper management unless/until an answer or solution is known. This means you hear about the smaller issues but won't hear about the big problems until it's too late and the most you can do is fire people. Swallow your pride and reconsider whether certain software releases should still happen. Try walking around campus and randomly pick a few meetings to sit in to assess whether people are being productive and working on stuff that matters or just busywork and politics.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at VMware full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Innovative technology
Fast Paced
one of the leaders in it's space

Cons – VMWare was full of great talent and collaboration but they have pushed most of the great talent out of the company. The few great people they have left are underpaid and under appreciated.

Advice to Senior Management – The problems that persist are not new and throwing additional headcount to fix the issues will not solve the core problems existing within the company. Be Accountable!

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at VMware full-time for more than a year

Pros – Stocked kitchen, great benefits, paid volunteer hours

Cons – VMware's vision of continuing their start-up culture is lost once you begin to feel like yet another number, high turn-over rate

Advice to Senior Management – Listen to the "little people".

Current Employee – been working at VMware full-time for less than a year

Pros – Best work environment
Managers invest in personal and career development
Clear goals are set and advancement within VMware is highly encouraged
Open to new ideas to promote a more efficient workforce
The product is well received. People want to receive calls from VMware
There is always a new challenge - products are always improving and there is always something new to bring up in customer discussions

Cons – Not many cons here. The training wasn't top notch right in the beginning but now there are endless amounts of training available.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at VMware as an intern for less than a year

Pros – Projects provide opportunity to make a real impact
Strong team bonding
Excellent pay
Strong intern program
Free intern housing
Transportation pass
Free shuttle to work

Cons – Intern housing changes every year and may or may not involve a long commute.
Projects are very independent and you get as much experience and guidance out of them as you want and ask for.
Intern hack-a-thon lasted two weeks and did not provide a lot of motivation for participants to finish -overall could have been run better.

Advice to Senior Management – It would be nice to have some more training on current technologies such as prototyping techniques and javascript libraries.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at VMware

Pros – Smart friendly people, generally good middle management.

Cons – Lack of strategic thinking among senior Vice Presidents, lengthy cycles for software updates to ship.

Current Employee – been working at VMware full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Work with some of the industry's best developers.
Challenges and list of todo items never stops.
Build one of the cool products here.

Cons – Revenue stream has slowed down.
Company with 14k+ people is turning VMware into a slowly moving company.
Compensation is not what it used to be earlier.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company