Sun Microsystems Reviews

Pros

Sun gave the world many great technologies, NFS, Java, NIS, NIS+, Solaris, and so on. They were quite ahead of their time in a lot of respects. Sun respected their employee Work-Life balance. Even going as far as to tell people to take time off and stop working. The environment was wonderful, great technology, great people, a very positive atmosphere. Office floor plan had several different area that you could... work in depending on the task you had to accomplish. Individual pods when you needed to focus and work on a task. Larger team collaboration rooms for several employees to talk, share ideas and collaborate on things. Smaller spaces for smaller teams or for managers to have confidential one-on-one meetings. The bigger campuses even had "drop in areas" for visiting employees to be able to get a desk and do some work. And above all, this company's motto was "The Network is the Computer" which rings so true now with Cloud Computing. Employees were also required (at least in my role) to take a minimum of two training classes a year, one in hardware and one in software. I haven't been at a company since that has put so much into their employees with respect to training. Would totally recommend the old Sun to people. But can't anymore since the Oracle acquisition.

Cons

* Couldn't market their products * In-consistent approach on Solaris x86. Had they not ignored it / killed it / reanimated it as much as they did, perhaps Linux wouldn't have completely ate its lunch * Inconsistent hiring into job levels... aka a less experienced person got hired into a higher ranked role than someone already performing well in a lower ranked role. (Think being hired as an L3 and the L2 has much... more experience.) * Not able to sell their technology well * Glut of servers on the market from the dot com bust... really hurt sales of new systems. * Was ahead of their time, and thus was acquired before being able to really make waves with Cloud Computing.

Advice to Management

Pony Tailed CEO was a mistake, shouldn't have changed captains in the storm. Being Sold to Oracle was another mistake, but I blame pony tail for that misstep.

Pros

Good working environment. Mostly friendly people

Cons

Nothing bad to say about Sun

Pros

gone, not much to say about

Cons

ok, not much to say about

Pros

The company believed in growing their employees. There were lots of opportunities to be promoted within job, laterally or upward.

Cons

Some managers needs to look at their employee as individuals with different needs and not group them based on whether peers want same development.

Pros

awesome company with great inovation

Cons

too many office politics that drive engineers away

Pros

Good team and camaraderie among all employees

Cons

None that I can think of

Pros

Great Technical Talent and People

Cons

Bought by Oracle; no longer exists

Pros

Able to work with many different technologies and given the tools to prospect new accounts in my territory

Cons

Challenges included the constant need for more reports, new reports, and updates even though we were dealing with long sales cycles and complex solution sales.

Advice to Management

Hire the right talent with proven track records and allow them to do their job.