- No, Zero professional growth, even though the recent company-wide employee survey pointed out the same, lack of growth, development and learning opportunities for existing employees, no steps have been taken to rectify the situation, and its been 6 months.
- There was a directed effort to grow the leadership and management team at VMware over last two years but rightfully or unjust-fully, all the revamping in the upper-echelons have the company has come from outside VMware, which has further encouraged the new managers to bring their partners-in-crime from outside VMware. This demonstrated a culture and Executive management support for hiring talent from outside then promoting from within or growing the internal employee pool in any way.
- Your experience in engineering depends on the team you work for as nothing is uniform company-wide, even the coding conventions, tools and the culture from team to team(or Business Unit-Business Unit) can be drastically different. Moving between teams can seem like working for 2 very different companies with different cultures.
- Stock-based compensation is hugely allocated to top-echelons of the company, and with the recent increase in Directors, Senior Directors & VPs, rank & file employees can only expect "token" stock based compensation, if any at all.
- VMware has strong portfolio and product roadmap, but all the innovations on the roadmap were created few years ago, with recent brain-drain in engineering, it remains to be seen if VMware will be able to maintain its market leadership, as the company tries reduce its R&D spend( due to Board of Directory mandate to realize operational efficiency in R&D) and at the same continues to loose rock-star engineers as VMware IPO stock option grants are expiring.
