Good engineers, good problems, start-up culture being replaced with big-corporation culture
Pros
I felt like VMware was going to be a good experience from my interview. At other interviews (hint, starts with a G :) I was asked a bunch of questions about horses racing around a track and balancing balls, and I wasn't convinced the people I talked to really knew (or cared) about systems/kernel issues or had a vague idea what my grad school research was even about. It felt like I was being asked trick questions to join some exclusive club. At VMware, I interviewed with the team I would be working with, and I was very impressed. The few canned questions always turned into good conversations, we talked about my research and current topics in the systems world. I left feeling knowing these were really smart guys who know their stuff, and that I'd enjoy working with them. I've since found this is true across the entire engineering staff. Luckily they offered me a position, and it has been a great job. After being in the research area for several years, I wanted to get into building "real" products, and that's exactly what we do. It's great to know your code is providing value to huge range of customers across the world. VMware is really on the cutting edge of virtualization, and there are still plenty of interesting problems to solve. Work/life balance in R&D is good - you have the occasional days where a big bug gets unearthed by QA or there's just a lot going on, but generally you have plenty of time to complete your tasks and branch out when something interesting comes up.
Cons
When I started, you felt like you were living the Silicon Valley dream. That slowly disappeared - the free lunch on Wednesday was the first to go, soon followed by all our options going under water (everyone is in that boat, though), then most of the shuttle buses went, senior management got a big shuffle and the founders left, the 401K matching and salary raises stopped, and now there's no more cereal or snacks. VMware was pretty much blessed with a monopoly on virtualization for a long time. Competitors are now not just snapping at our heels, but storming the fort. This can be healthy, but it is quite a culture change. Thus working here has started to become more like "just a job". It's probably a combination of the current economic times and the start-up culture growing into the mega-corporation that VMware really is now. So far retention is good and everyone is taking the changes well, but you do wonder that if things start to pick up if good engineers will leave for greener pastures - that would potentially be a real morale killer.
