Pros
Perks are on par, if not better than most companies in Silicon Valley. Location of the main office in Palo Alto is wonderful and provides opportunities to exercise outdoors. Many coworkers organize activities including running, soccer, basketball, ultimate frisbee, and "bootcamp". VMware has one of the best technical staff I've worked with- they have to be by nature of the products that VMware develops. If you are into low level systems, I would wager there is no better place to work.
Cons
VMware is in dire need of good management having wasted years while waiting for Microsoft to create a virtualization product. Marketing could be better as everyone has heard of Microsoft's products, but not VMware's. For the engineers, the infrastructure leaves much to be desired. Automated testing is lacking, and manual QA is scattered throughout the world. A lot of time is wasted trying to track down issues with someone who is 12 hours ahead you leading to week long e-mail exchanges. Management seems to care more about counting beans than getting resources that engineers need to effectively do their job. Politics leading to changing requirements on top of poor communication leads to projects being late, scrapped, or rewritten unnecessarily.
