Pros
1. Work Life Balance - There is no pressure to work on weekends and after hours unless there is an emergency. 2. Good campus and work environment - The campus is really big, employees get their own space(cubicle or share an office). There are a lot of events that happen every week including a bi-weekly "bash", tech talks or celebrations of festivals/holidays. 3. Good for people with families/kids - Halloween, Diwali, Chinese New year etc. are celebrated in grand fashion with a lot of activities for kids. Recently, a lot of musicians/bands/actors/speakers have also come to VMware and given talks/concerts. 4. CEO - The CEO(Pat Gelsinger) is an engineer at heart and knows how to execute well.
Kontras
1. Slow professional/technical growth - The company is good for a new grad or staff engineers but anywhere in between is a very slow growth process. Too many managers who were bad engineers or not engineers at all means that there is too much talking but less doing. If you're looking 2. Experience is very team specific - The core kernel/monitor teams have amazing engineers but the new teams who focus on management solutions have some really incompetent engineers - mostly JAVA shops. A lot of teams also have a bad junior:senior engineer ratio which means code quality and engineering process is low quality. 3. Old Fashioned - Almost everything VMware shouts old-fashioned. Engineers don't get laptops. For the new age of engineers who are used to working at off-times the lack of a laptops leads to a lack of productivity. The engineering processes are also very antiquated and resistant to change. 4. Too many re-orgs and management changes