In defense of VMware...I work at VMware and it's been great so far. At least in my division, there is very little "big company BS" to put up with.

I've been here for a year and I've yet to file a single TPS report, attend a team building exercise, and they throw company-wide beer bashes every Friday (usually with pretty good food).

It's a good place to work, in other words. Is it the same as a startup? Not at all. But if you're going to join a big company, you shouldn't be expecting that either.

How many of these 900 jobs are developers?

Not that I feel great about anyone losing their jobs, but it's hard to get a sense of what this means for VMWare without knowing their "restructuring plan". Are they HR department consolidations from acquisitions? Sales consolidations? There's a difference.

I assume they're not replacing 900 software developers with virtualized developers who run just above the metal.

i work for riverbed. before their opnet acquisition in december they had about 1600 employees. now they have more, but i don't know if the new size is supposed to be public or not.

my team building exercise was last week and it was 3.5 hours of go-karting in burlingame and a catered lunch. we had the rest of the day off. it was the first team building exercise my team did in my 12 months here, unless you count things like a halloween or christmas party.

i've never had to do a tps report. the closest thing we have would be updating our internal wiki every week with a weekly status.

we get to wear whatever the fuck we want. i got teased about going out for interviews when i wore a button-down shirt on laundry day instead of an ozzfest t-shirt with a massive screaming demon head on it (i thought it would be unprofessional; silly me). that's not to say that you get made fun of for wearing button-down shirts; i only did because i pretty much only wear t-shirts to work. i'd say about 3/4 of my team wears button-down shirts or the female equivalent. most people wear jeans. shorts are common in the summer. some people wear flip-flops year round.

the idea that all big companies are going to be bad or even just worse than small companies is just silly. yes, there's shitty large companies, but there are also shitty small companies and shitty medium companies. but that's because of a bad or incompetent management team, not because of the size of the organization.

Heh... it's funny/nice to see someone mentioning riverbed as an example of a "big company". I laugh because I was there when 150 counted as a huge headcount and the SF office had to move to fremont street (and before there was a south bay office). I left when it rapidly grew to about 600 or so soon after the IPO.

heh, i kind of know what you mean. I interned there in 2010, and then joined full time in jan 2012, and i was amazed how packed the sf office had become.

now i work down in the new sv office, which has become nearly full within just a few months.

Not at all. VMware was a great place to work for, at least the SpringSource division. Other than daily standups, about 90% of my time was spent doing just feature planning and development.

and small companies don't fire people?

In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated.

As far as large companies go it gets a lot worse than VMware though they seem to have lost direction somewhat.

The problem of largeness is that decision makers are so far removed from the decision they can't possibly make good decisions. It's certainly possible for small companies to make bad decisions as well.

And at small companies, a boss may fire someone they just don't like personally. And not all bosses at small companies necessarily understand what their underlings do for a company.

At big companies, if it is done right, the upper level management may ask for input from 1st line managers as to who they should fire. Also, my last company, all managers had to rank their underlings, and those at the bottom had a chance of being trimmed if there were layoffs.

Many big companies will listen to those first line managers, and almost any upper-level manager is aware of their lack of knowledge about the leaves of the management tree.

Yes, you can be laid off from a small company because they lose one of their large clients for reasons that are absolutely nothing to do with you.

They will then look to trim off "luxury expenses" and if they are not a tech company, having a full time IT/dev guy is likely to be one of them.

Employment is capricious in most situations.

Large and small organizations can both have politics, can see drastic restructuring when business changes or a major client makes a change (drops a product, demands a change, ...). Large companies may insulate somewhat against capricious changes, though non-operational circumstances (particularly mismanagement or liquidity crunches of the holding corporation) can cause sudden and drastic changes (Borders, UAL, American Airlines). Small companies can have cash-flow issues as well.

There's very little that's assured in life. Death and taxes you can count on.

> In big companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to be in the wrong team/group/project and some clueless bean counter decides that's the business that needs to be eliminated.

Why do they have to be clueless? Projects are never failures? They could cut a terrible project and still end up laying off good people. Is that a bad thing?

In small companies good people can end up being laid off because they happen to not be buddy-buddy with their boss, and there's no oversight. Or because they aren't related to the owner.

It cuts both ways, for sure.

Small companies pay you less, make up the shortfall in stock options, work you longer hours and then go belly up ;)

I was fired from a startup, and I was their best developer. Needless to say, they are now going down. Making the engineering team political will doom any startup.

Small companies don't have to. They're small and the culture is immediately affected by the owners/founders/executive team directly.