Pluspunten
I worked at VMware for 2.5 years following their acquisition of Carbon Black, for a total of 5 years working on CB products. I enjoyed my time there before the pandemic and the acquisition. The office culture was stellar, people were very passionate about the work we were doing, we moved quickly, and hired lots of new college grads who we could train and watch grow into spectacular engineers. Some incredibly smart people. Folks are generally collaborative and helpful when you have questions. Benefits are decent (high-deductible health plan has no premium; stock-purchase program gets you shares 15% off). For some of us, there's a fantastic work-life balance. I was never questioned for taking time off. I was never made to feel bad for taking a long midday walk, or heading to the grocery store before the evening rush began. If you live near an office, they're really quite nice. Boston has two downtown offices that have nice views and a very "tech-corporate" vibe. Whether or not that's your vibe of choice, you can't deny that they're nice places. VMware 401(k) plan in Fidelity supports "mega backdoor Roth" conversions for those looking to take advantage of that loophole. VMware's post-pandemic plan should never force you into an office. Even considering the forthcoming cons, I enjoyed my time there overall and wouldn't wish to undo it. I will preface the cons by saying that VMware is still a better company than 98% of American employers. In tech, I think engineers are overly spoiled for choice among the top 2% of companies. If you're coming from any other industry, VMware will likely be the best job you've ever had. But, I wouldn't recommend starting a job there today if you have other tech-company options.
Minpunten
VMware management loves to espouse their "EPIC2" values. If I have to be constantly reminded of what my values are supposed to be, I probably don't share them. VMware is broken into many different "business units" which are all essentially different companies. If you work in one, you'll have no contact with people in a different one. In general this is fine, but the public marketing highlights interoperability of VMware's products with each other. Hard to back that up in reality, when I've never heard of the product I'm supposedly receiving API calls from. No real corporate culture or sense of togetherness, possibly due to the sheer size of the company. Dry (alcohol-free) offices except with special approval that requires a bartender to be brought in. Minimal snack offerings. VMware has a political action committee (PAC) led by Sen Orrin Hatch's (R-UT) former chief of staff. They did not stop contributing to elected congresspeople who were supportive of the Jan 6th Capitol insurrection. Lindsay Graham remains highest-paid recipient. Significant attrition. At CB, we probably lost close to 50% of our engineers since the pandemic started. Full waterfall software development lifecycle (at Carbon Black, at least). VMware hired a number of managers from Docker and put them in charge of engineering, and they pivoted hard to a date-based, non-iterative software development lifecycle. Corporate all-hands calls are largely pointless. CEO has zero personality (though I do hear he's a very kind person) and is almost comically uninspiring. The only tech stock to trend downward during the pandemic. That's saying something. Was often short on work to do. Spend lots of time sitting around. UX, Product, and Engineering have been split apart and no longer have direct communication. Unfortunately, my experience post-acquisition was generally less positive (and certainly negatively impacted by the pandemic). Significant bureaucracy, at corporate and BU levels. Corporate started a committee to investigate the number of committees there are shortly before I left. Processes have been stood up at BU level that inadvertently strangle the ability to improve the products we build. UX is always "too busy" to help. During the pandemic, VMware built out significant presences in Bulgaria and India. These teams are generally very competent and work long hours, but communication is nonexistent between the geos. This is true across disciplines; engineers will find MRs making changes that their colocated UX/Product folks have decided against, and those folks will contact their cross-geo counterparts to find that they're of the exact opposite mindset regarding the functionality in question. Some teams rubber-stamp and merge code in the overnight hours of their cross-geo counterparts to avoid being blocked from merging. Very stingy about salary increases. Even stingier about promotions. Stingiest (perhaps most shockingly) about equity grants. VMware no longer hires engineers with less than 3-5 years of experience. With each year, college graduating classes get more diverse. VMware complains about never hitting its meager diversity goals, but they don't care or realize that the majority of racial and gender diversity in the engineering talent pool lies at the youngest end.