A little late. I got the call yesterday
But workstation was for long left on the backburner - we haven't had there a lot of killer features since '07 probably. So I guess it is not a new decision.
Clarification: I mean that workstation was deprioritized by corporate, not by the team that worked on it.
I personally spent 2 years of my life, starting in 2008, bringing Unity to Workstation on Linux and making it work with every combination of Linux and Windows I could throw at it. That work was continued by a teammate for several years.
I spent 3 years rewriting most of the foundation, UI, and server infrastructure for Workstation 8, bringing the ability to connect to remote VMware ESXi/vSphere servers, along with the server component of Workstation 8. This work allowed VMs to be hosted on any server and accessed from any other server, and allowed VMs to be pushed between servers. 3 solid years on this feature alone, given just how much was needed to make that happen.
In the same release, we replaced the old Teams feature (a single feature that provided a multi-VM UI along with software-defined networking segments) with a series of more independent, more useful features. These were just a couple of the major features released in Workstation 8, and with all this came cleanup in the UI to keep the experience sane, not bloated.
That came out in 2011.
Workstation 9, released in 2012, came with a web-based UI for interacting with VMs called WSX (a feature I dedicated a bit over a year to). It also added UI refinement for the features that come out in Workstation 8, more remote VM support, hardware improvements (USB 3, Hyper-V, OpenGL for Linux VMs, nested/Inception-like VMs), locked down virtual machines for IT, and probably more that I can't remember.
Workstation 10 followed that a year later, and brought guest hardware support for tablets, enhancements for Windows 8 hosts, more remote VM improvements, better command line automation for remote-controlling/creating VMs, and a bunch of other things. UI-wise, it was a smaller release, but it did a lot for the hardware support.
I left around this time to focus on Review Board (https://www.reviewboard.org/) full-time.
Since then, they released 2 major versions: Workstation 11 and 12. From what I can tell, these were largely about hardware improvements and performance improvements, less about major UI changes, but there's a lot that has to happen for these improvements. Hardware improvements are crucial to keeping the VMs useful in many situations. Performance was also a focus. While building these releases, the team was also busy helping out the View team by helping them consume bits of the Workstation/Fusion codebase. They also begun development of AppCatalyst and Flex.
There's also work that happened on Player, Ace, and other things, all throughout.
So that's a lot of killer features in my opinion :) I barely scratched the surface of 8, and didn't go into all the stuff we did in 6 and 7.
We were all very proud of the product, and often spent our free time working on it. I should point out, this was not a large team by any means. It was an amazing team, though. A family. One that will survive these layoffs, one way or another.
These features may have been prohibited by corporate management for some reason since ESXi have passtrough. And yeah - I view it from strong power user/developer/gaming angle, not sysadmin.
A teammate just told us he's bummed he didn't have just a bit longer to work on Workstation, because he had a few things left he wanted to fix and rework for the next release. Our personal todo lists were so long, we could have filled another 10 releases... Shame we didn't have that opportunity.
That was and still is a killer feature.
I know about rr and such, it's just another level to be able to record whole system state.
[1]: VMWare Workstation 7 demo about Replay Debugging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjZWn3iDPiM
Workstation was my go to as well for desktop development needs for many years, but switched to VirtualBox after Workstation 10. Kernel updates on Linux often broke Workstation. You needed to wait for VMware to release an update, upgrade to the next version (that would also soon lag behind latest kernels), or search for a patch over on Arch[0].
VirtualBox does the trick but Workstation's a better product.
It just warmed my heart that you and your team put your heart and soul to that product and loved every second of it. Thanks for doing all that hard work and doing it the way it's supposed to be done.
I was already a bit troubled by the shameless yearly waves of "upgrade begging", and by VmWare clearly keeping features back to try and segment the market (especially with Fusion, because "everyone knows Apple users are rich idiots"). This final nail will likely push our company to VirtualBox for good, it's become the standard in OSS circles anyway. You did well to leave, VmWare as a company has lost direction.
The past two eyars, MSFT have cut a large number of people annually. CSCO have been cutting a large number annually since 2011 (though this is more of a migration of staff to lower cost economies/newer focus areas). HP have a long history of annual staff cuts. Even Google has been cutting staff on an off for the last 4 years (mostly post acquisition).
In most of the country (California is probably an exception), the company does not have to pay anything at all.
I don't know about "usually". A lot of these big SV companies seem to usually pay some severance.
> Also, what are the usual time limits in the industry?
What time limits do you mean? As in, what notice do they have to give you? In much if not most of the country, none.
Was just wondering as this might screw up with someone if they are short on money, have mortgage, etc.
In EU, there is some minimum notice time (I think two weeks?). In practice (from what I've seen) it's usually two to three months, but layoffs would be done immediately by agreement (basically pay for that period anyway). Minimum severance is one-month-pay (average, so bonuses included) for each year worked, limited to three.
So in real life, one would get 5-6 months pay when being laid off. Depending on the situation (reason for the lay off), one might not be able to spend their vacation and that would have to be paid off as well. On top of that you might apply for unemployment benefit (which you paid for, so I'm not sure how relevant it is).
I could walk into work this morning, get laid off, and escorted out of the building without notice. That's it, done, no more salary. To make it even worse, you also lose the subsidized health insurance. My employer pays about 60% of the cost for my family, so my monthly premiums would jump from $800 to nearly $2000 a month at the same time my income drops to near zero.
Sure there's unemployment payments, but they're usually only a fraction of your previous salary, and are often capped to a maximum by your individual state.
Welcome to capitalism ;)
You have to give at least two weeks warning to the employer if you want to leave, but if they want to fire you, they just show you the door without warning. Note that the employer may then just fire you anyways, so your courteous notice results in two weeks without pay. For some reason, this is considered fine, even in industries where it's a laborer's market.
Still even provisions like that are inconsistently applied. I worked at an internal development studio of a large video game publisher that closed, resulting in the layoff of all ~90 employees. The studio had two offices: one in Los Angeles, California and another, smaller office in Austin, Texas. The employees at the LA office were covered under the WARN act and thus paid/insured through the end of the year (2 months) and received company severance on top of that. Those of us at the smaller Austin office were not covered under the WARN act as we had less than 50 employees at that location. Instead we received a check for our last two week pay period and the aforementioned severance package.
Anyway I'm not sure this scenario is any better than the US scenario of little to no employee protection. Sure, it means you're not flat and your back from day one, but the cost firing anyone is substantial, making it very difficult particularly for small business to hire simply because the risk is too great. I'd be keen to learn if there are other ways to reduce that risk than simply making it easier to fire people indiscriminately.
That's not exactly true, the company does have to pay unemployment insurance and each state has varying laws. Most states tax sites will have the documents.
If the company isn't in dire financial straits, it's common to give some severance pay, usually tied to length of employment. This isn't a requirement.
With the US's ridiculous system of getting most health insurance through your employer, it does mean that you lose many of those health benefits. There is a legal provision called COBRA where you can continue for a time on your previous employer's health care (at your expense). The ACA (Obamacare) makes losing your health insurance less dire than it was in the past (for things like "pre-existing conditions"), but it still sucks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
>An employer who violates the WARN provisions is liable to each employee for an amount equal to back pay and benefits for the period of the violation, up to 60 days.
...pretty much says companies can do what they want. For a lot of these folks, that's a severance.