Memories from VMware’s Hosted UI

A very interesting post. To me this illustrates a couple of points very well.

1) VMWare likely have no idea what they lost when they cut this team. Once teams just look like just a number of people to be re-located to save costs, there tends not to be consideration of the value of a long-lived team with the experience and team spirit that this post talks about.

2) If you're an employee of a large corp, never ever stay out at a role out of "company loyalty", it's a mugs game. Not to say that that's true for all companies, but large ones seem to have a distressing tendency to treat people as numbers to be valued and shifted and cut, and loyalty shown by the person to the company means very little in these circumstances.

It is no small feat to create this kind of culture in any large organization. Even more impressive is that the culture was defended during a decade of changes in personnel and corporate priorities. It is fitting that a team which brought cross-platform interop to the developer masses would achieve cross-company portability of their culture.

For those lucky enough to find such an oasis as their entry point to the corporate world, please know that even though your experience may have been atypical, it can be replicated as you move into future leadership positions. It only takes one cultural existence proof to transform a collective industrial race to the bottom, into a contagious race to the top of human possibility.

One reason why industry veterans appreciate open-source is that they can have an ongoing role in the long-term evolution of their software creations. As operating systems increase vertical integration with cloud services, device owners need Client Neutrality. Products like VMware Workstation can set boundaries that reflect the goals of device owners, rather than OS, cloud, advertising or hardware vendors. Workstation team members may find kindred spirits in open-source projects attempting to follow in Workstation's pioneering footsteps.