this is why I don't work for mega software corps
i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.
i bet all these poor bastard devs had to do 'team building exercises', file endless TPS reports, and forced to enjoy TGIF jeans day to indoctrinate you into the company cult then it's layoff time.
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.
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.
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.
now i work down in the new sv office, which has become nearly full within just a few months.
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.
It cuts both ways, for sure.
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.
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.
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.
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?