Management is a constant Peter Principle Ferris wheel of over promotions. Competent middle managers are continually promoted or given additional responsibility until they fail and get laid off or quit. Former CB managers and engineers thrive in the same or higher positions in other companies after leaving. Management has a cognitive distortion of every six months saying they will fix technical debt and quality issues and they mean it this time, but budgets and resources always favor feature velocity. This left both technical debt (deferred and more robust redesigns, infrastructure, documentation, invitation, customer communication, tools, quality, stability, expandability, and technical expertise), and organizational debt (process, moral, training, coordination, institutional knowledge, and intra-team communication). Once the first slipped feature date is announced they relapse back into feature velocity first mode. The next release is sent out, customer complain about it and metrics look bad, management gets replaced or reassigned and there is a focus on quality for a couple of months and the process repeats itself.
Any employees with strengths that didn’t prioritize results driven feature velocity have been laid off, quit, or just keep quiet and work on features. Most visionaries, teachers, coaches, coordinators, connectors, and strategists have long left the company as their strengths were not used and often disparaged. Engineers and Product Owners who prioritized feature velocity over all else are quickly put into management to reinforce feature velocity. External management hires quickly learn feature velocity is job one or are quickly shown the door. Little resources are spent on jumps in invitation and must be gained through acquisition.
The company operates under a hero management style, only concerned about today’s visible crisis and ignoring larger underlying problems. Most of the upper management that caused these problems cashed out and left after the buyout, but their philosophy remains. All VMWare has done is rebranded the same philosophy of features first with limited understanding of resources. Then only adding resources for the most visible issues when upper management thinks it’s a crisis. Often prioritizing issues based on office politics over engineering or business priorities, while ignoring larger systemic problems until they eventual become a crisis.
Unless you thrive in chaos, love coding quick solutions, and are a results driven developer I would avoid working here for a year as they sort out the buyout and VMware really understands what they bought and hopefully creates realistic work levels and additional investment in engineering.
Real career advancement is limited. You are overloaded with work, so any additional learning or advancement must be done on the employees’ time. Any sign of competency is rewarded with a vastly increased workload. Larger solutions are not prioritized unless you implement it yourself on your own time or in response to a crisis. Many times, ideas, tools or solutions have been proposed for years internally and ignored, only after external requests or a crisis happens will they be implemented.
