Great Technology. Buy the stock but think before working for it.
Pros
Strong Technology. Opportunities for engineers to 1. Deal with Classic Computer Science problems. Lots of Intellectually satisfying toys to play around with. 2. Deal with diverse cross-functional problems and define your own work due to the a large line-up of program managers who are constantly trying to get their respective features into the release. 3. commoditize virtualization in a zillion different ways.
Cons
Work culture is very cut-throat. Credit for work is often pre-assigned to specific people. People identified as "Top performers" at some nebulous stage in the company's history continue to be treated like stars, irrespective of whether they are currently delivering or not. This sort of issue becomes more glaring as these people with no particularly outstanding technical strengths or people management skills drive the 'vision' of the company and unfortunately there is no accountability for the "leadership". Failures of projects are translated to "bad execution". i.e. The growth of such people is a self-limiting factor for the organization. The excessive engineering driven culture prevalent at the time of the IPO no longer exists due to the sunken realization that productivity does not translate into success in this company. Growing in this company requires you to strongly align yourself to a successful manager or lead without any scope for dissent resulting in a very divergent standard of the technical folks in the organization. In other words meritocracy exists, mostly as a farce, in this 'colonial' organization. Not to say that that performance evaluation is entirely arbitary, but if you see mediocre people in top-notch positions, you just know the reason why. Too much cloistered thinking similar to some inbred research circles. Communication or more appropriately 'diktats' often flow from top-down. Multiple layers of high level executives have been added stretching from a depth of 5 from ceo-to-work-ant to about 10 for the same number of people in the company. These factors may make business-sense to investors but translates to a degeneracy from an "exciting" to a "mediocre" company for R&D.
