Pros
The checks clear, the bonuses/stock if you last long enough Lots of great co-workers
Cons
It appears like VMware has a play book when it buys out a company, and none of it helps the employees of the buyout. The first thing they will do is try to re-band (demote) the employees. They will use the excuse of they are a big company and things are different and you either take it or leave it. After a few months they will double the old company’s workload and ramp up offshore efforts to help. Upper management will trash talk the bought-out company any chance they get in order to justify any changes (layoffs and reorg) they will implement. Upper management will shield themselves from the bought-out company’s managers and employees so they can ignore their issues, concerns or complaints. They will make the bought-out company’s managers accountable to the deliverables but have no responsibility or power, understanding or control of new offshore resources. Management who can, leave the company or quickly find a more stable group in VMWare to transfer to, leaving a huge leadership vacuum. As the bought-out company star team members leave, they will be replaced by untrained resources amplifying unreasonable schedules. The new offshore resources will be dumped onto projects with no training or understanding of the project, team or technology. The team will not be integrated or even introduced to each other and will not be given clear goals or direction but will be given multiple and often conflicting deadlines and goals. The new offshore resources will have their own managers who have no goals or accountability to the new projects and often have goals and accountability for other projects. The bought-out employees will be squeezed into having to do their previously scheduled deliverables, new deliverables and somehow ramp up themselves on new products, VMware systems and help the new team (assigned 2 minutes ago) also ramp up. If they fail on any of the three projects you are on, they will be called out for not being “team player”. If they mention any organizational problems, they will be called much worse things. Upper management will berate you if you have even hint at questioning them, they will call you hostile, ironically screaming it at you. A person asked a simple question about unfreezing pay raises and an SVP went on a rage about cooperation and not being hostile. Its common for five hundred people to be on an engineering conference call and if the SVP doesn’t filibuster the whole meeting to avoid questions no one bothers to waste their energy to ask a question or from fear of reprisal. Teams and information are silo-ed across teams and even from management to engineers. It’s not uncommon for issues to ferment or fester for months and only when it’s a crisis gets dumped on the engineers who can actually fix it with demands of why several month long outstanding issue has not been resolved, when the engineers didn’t even know about it until that moment. Once the ramp up is done, upper management expects quick results from the untrained disorganized mess they created. This is when some directors start working against each other. Some openly subvert and work against others to see which of them survives the next re-org or twice a year layoff. Upper management entire focus is on solving “their” problems and “their” goals, often to the detriment of the product, employees, team or even company. As someone who has helped build a successful decade long offshore program, this is not how to do it. Upper management creates such an environment of fear from over aggressive schedules, and priority contradictions, poor communication, unwillingness to listen, layoffs, and hostility towards the bought-out company it fails before it starts. VMWare used the 2020 financial crisis to temporarily freeze 401k matching, bonuses, and raises all while exceeding their goals.