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Managment, Agile, whats that? - QA Engineer VMware Employee Review

2.0
Nov 21, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Your fellow coworkers are the best thing about this job. You will make friends that will last a lifetime, but the only other thing is the casual environment.

Cons

This review is mainly for people looking to go into R&D at Airwatch but still applies to most of the company. The on-boarding is a week full of nonsense. It is 100% sales. How often will you need to give a sales pitch as a member of the R&D team? It would make a lot more sense if they tailored the training to one day of overall AW history, then Console basics, than finally your department. At Airwatch if you accept an offer for QA you do not decide where you will be placed. For example, If you have worked for Apple for 3 years and have a lot of experience debugging iOS applications, you will be placed on a windows mobile team. You are placed where you are needed not based on your strengths. Be prepared to move a lot too, after working on your first team, you will be relocated to another when half of their team decides they have had enough. You will be lucky however if you get one of the two actual competent managers for QA. Those two are active within their team and actually work, while the others sit around "handing out tasks" and try to come up with processes that will just make your life harder. In all honestly the R&D team is a tornado of 10 people actually working while the rest complain about how young their team is and that they are bored. If you happen to be one of the people that work then you will not get any rewards or compensation aside from maybe a thank you from your customers support ticket . Their QA is about as flat as it gets. If you want to move up someone needs to leave and I can bet the person looking for the promotion will be the one to leave. That brings me to their attrition rate. ~50% of the people at AW have been with the company for less than a year. This is not because "Our employees are learning so much that they move on." It is because the management and amount of work are ridiculous for the "compensation" you will be getting. Turnover is high for a reason, and it is not a positive one. Workload is insane and unrealistic as many people on here have said. There is always some customer issue and YOU WILL be pulled away from your current task to work on it. That being said, you will be split across 1000 things to do and nobody will take that into account. You will have PMs jumping down your throat while your "Lead" will be giving you some made up task to validate their position. No one understands that you are being pulled in six different directions which causes you to have to stay late almost everyday. It is not uncommon to have a 10+ hour day or to work on weekends while in QA. This would be fine if management put in the same amount of work. You will be splitting work with the India team, but don't expect your lead to treat them like equals. For the Atlanta team, India is there to take blame when something isn't completed. They are not valued like they should be, much like most of the company. Huge lack of professionalism, you CAN NOT come gossip about how someone just had an awful interview and was "a complete waste of my time, and a total idiot." Management is the absolute worst part about this company. All they want to do is put their hands in as many cookie-jars as they can just so they can say "I had a part in this." Office politics are at an all time high. Most will not listen to their team for new processes or more efficient ways to do things. You will learn a lot don't get me wrong but here is the most likely scenario. You will probably work here for about a year, realize just how awful it is and then leave.

Explore other reviews about VMware

5.0
Jun 24, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

VMware is a big company but in many ways had a startup vibe. That was great because the resources and infrastructure of a big company were there, but it gave most people I worked with freedom to work on many projects, influence, move around, and contribute in many ways. Plus, many things moved faster than they might at other companies of the same size. Perks were really great including bonuses, events on the campus, opportunities, etc.

Cons

The biggest con is the annual layoff. During most of the years I was there, we were growing like crazy, beating expectations, gaining in stock price, etc. It was always positive and upward. However, every single January, it was known that there would be a round of layoffs, even when all numbers were looking great as they almost always were. Management called it restructuring. But, over the years, some really good people were let go for no apparent reason. Then to add insult to injury, a week or two later, there would be a company quarterly meeting discussing how VMware was doing so well and is still hiring, but they had to make some changes. It always felt dishonest and the sympathy for those let go came across as disingenuous.

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