Vantaggi
Flexible time off, decent stock awards (if you can get them, which no one does anymore), good pay, no one does anything or cares what you do so you're free to do whatever you want, except advance your career.
Svantaggi
No one does anything, so if you're like me - the only guy you know who's doing stuff - it turns out you're doing all their jobs as well as your own while getting little to no feedback, input, or work output from others. You also get no extra compensation or recognition for working harder. You get super frustrated with trying to change things and get things done while just running into walls of dead weight everywhere you turn. They will kill your work/life balance because they need you to be the guy doing stuff while they play golf or whatever it is they're doing all the time. They'll block career moves, because they need you to be the guy doing stuff. They shoot down anything close to negative feedback because fixing problems is harder than doing nothing. If you do nothing, you'll love it here because everyone leaves you alone while you're out doing nothing. For those people, work/life balance is probably great. If you're worried about accomplishing anything or advancing your career, look elsewhere. There are barriers to entry everywhere, and a big 'old boys club' that will block you if they sense you might be equivalent or better to them in skill. They take all the best opportunities for themselves and leave the scraps for everyone else. There's a lot of people on scholarship from this company, a lot who are just playing games and taking part in corporate one-up-man-ship, and only a select few who seem to be here to just get stuff done without tooting their own horn, stepping on everyone else, and generally making life miserable in some way for everyone else. Aside from the workforce, there have been a ton of "cutting back" on comp plans, where they are reducing compensation on core products with zero notice. You'll have in-flight deals when they make the change and now your pipeline takes a hit because you aren't retiring as much quota as you thought you would. They've also implemented some caps on certain roles' accelerators, and implemented sliding scales to avoid paying you all of your money early on in the half or paying on accelerators before you hit 100% quota. The Dell acquisition is creating a lot of problems with all the companies' reps and teams stepping all over each other. No communication, and a lot of people trying to take the lead on everything. Tons of people calling on the same customers and right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. Makes us look brilliant to our customers. In terms of company strategy, it's hard to divine that. One minute we have a cloud thing, next minute it's canned, and a new cloud thing comes out. Every time we announce one, it's the best thing since sliced bread until a year or 2 later when we can it. If we could just stay the course on SOMETHING, we might get somewhere. It reminds me a lot of working at HP, where they were constantly buying companies to replace a product that already did that thing, then they turned around and buy a new one to replace the replacement. It frustrates not only the field teams who have no confidence anything will be around long enough for a customer to actually use it, but most importantly the customers who hate getting jerked around all the time. VMware is forever killing products with no notice to the detriment of customer satisfaction.