Thread regarding VMware layoffs

Example 3 - trees of “leaders” (eg. VP > Dir, Dir, Dir, Dir) with no direct reports who can’t clearly articulate their roles.

This!

I wish we could query the workforce DB to find out how many directors/vps/managers have no direct reports. The leaf nodes will be the first to get axed. I’m sure hock’s PE gang will be running queries like this.

Haven't fixed a software issue in a few years?

It's ok to click your heels together while saying "Apollo 13 was an inside job" and then close the ticket. The issue magically disappears and the software just got better.

You're now a rock star developer.

We have too many processes to approve a simple task, and people aren't held accountable for completing tasks on time.

Feels like some people work against you rather than with you, as if their paycheck depends on them piling up more issues, constant follow-up after follow-up.

Often, things do not progress until they are escalated.

The fact that people have exist to simply make other items more difficult.

Example 1 - instead of giving a customer a good faith credit of 5k, billing ops, DMT, and revenue will spend 150k of internal time to say no.

Example 2 - layers of sales people who know nothing about the products the sale.

Example 3 - trees of “leaders” (eg. VP > Dir, Dir, Dir, Dir) with no direct reports who can’t clearly articulate their roles.

I understand things can be scary in this market. And, for those people who are highly compensated but have no overall worth, this is especially terrifying. Time to reduce inflated egos and salaries.

A daily single sign on for each internal website is not what SSO means.

Branch management, product build and testing infrastructure are the worst I have ever seen.

Congratulations developer, you are now on a mailing list that will update you daily about business & sales meeting details for a group having nothing to do with your BU.

Obtaining a license for a not-for-release build to use in house testing is a masterfully created rube goldberg machine that is a major roadblock -- by design.

Once I asked my Director, why are we implementing the tool. It didn’t made sense and I told him this would never be used. He said it doesn’t matter if it would be used, all it matters is to show higher management that we are doing something innovative. We can ki-l it after 2 years silently. That’s VMware WWO for you.

I worked in FP&A finance for a few years in vmw and last year moved company.

Can say it’s an eye opener on how behind we are in terms of process and systems

Also I found the idea of VMware defining saas as term license hilarious

There is no accountability

This!

VMware behaves like a startup.

There is no accountability. Zero alignment to corporate objectives and goals.

Quota setting is a problematic. GTM is wrecked. There is no standardized sales methodology. Bring your own framework theme. Operations is siloed maybe even antiquated. Sales leaders track deals in spreadsheets. Pipeline expectations are manage over the pipeline itself.

@jkg+1kzJjYRy
You nalied it man! I appoint you SVP of infrastructure and tools at VMware

Eternal hope that someone responds and reveals a better way or a better set of apps than what VMware is using now internally and shares the list of apps, and that someday VMware thinks about consolidating WWO into the better run org and stops wasting money managing with obscurity and personality over math. Maybe a manager stops by and really thinks about it.

As a shareholder, it's absurd how many employees are dedicated to work with zero accountability for deliverables, and it's often impossible to measure results even if a leader wanted to. The $ spend on tools that aren't remotely best in class for a company that prides itself on providing tools that are best in class is frustrating on a daily basis.

Nothing in the list is anything not already discussed in finance and business publications, and it's often used to explain why VMware is an easy target for acquisition.

There's endless articles written about VMware's business and revenue per employees being simply terrible and VMware's time to transition to subscription has spawned a number of articles in much more venerated public forums than this one. Our lack of employee efficiency is a root cause.

Internally it's like watching someone reenact 'for want of a nail a kingdom was lost' - because they've forgotten they're running a kingdom.

There's so much wasted effort here that 3 companies in a row thought they could make small changes and make billions. 2 companies have succeeded and now a 3rd will likely do the same. This company has so many smart people, imagine how it could be if they were all moving in one direction using the tools that make them the most effective.

Google has advertising cash to burn on wild ideas. Microsoft has cash to burn. VMware does not have the same privilege of spending without consequences, and now, it's being acquired yet again.

Why are you complaining about this on a public forum? What outcome are you expecting?

WWO is managed by a nontechnical leader. This leads to interesting decisions about tools and infrastructure.

OCTO is simply better at anything running the business. WWO really needs to go away.

Tools are changed frequently, even when it's not needed or wanted. Many months out of every year are spent moving things around and looking busy rather than forward progress.

slack, teams, source, social, zoom, SharePoint, miro, the MS Office suite, workboard, and smartsheets, powerbi and sap hana, and tableau and sap and oracle. And a half dozen custom sites like flings, created solely because it takes too long to send a rpa request internally.

Can't forget the busy work. Moving checklists and files around.

Projects to slap a new font on existing reports. Projects changing acronyms. Heck, projects getting renamed almost annually so they look like new projects, and then people change where the project tracking is so no one realizes the latest new thing is really the 3rd attempt to launch something with a new style sheet after no one adopted the project the first 2 times. Some projects are on their 5th attempt. The sheer amount of wasted time is staggering.

There is zero interest in picking tools that work at scale. There is no effort to try to make a process more efficient by design. Rather than actually listening to users, tools are chosen in a vacuum and then everyone else just has to 'deal with the fallout'.

Vault and Source are nearly worthless.
There's no internal source of truth for policy . Old docs are everywhere. No one dates anything besides HR. *Shout-out for good change control for HR.

VMware has excellent KB tools that make it easy to keep content fresh, no one uses it outside of tech support.

Do we really need 4 different training programs?

Spreadsheets for product listings, none of which are standardized. The flashbacks to the late 90's lotus notes feeling is unreal.

Seriously, SAP over Oracle? Who does that for any business with over $1B in revenue? Do they secretly hate accounting and biz ops and IT that much??? And prod ops...what did they do to deserve SAP? Don't get me wry, SAP is pretty, but soooooo much more costly to launch and maintain.

CPQ in Salesforce and the tech support install base- how is it VMware cannot manage to automate workflow around quoting and pricing remains a great mystery in our time. How are rate card rules and click thru agreements for proposals not fully automated at this point?

The obsession with having sales micromanage partner pipeline hygiene directly in SFDC is such a waste of time. Sales ops exists, use them.

The latest decisions to move from Smartsheets to Clickup is shaping up into a daily comedy blog in slack.

OKRs in workboard at a company that makes it impossible to get financial data to do real cost/benefit work. Tie some dashboards and some ryg indicators in here somewhere.

Absolutely looking forward to Broadcom and Google tools just to cut down on busy work related to tools changes.

CPN and associated tools, great idea, too many cooks. WWO needs to hand it all over to OCTO not just stuck OCTO with the finicky bits.

Give RPA a budget. Teach ops to self service scripting