On Wednesday, just two days after the removal of Diane Greene, virtualization.info published an exclusive letter from an anonymous VMware employee providing an interesting picture of what’s happening in the company these days.
The article ignited a number of reactions among other employees, which not always expressed positive comments about their former CEO.
Trying to better understand the Greene’s popularity, virtualization.info dug into Glassdoor, a new online service which allows anonymous employees to review and publish salary details about several companies.
The Glassdoor profile of VMware only contains 65 reviews at the moment of writing, but there’s enough to extrapolate precious perspectives about the company and management behavior.
In particular the website keeps track of the CEO approval rating and it seems that Diane Green was mostly approved:
A couple of the most recent reviews are specially interesting:
June 27, 2008
Great for engineers; not so much for everyone else.
Anonymous in Palo Alto, CA — Current EmployeeAdvice to Senior Management:
“Senior Management should start openly communicating with employees and shouldnt be afraid to take hard looks at their organization with an eye toward streamlining things. The culture of fear (propagated mainly by the CEO), has all of the senior management quiet. Only one of the high level finance VPs (who acts as an independant consultant), ever has the guts to speak out against things which are wrong.”
July 9, 2008
Hope Diane going doesn’t ruin it
Senior Member of Technical Staff in London (England) — Current EmployeeAdvice to Senior Management:
”Don’t change what Diane started. Staff will not take well to being more aggressive a’la EMC”
Update: This post slightly encouraged the activity at Glassdoor which now features 75 reviews.
Some interesting additions:
July 12, 2008
Good overall company with a few challenges to address
Sales Representative in Palo Alto, CA — Past Employee (2008)Advice to Senior Management:
“DIane Green was a great CEO to build a smaller company, not the right leader for a large enterprise software company.”
July 13, 2008
Micro Management is no longer needed to 6K people company
Sales Representative in Palo Alto, CA — Current EmployeeAdvice to Senior Management:
“I believe many people have good competency and very talented. Some people had lost the mentality to improve because of the the culture of fear.
Just do what you think right.”