For his corporate blog Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization & Management Division at Citrix (and former XenSource CTO), publishes an interesting post about VMware hiring techniques:
Once again (it happens every 6 months or so) VMware’s press gangs have pushed the “send” button on their spam engine looking for talent. They have spammed the entire XenServer team, and probably the entire Xen community work list, with promises of fulfilling, gainful employment, and on open source to boot!
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I noticed some of your contributions to the Xen community. I work at VMware in Staffing for the Core Technology Group. I’m pretty sure you are not actively looking for a new position but I wanted to check with you to see if knew anyone that may be interested in interviewing to join our team. Most of what I look for in candidates is deep open source experience. People that know low level C programming typically do well here. We have an opportunity in one of our core R+D groups for someone that is open source savvy, can read low level C code, and is willing to handle Build Release for this group. I also have other opportunities that involve working with the open source community to help make Linux a better OS for virtualization. Ideally, these positions would be located in the US Palo Alto, CA or Cambridge, MA. For the Build release position, we may be willing to consider top talent being located in other facilities we have around the world. Again, I respect that you may not be looking for anything right now but if you’re interested of know someone who may be, feel free to let me know. I look forward to hearing from you…
It’s expected that VMware tries to hire away the brightest minds on the scene, and most of all those working for its competitors. Microsoft and Citrix probably do the same.
What sounds strange is that VMware head hunters don’t bother to have a personal, human relationship with someone as skilled as the Xen lead developer. At these levels hiring discussions should be more engaging than sending a predefined email template.