I wanted to work as a technical support engineer at VMware for a while now. Mainly for free certs. But then I heard it is basically slave labor with the high caseload, very long hours. Which I was still tempted to deal with. But now I find this site and it seems like this company could care less about their employees. I have never heard of a company that fired people so much. This explains why I am always seeing Technical support positions on linked in. is this company as bad as this site makes it out to be or is there anything good about working there?
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Yes. The case load is impossible to manage. Even you do manage your cases well omce they notice they will push other people’s cases and escalations to you. Did it for two yrs and peaced out...no regrets
VMW cert is not a highly sought after cert in IT industry ... say comparing to ccna, cissp and etc. Each cert cost around $200. You are betting your career on $200 and your precious time to obtain an average valued cert. Support is a high stress job and you are expect to know and be good in supporting multiple products (that is ridiculous in my opinion and severely lowering the standard of expertise), yet the pay grade is lower than most of any IT professions. Certain products are difficult to support due to poor quality. There will be at least 2 company wide layoffs a year. GSS seems to be safer comparing to other division. That is probably due to fairly high turnover on experienced folks. The cost cutting in gss is in autonomous mode. The good news is, gss constantly hiring to fill the gap and that give you a sense of job security. I also heard that they had 3 layoffs this year from people still in there. However, your desire to work for a company because of free cert isn't a wise decision. Overall, it is an average place to work.
It's a good job, I did it for years before I went in to management. You get exposure to all kinds of customers and tech, and they pay pretty well for support staff if you have some experience.
I don't work as a TSE, so that's a specific exp. One thing though, pls keep in mind that the messages here on a board about layoffs are all about the worst, but to put in context... The recent layoffs which folks have termed as 'massive' were on the order of 300 people in a company which employs 20,000+.
Yes, there are layoffs twice a year, like clockwork. Typically no more than 300 people. Benefits are good, pay is pretty good, bonus structure is pretty good. You'd have to wait a long time to get super rich working here, as the stock has bounced around 100 + - 20% for 10 years, but it's better than a lot of organizations.
The PA, BLR, and IE campuses are pretty nice, and most of the folks you work with are pretty solid.
You could do better at a handful of other companies, but you could do much much worse.