Sun Microsystems Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Sun Microsystems full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Good people, good facility and good technology

Cons – Career progression was limited, salary could have been higher.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sun Microsystems

Pros – Very technology driven and innovative
Innovation and R&D comes first
People are individuals, not an army
A lot of room for creativity and ideas generation, implementation

Cons – Poor operational alignment has made the company less profitable
Flexible working hours have also impacted the overall success of the business
As a result there is no more Sun Microsystems

Advice to Senior Management – If you get together to create another Sun, I am willing to join!

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sun Microsystems

Pros – - Some great people to work with.
- Good, competitive salaries.
- Invest in their employees, good training oppurtunities.

Cons – - Too many Re-orgs, hinders productivity.
- Fear culture, created by adopting employee rating practices similar to that of GE.
- Politics between BU's.
- Useless middle management.

Advice to Senior Management – Pick a direction and stick to it for a while, let everyone settle in and complete projects before deciding on another re-org.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sun Microsystems

Pros – Company is now imploding on itself
Most Senior Management have completely disappeared
Middle Management still trying to do their best
Superb work/life balance
Great colleagues

Cons – The sadness that a once great company is soon to be no more
The workload is getting heavier
Job cuts being made in the wrong area and now affecting customer satisfaction

Advice to Senior Management – At least make the effort to be visible....
Hopefully the good ones will make the transition and the bad ones recognised and let go

Current Employee – been working at Sun Microsystems

Pros – Still an open culture, candid views are expressed and not squashed.
Loose, some might say lax, day to day management of staff in the Field - you are essentially your own boss.
Good benefits, even though salaries are lagging.
Still proud to work for such an innovative company

Cons – Reputation has taken such a knock in the market place.
Uncertainty as to what will happen once assimilated into Oracle.
Morale has taken endless battering over the years with layoffs and poor performance - no longer the same Fun@Sun.
Poor senior management.

Advice to Senior Management – They'll be too busy looking after their own skins post acquisition.

Current Employee – been working at Sun Microsystems

Pros – The salary
The people are mostly great
The products are world class, but too expensive and things that customers don't value

Cons – The senior leadership lack of strategy
They don't know what customers value
Wrong location for design
Opex is running too high

Advice to Senior Management – Hand over to someone else who knows what they are doing, move design to asia and close all USA operations to a minimum.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sun Microsystems

Pros – Sun's still a very competitve environment in terms of knowledge transfer regarding modern IT trends. The people at Sun are

Cons – Working for a company with a steady productivity increasy without an equivalent growth makes life hard

Advice to Senior Management – Please bear in mind, that every employees is a precious and intelligent individual, and not a dumb resource

Former Employee – worked at Sun Microsystems

Pros – Highly technical environment, intelligent coworkers, passion for innovation and exploration, pioneering technology, great quality standards, competitive and challenging market. Sun has been fighting an uphill battle for so long that every employee of more than a few years has been instilled with a strong sense of "never give up", "we can do it better [ than the competition ]", "we can go the extra mile".

Cons – Line and Middle management focuses very strongly on "how to work" vs. "what to work on" in order to justify their own existance. The work in many areas is therefore decidedly non-agile, with many reporting/approval processes that can give a strong feeling of being disempowered.

Advice to Senior Management – Eradicate a few levels of middle management. Having to write reports for three different managers plus the line manager without ever being given a "downward feed" on how good/useful/complete that reporting is nor what it is actually being required, while at the same time being told by the line manager that your own performance depends on the goodwill of these report-only managers (and their feedback cannot be shared with you as it's confidential) is a sure way of paralyzing the workforce. You can literally work your socks off and get great feedback from customers, but fail to give credit to all the managers involved and your performance review hits rock bottom.
Middle mgmt. has become a cronyism playground. More fairness and less favouritism, less reporting and more empowerment to the worker bee could release quite some energies there ... energies now spent on appeasing/pleasing middle management instead of creating revenue for the company.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sun Microsystems

Pros – The only real reason to work for Sun is its Work from home program. Sun provides both the technology and a very responsive help desk to enable you to function in your home environment. The ability to work from home also enables you to balance your home/work life within reason and as long as you fulfill your job responsibilities and meet the necessary job requirements you can choose how you work during the day. For me being based outside of the US I could work early morning to catch up on the US from night before and then take a break during the day until the US work up again.

Cons – The constant need to change strategy and direction. You may start the year with a clear strategy and a few months down the line just start seeing the results and all of a sudden there is a 180 and this continues and continues which results in everyone running around in circles and not necessary having the conviction to put their heart into the role as they know it will change shortly down the line. The other fault of Sun is the splatter gun approach - trying to fund everything under the Sun and doing none of them well whereas employees constantly say reduce the amount and fund properly.

Advice to Senior Management – Stop being so arrogant and disrespectful of those that work for you. You work in an environment where a majority of the employees work remotely but refuse to adapt your communications to adjust to a global audience. Yes a majority of management is located in the US but a majority of the business is generated outside the US, give the field more credit and empower them more. Stop being isolated in your ivory towers

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sun Microsystems full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Smart and motivated team, good IT management, good benefits, Work from Home,

Cons – outsourced application support model is not agile and increases time to delivery, no sabbatical for long term employees, vision for company not consistently communicated, travel limits due to cost constraints, uncertain future for company as it was acquired by Oracle

Advice to Senior Management – don't out source core knowledge of apps

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company