VMware did a totally awesome thing last week: we named our first VMware Fellows, Ole Agesen and Mike Nelson. Aside from Ole and Mike getting a spiffy new title, their alma maters each received $800,000 endowments.
Having just been promoted to Staff, I’ve been talking with my manager lately about what my next career goal is. Senior Staff is on my radar as my next move, but now I see I’ve got a new long-term goal to aim for.
For the vSphere admins in the house, Duncan has a super-quick (one question) survey about vCenter. Take 30 seconds and answer it!
I’m working at home today, recovering from RADIO.
RADIO is an internal VMware event, and it stands for Research And Development Innovation Off-site. It’s a huge event intended to get our R&D org thinking about how we can innovate around the company.
I just got home from it, and I’ve got to admit that I’m exhausted. I was invited to speak there, and gave a talk about how engineers can better learn about our customers. I also ran a birds-of-a-feather session on a similar topic. But my exhaustion isn’t just from the preparation (and, I’ll admit, nervousness) from my sessions. It’s from the sheer amount of awesomeness that I’ve seen going on around the company.
A lot of companies talk about supporting innovation from within the ranks of its team. VMware delivers. First of all, the whole of R&D is encouraged to submit their ideas and develop them. We have features and products that were first suggested at RADIO. Second, the RADIO folks put a huge amount of effort into helping those who submitted their ideas work on them to get them to a place where they’re ready to be shared with a wide audience. Everyone who submits gets to go to the event, and other people around R&D get to come if they win a ticket in the lottery. Attending RADIO is completely paid for by VMware itself, and it doesn’t even come out of our departmental budget. And we’re given three days to bask in all of this: presentations from our fellow engineers about their awesome ideas, and plenty of time for breaks so that we can meet each other and discuss it.
And now it’s the day after RADIO, and I’ll admit that I’m exhausted. My plans for today involve going through the mail that built up while I was at RADIO, and thinking about what I learned while I was there.
At VMworld last year, we previewed Project Octopus. Octopus is our enterprise-level cloud file-sharing application. I’m not talking BitTorrent for IT, I’m talking about a safe and secure cloud file store. I’ve been dogfooding Octopus for months, and have done some research on it too. It’s been a great way for me to store documents that I’ll need to access on multiple machines (including my iPhone and iPad), and to share documents with my team quickly and easily.
Additional details about this spiffy new public beta are available in the official announcement blog post. I’m sure that it’ll also be discussed in tomorrow’s End User Computing Virtual Conference.
One of the things that I think is pretty awesome about VMware is how green we are. The person behind our green efforts is our lab manager, Doris Lippitt. Doris is the person who secretly makes everything at VMware work: she knows everything that’s happening on campus at any given point, she knows how to get anything done, and she somehow makes sure that it’s all very very green. It’s quite cool.
In honor of Earth Day, VMware Careers is doing an interview with her about our green efforts. Go check it out!
During interviews, I often get asked by candidates why they should work for VMware. There are lots of reasons to do so, but here’s one of my favorite ones: VMware CEO Paul Maritz was just ranked in the top ten CEOs by Glassdoor.com. Their ranking is based on employee reviews. Having trust in your CEO is a great thing, and is definitely a great reason to work here.
The user experience team at VMware is still growing. Here’s a job description for a senior interaction designer; we’ve got other positions in interaction design and research, for both new college hires and experienced hires. Ping me if you’d like to learn more or would like to apply.
VMware has a new publication: the VMware Technical Journal. There’s some awesome content in there, especially the case study about how we set up the VMworld Hands-On Labs.
This is sooper sekrit, so don’t tell anyone!
If you’re participating in the Project Octopus private beta, there’s a new iOS app available in the iTunes Store.
My team has a very large research project coming up, and we’re looking for a contractor to come in and help us for at least three months. In this research project, we’ll be doing a lot of studies in the usability lab.
For this position, we need someone who will own the complete research project. Working with my team, they’ll define the scope of the project and how we will go about answering the questions that we have. They will create the research plan and all usability test materials, including (but certainly not limited to) creating a screener to find participants for the study, setting up the environment for testing, and creating the task list and script. They will conduct the research and analyze the results (which we anticipate will be a mix of qualitative and quantitative).
Candidates should have at least an undergraduate degree in HCI or a related field and 2-3 years of experience in conducting UX research. A stellar candidate will have experience in conducting research on highly-technical enterprise software.
Interested? Have questions? Email me.
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