One of the things that I like about working at VMware is the effort that the company puts into greasing the skids for its employees.  There’s a lot of little things that are done to make my life easier.

One of them is our Helpzilla.  It’s how pretty much everything gets done around here.  Order hardware?  Helpzilla.  Book a big conference room?  Helpzilla.  Can’t get Flash to update?  Helpzilla.  Reconfigure your office?  Helpzilla.  Each of these are very different tasks, but there’s a single entry point to all of them.  For me, this makes my life so much easier.  I don’t have to remember which website to go to when I need to do something.  I go to the same place every time, fill out the same form, and everything magically happens.  There’s a single place where the history of a request lives, so it’s easy to add more details or find out the current status.

Another one is our desktop support folks.  On each floor of all of the buildings on main campus, there’s one office with one or two support folks.  They’re responsible for handling a lot of the computer-related Helpzilla requests, but they’re also the keepers of lots of useful things.  Lost your dongle to connect your Mac to the projector?  Stop by their office and get a new one.  Need a USB key?  Swing in and pick one up.  Lots of the little things can be handled like this, with no requests or paperwork or approvals.  It makes life a whole lot easier.

A couple of weeks ago, the battery in my MacBook Pro began failing.  I put in a Helpzilla ticket to order a replacement.  The shipping of the battery was the slowest thing about the experience.  The battery arrived, and one of our desktop support guys was in my office the next morning offering to take care of replacing the battery for me.  How awesome is that?  I only had to finish up what I was doing and live without my laptop for a bit while he magically made everything happen.

Thanks, VMware!

(I suppose I can’t write a post about liking working for VMware without mentioning that we’re hiring.  My team has interaction design positions open; ping me if you’d like to know more.  We’ve also got a whole bunch of other positions open, including development, test, and program management.  Ping me if you’re looking for a referral!)