Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix, recently talked about VMware hiring practices taking place, as he discussed an email that he, and evidently many others in the Xen community received.  What is interesting in the email isn't the fact that VMware is trying to go after Xen developers.  After all, we all know the challenges of finding people with virtualization expertise and it doesn't stop at virtualization administration.  The virtualization developer position is probably even more challenging to fill, thus the email Simon describes below.  The really interesting piece in all of this is that one can only assume this was a giant mail blast with little regard for who was in the TO: list.  And perhaps, normally using a template email like that would be fine.  But when you email the CTO of the competitor or the person who founded XenSource and currently runs the Xen Project, perhaps a little more care should be taken.  At the very least, scrub your mail list before sending out a blast like this!

Simon posts the email on his blog site.  The email read:

To: Ian Pratt
Subject: VMware open source engineering positions 

Hi Ian,

This is Tom from VMware.  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. 

Thanks again, Ian. 

Tom M

VMware Core Technology

Palo Alto, CA

You can read Simon's original post on his blog, here.