[frostmatthew]

Thankfully this isn't the situation everywhere. I've been with VMware for about a year and a few months ago I made a comment/joke to my tech lead how I was extremely surprised (given my fairly nontraditional background) that I even got an interview...he then told me any application that includes a link to a github profile must get passed along (thus engineers on the relevant team are the ones that determine if the applicant should be interviewed or not).

[N.B. I have no clue if this is applicable for all of VMware of just my location]

[praneshp]

I'm almost certain this is specific to your team/location. Three years ago, when I was a grad student, I had a screening round on campus with VMWare, and rate it my worst experience ever. A HR person (who contracted with VMWare, acc to her LinkedIn) interviewed me with a pre-printed list of questions; among other things, she didn't understand the difference between the TCP/IP stack and the data structure called stack. To top it off, when I mentioned something about Citrix in my work history, she said she hadn't heard about the company, and said VMWare doesn't bother about "small companies".

I guess both of our stories are anectodal, but maybe my situation was because of an arrogant contractor, as opposed to an employee. It's really cool that VMWare actually looks at github profiles.