I too am a TSE for VMware and know your pain. I think the problems are multifaceted.

Firstly, the complexity of the products has increased drastically over the past few years. The introduction of SSO has taken troubleshooting to a new level as it changes in every release and new bugs are discovered daily.

Additionally, our caseloads have shot up dramatically. When I started I think people were averaging around 20 cases per engineer, now it could be over 40. Customers are opening more cases than ever and we have fewer engineers to cope with this. The quality of the cases being opened has also fallen. Gone are the days where any preliminary troubleshooting has been done by the customer, a large number of cases don't even reach us with a description.

Staffing is, in my opinion, the elephant in the room. Good TSEs generally go a couple places, they either go out of production support to Premier services, or they go out the door. VMware can't pay good engineers to stick around when companies are poaching them for 100k+. So what you get is a brain drain in production support. We also dealt with a hiring freeze last year which compounded the issue so the new engineers are both quite green and their colleagues are too busy to help.

I still believe VMware support is an amazing organization but it has been ignored by the company for too long, and we are way too nice in terms of troubleshooting issues which are out of scope. We can be hard-nosed and shut cases down but I think our flexibility is the only thing that distinguishes us from other support orgs. All I can say is please do complain to your sales teams, not sure if it will hurt or help me individually but they need to take a closer look at what's happening.