Broadcom is laying off 1,267 Palo Alto-based VMware workers following its acquisition of the company
Chip manufacturer Broadcom wrote the latest chapter in the long story of return-to-office tensions between bosses and employees.
After completing its $69 billion acquisition of cloud computing company VMWare, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan issued a direct order to his new employees about where they must work. “If you live within 50 miles of an office, you get your butt in here,” he told the workers of previously remote-friendly VMWare.
The comments came during a meeting Tan hosted on Tuesday after the merger between the two companies officially closed, following approval from Chinese regulators. Like many other executives, Tan cited in-person work’s benefits to collaboration and company culture. “Collaboration is important and a key part of sustaining a culture with your peers, with your colleagues,” he said.
How To Lose Your Top Employees 101
CEO’s don’t give a shit about the longevity of a company or product. They’re incentivised to cut costs and increase profits this quarter/year; everything beyond that might as well be someone else’s problem. If they succeed, they make many extra millions. If they fail, they’ll make slightly less millions, and eventually be replaced by someone who succeeds at extracting extra currency units from the company or its customers.
This is why publicly traded companies are trash. No long term vision.
Let’s not breakout the paint roller to cover every company. (Long-winded, but I want people to see that not all companies are capitalistic hellscapes. And it’s possible to practice capitalism where the company, customers and workers win.)
We have a monthly all-company meeting. Weirdly, it’s not boring, mostly interesting info, I rarely skip one. The “suits” give us a breakdown as to how much we made, lost, expected, exceeded, all that. The CEO chimes in with future directions we’re looking at, praises people and teams, takes questions about anything, nothing verboten. Last meeting, I asked how, given the tiny market we dominate, we continue growth? Very eye-opening response! Straight answer, no bullshit, no corporate talk.
Hell, for 2020, 2021, maybe 2022?, the CEO told the board we expected to lose money as we were building up our staff, skills, products, etc. They were happy to hear that! At my org, it’s staff first. We realize that taking care of our people automatically means taking care of our customers.
We failed. Fucked around and made a profit those years. We’re aiming to break even this year. And again, we’re not striving for profit at all costs. We’re building a solid future. And this isn’t some brand new venture. In one form or another, we been at this 20+ years.
As to CEOs “failing” and “golden parachutes” (which you didn’t bring up!), often the board brings in a CEO to make unpopular decisions to get what they want, change course in ways that might not be well-taken by the public. Sometimes for good, sometimes for evil. I won’t say CEOs are blameless, but they do indeed have a boss in the form of a Board of Directors.
If you’re a smart businessperson and leader, you’re going to get a contract including a parachute. You would be a fool not too! The board can force your hand, ruin your reputation, and that’s often the job you agreed to. So yeah, pay me if you fire me for doing what you said. Ellen Pao anyone?
Any yes, the cyberpunk Megacorps that have evolved are poisonous. Antitrust laws, legislation and court rulings used to me much stronger.
tl;dr: Companies and CEO ain’t always evil. It’s the Megacorps that are mostly fucking us around and they should be broken down. This graphic tells a story worth a thousand words.
Is this company public? The company I work for was like that pre IPO. And then it got a bit worse afterwards but we still got good answers to hard questions at all hands. That lasted for idk 3 years? But now 6-7 years later our all hands have been reorganized to split them up, people who used to ask the hard questions were let go or encountered to leave etc.
But hey, are you hiring?
Software dev, and yes we’re hiring. DM me.
But is the company publicly traded?
“Get back to the office or you’re fired!”
(fires 1,200 workers anyway)
It’s cool… plenty of other tech companies to hire them.
Should probably have dictated the ultimatum first, before firing anyone, so they could self-select the departures. Then, if it’s not enough, cut some more to get the final numbers the manglers want.
I’m re-evaluating my use of VMWare products now, that’s for sure.
Everything is going to be core based for licensing, and if you aren’t in their top 600 customers you will receive worst support. Both of those things have been publicly stated.
Yup. And I have a couple workstation licenses in need of an upgrade purchase that will probably not happen now. Linux KVM is looking more appealing.
For workstation there hasn’t been a need to use VMWare for over a decade now, if you’re on Linux. Server side, if you needed live migration you had a reason to stick with VMWare - but that also should’ve been solved about a decade ago. Pretty much the only two excuses for still using VMWare infrastructure are “it’s old infra, and we don’t really have the time to migrate away from it” or “our ops team is too incompetent to handle anything else”
For Linux yes I started using KVM and it works just fine for my needs on a workstation.
For Windows hosted VMs I preferred VMWare Workstation. It has a workflow that worked for me and I found it compatible with a wide range of guests. Linux guest support in HyperV is a joke. Virtualbox sucks for professional use because the functionality locked behind the extensions they force you to download is an invitation for Oracle to begin harassing for licensing with the threat of a software audit if you’re big enough a target.
I don’t mean for this to become a Linux vs. Windows thing. I have reasons that I need to use Windows. Though that’s not to say I’m not pushing for more Linux. Windows 11 is a big enough reason to ditch windows.
Now? The writing was on the wall years ago. Support has already taken a nosedive, and they’ve basically all but stopped selling anything except to the biggest customers.
I never needed to contact support for VMWare Workstation and when I did have a problem forums helped. So I didn’t notice. I did however notice when this whole Broadcom thing started taking shape and now it’s more obvious than before.
Give Proxmox a burl, very nice.
My biggest qualm with switching to proxmox is how painful it is to convert VMs. We have some VMs with multiple TBs of storage.
In order to move you have to install the drivers first, shut down the VM, copy the files over (slowly), convert the VM (takes forever even on a 6 drive NVME raid array), before creating a new VM with matching settings then booting and it finally will work. And if you forgot the drivers then you have to find a storage controller that works, boot up, install the driver, then shut down and change the settings.
well that’s gonna be a beast you face anyway - it’d also happen if you had to implement your worst case DRP.
I’m not saying it’s gonna be hassle free, but uh, you’re migrating your infrastructure. It’s gonna be a big job.
VMware makes it easy. You can live migrate a physical (or virtual) machine to VMware. Then just shut down the physical machine and turn on the VM. But apparently nothing like this exists for proxmox.
There’s a vmware converter
You can skip the disk convert step and mount the vmdk files directly. Then after bootup you can use the move disk feature to live convert the disk type.
Proxmox to the rescue.
XCP-ng is a good alternative. ProxMox is good for home labs.
Thanks I will check those out.
I tend to draw the line around the 500 VMs mark and whether you use hyper-converged hardware. Above 500 VMs you are likely to be using dedicated storage, where XCP-ng will scale more easily.
Proxmox makes hyper-converged management simpler than XCP-ng and can handle more complex networking setups out of the box.
But there is a pretty large overlap between their capabilities.
Do they have other products aside from their premium Virtualbox skin?
Hahaha.
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Fuck off
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A 50mi commute where I am is going to be ~2 hours each way due to traffic. That’s 4hrs each day of lost life which, if I had to do, I’d demand to be compensated for. At even a low 225 days a year that’s 900 hours of time at tech-level per hour pay.
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There are no collaboration benefits. My Product Manager friend and I disagree on this greatly - but I’m still confident from an engineering standpoint that there is no material value add to in-person meetings that cannot be realized remotely with simple concessions (if anything at all).
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There are a significant increase in distractions, long lunches, arriving late, leaving early (to name a few) = significant decrease in productivity / output.
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A lot of tech places where I am that are 40-50 miles away will require me to pay for parking. Screw that.
RTO can die. Commercial landlords can burn for all I care. I do feel bad for neighboring small businesses that are negatively impacted by the loss of foot traffic - but if my area is at all indicative, many of them just left the city and went suburban or rural and are just as successful with lower rents.
I’m going to take point three a step further and suggest there are ENHANCED collaboration benefits for virtual meetings, of course depending on the field.
I work in a field that produces a shit ton of SOPs and technical documents. We’re better able to collaborate when we can all work on a document simultaneously instead of having one person input all the changes while we do our best to explain to them what we want them to do.
There has been so much meeting time dedicated to something like “up three lines… No, three, so one more line. Now go there… Keep going… You got it. Okay, now add ‘this’… No, that’s not quite right, try ‘that’ instead,” and so on. So much wasted time.
I almost forgot about that… Shudder no less efficient way to do something.
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Get your butts back in the office so that you can spend all day in Zoom meetings. Thanks but no thanks.
That drove me crazy about my hybrid schedule. It didn’t matter whether I was in the office or not. All communications were via slack and email and all meetings were via Zoom. There was not one single reason for me to be in that office.
And it wasn’t even a ‘sunk cost on real estate’ issue. The office was attached to a production facility. If they got rid of it, they could add more production lines. Fucking moronic.
Sounds like a whole lot o’ quittin’ time to me.
Probably, but the tech industry has cooled a little. They’ll bail, but they won’t bail as quickly as they’d like to bail.
If this happened to me the first thing I’d do is start looking for other jobs. The second thing I would do is start giving the absolute bare minimum effort possible without getting fired.
This CEO is a fucking idiot. In what I assume is an attempt to increase productivity he’s just caused his entire workforce to not give a fuck about their jobs anymore.
Really, this is what will happen. People will eat the shit sandwhich in the short term, but as hiring at other firms picks up in the coming years they’ll lose all of their talent to higher paying companies. Then they’ll complain about no one wanting to work or not being able to find good hires.
Not only that, they’ll lost their best talent first
This is called the “dead Sea effect”.
I think that’s the idea. Why do costly layoffs when people can just be led to quit? This issue is politicized so they’ll have cover.
Note that broadcom is notorious for buying a company with “captive” customers and gouging the customers while slashing expenses.
They are ecstatic to have people quit and they don’t even care if the “good” ones quit, because they just need to gouge VMware customers for a few years and if VMware becomes a dried up husk of a company, they roll their revenue into a new company to vampire into oblivion.
Come on over baby
Whole lotta quittin’ going on
Come on over baby
Baby you can’t go wrong
Ain’t no bullshittin’
Whole lotta quittin’ going on
Travel between worksites is on the clock.
We’ve demonstrated for years now that home is a worksite.
I’m happy to drive in to the company office from my personal office, so long as my commute time is on the clock.
Good luck with that. It never worked for me.
Isn’t that the law in Germany? Travel time from home too workplace is on the clock?
Nope. The place of work is named in the contract so you know what you get in to. If that place is 2h away, that’s your problem.
One more boss of Late stage capitalism
I used to wonder what specific things would drive someone to shoot up their workplace. Nowdays, it’s clear to me that people like Hock Tan are the reason.
Dude. No joke. I’ve been through a couple mergers at different companies. First time we had active shooter training a couple weeks before the announcement. I didn’t make the connection at first.
Fast forward a few years. I’m at a different company. HR announces active shooter training. A month later we get told about a buy out.
Fast forward even more. HR announces active shooter training. I tell all my colleagues get resumes ready. They thought I was nuts. Sure as shit a month after training CEO says he’s selling us off cause he wants to retire.
I truly don’t understand why this isn’t more obvious to the public. Thank you for giving some examples.
Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?
Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?
Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?
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”Collaboration is important and a key part of sustaining a culture with your peers, with your colleagues,” he said.”
”You might be able to execute your work on time and to standard in a remote environment, but what about your colleagues?,” wrote Jake Wood, CEO of software company Groundswell, on LinkedIn this summer. “Absent your presence, leadership, mentorship—can they thrive?”
Do they think that no one working remote talks to each other? Obviously they don’t actually think this, and this is all just a means to exert more control over their employees. I sure hope no one is falling for these “reasons” these CEOs keep spouting.
Everyone that still has a job, get your butt back to the office… not so fast you guys.
“No.”
@MicroWave the ones he didn’t lay off that is
I’ve got a 20 mile commute and that’s basically at the edge of what I’d be willing to do on a daily basis at this point. Sure 50 miles is fine once a week or whatever, but fuck if I’m putting in anything more than 39.9999999 hours if you’re expecting me to spend 2+ hours commuting every day (and 2 hours is basically assuming best case highway all the way scenario to come up with it only being 2 hours)!
I know this is the norm for a lot of people, but I’d have to be very desperate to do it again and people that were 100% WFH or worse yet hired to be WFH aren’t going to be willing to do it for long.
So their plan was to buy the name and get rid of employees? Looks expensive for that.
