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Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 1letterunixname 3y agoFun fact 0: Much of VMware's practical success was born out of its sales and consulting arm that was born out of the subsuming of an East Coast consulting company. (A long time ago, I found a deep link to an IT shop redirect mentioned somewhere on early documentation or in a support article.) Fun fact 1: Between VMware and Citrix, there was an unspoken gentleman's agreement that piracy in the service of the industry and functional interoperability was OK. Licensing became nag-based because of the pushback from customers who experienced hard licensing restrictions interfering with critical business operations. Fun fact 2: One of VMware's office moves was blocks away around Palo Alto. Legend has it, some servers were kept running by migrating to/from standalone UPSes and datacenter PDUs one PSU at a time. Fun fact 3: VMware Workstation was usable and interesting in 2000. Fun fact 4: VMware's early story is almost as desperate as Dropbox's and Cisco's. All 3 could make interesting Netflix docudramas. Fun fact 5: VMware's ~2015 microkitchens were better than Facebooks. Breadracks of jars of tasty snacks from wall to wall. Fun fact 6: Most of VMware Workstation and Fusion yearly major versions skew to UI/UX and theme changes rather than functionality improvements because of incredibly lean, under-resourced teams. Disclaimer: Once upon a time (c. 2004), {{big name university}} paid me to go to in-person training and pass the VCP exam. LOL.
- scaramanga 3y agoSurprised their union agreed to this given the extraordinary profits being made...
- johnmdesjardins 3y agoFiring people is how corporations fund M&A. It creates an ILLUSION of growth for investors. The layoffs inevitably impact the business and that LOB's revenues will soften or decline over time as customers get frustrated with lower quality and poor service, and as they have fewer people advocating, selling, etc. This is why M&A is, on balance, a JOB DESTRUCTION ENGINE.
- deburo 3y agoCost cutting or killing a competitor (does they own another virtual host company?)?
- alephnerd 3y agoBroadcom is almost 50% Hardware and 50% Enterprise SaaS (CA Technologies' APM product line, Symantec's EPP product line, and now VMWare's entire private cloud product line) by revenue. I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom did this acquisition in order to pull of a HP/HPE type split. Broadcom alumni did a similar thing with Citrix, TIBCO, and NetScaler merging into the "Cloud Security Group"
- ska 3y agoLeast surprising headline of the day?
- p1esk 3y agoAre there any surprising headlines today?
- rilindo 3y agoAs a public cloud engineer, it feels like this is a mistake to cut deeply right when cloud repatriation is starting to be a thing.
- asylteltine 3y agoCloud repatriation is a myth perpetuated by consulting companies to get more hours. No one is seriously considering moving off the cloud
- Jordanpomeroy 3y agoFalse
- LargeTomato 3y ago[flagged]
- allenrb 3y agoI honestly cannot tell if this comment is a joke or not.
- wmf 3y agoWhy bother repatriating to VMware? It's probably more expensive.
- ghaff 3y agoYeah. Repatriation is probably an overstated trend even if companies are generally getting smarter about where and how they run workloads. But, while it's hard to migrate companies off VMware to a different on-prem solution, I'm not sure that you'll see workloads being repatriated going onto VMware (unless the company already has a large installed base).
- alephnerd 3y agoMost F1000s use ESXi by default. You can concentrate only on direct sales to F1000s and make more than enough revenue. Look at Zscaler and Crowdstrike for examples - both follow this strategy. As a business, you optimize for Net Revenue after Cost of Operation. It's always good to drop customers if it costs more to support them than the revenue you get.
- ReptileMan 3y agoIn my low labor cost neck of the woods VMware employ a lot of people. I wonder if they will pick up hiring and shift work from US/UK here or will decimate the current offices too. Or both and work current people here to the bone. It's broadcom after all.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoAcquiring and gutting is the Broadcom way.
- outside1234 3y agoBut this isn't semiconductors. This will just end up with Microsoft taking all of their customers away.
- stackskipton 3y agoAs former admin of both, HyperV is nowhere near as good as VMware ESXi offering. Also, switching Hypervisors at F1000 is such a massive project that no risk adverse manager is going to sign off on it. I've been at F1000 with ESXi clusters, they had 20 racks full of blades/switches/SANs that made up 4000 core cluster. They will ride or die ESXi no matter how hard VMware screws them over.
- bluGill 3y agoToday... However if Microsoft (or someone unknown) works hard for a while they can build a more compelling offering and get F1000 to switch over the next 10-20 years.
- stackskipton 3y agoSure but until then, they can squeeze the hell out of F1000s. Problem with creating competitive offering is F1000 are not going to take risk on you. Last thing CIO wants to remember for is someone who greenlit moving core infrastructure to product that went under. They also need to provide decent support so startup today has about 15 years before they even think of breaking into this market. So it's got to be a major player like Microsoft who seems to not care about this market because Azure. Nutanix is there but they are all in hyperconverged meaning traditional compute/storage separated hardware would have to be thrown out. Red Hat exited in 2020. So I don't see a competitor on the horizon.
- mobilio 3y agoLink: https://archive.md/V9Y67 https://archive.md/V9Y67
- cbsks 3y agoI interviewed at VMware a couple of years ago. Bullet dodged!
- chihuahua 3y agoI interviewed there a few weeks ago. They mentioned the pending acquisition, and said they had been trying to fill as many positions as possible before that event. They would continue interviewing candidates, but if they wanted to make an offer, that offer would have to wait until after the acquisition completed. I found a job elsewhere in the meantime, so it's not relevant to me anymore.
- geodel 3y agoI think they allow(ed) permanent remote positions. For someone who care (like me!) it maybe worth quite a bit. So far I am stuck with this RTO mandate in most places.
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoHave you found public companies with generous stock comp that allow full remote?
- chihuahua 3y agoDepending on what exactly qualifies as "generous": ZipRecruiter, GE Healthcare, Cloudflare, Atlassian.
- TimMontague 3y agoNVIDIA has fully remote positions.
- unmole 3y agoArista has fully remote positions globally.
- outside1234 3y agoProbably going to lose the other half promptly as well to be honest. I mean, seriously, who wants to work for Broadcom?
- brcmthrowaway 3y agoBRCM comp is about 50% stock, and the stock has been a runaway hit in the last few years. So a lot of people. They also gave crazy 4 years of RSU grants in one hit right before COVID.
- jsdwarf 3y agoThere are golden handcuffs called RSUs, shares that are distributed to employees over a longer period of time. The longer you stay, the more shares you get ;-)
- natbennett 3y agoI know a surprising number of people who hope that Broadcom will be better managed than VMware and that it’ll be easier to get good work done there. Mostly folks who came into VMware through acquisitions and then had layers and layers of VMware management piled on top of them.
- uxp8u61q 3y agoAbout 20,000 people according to Wikipedia...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- natbennett 3y agoIs this reporting that Broadcom is implementing the layoffs that were announced through the offer letter process? Or are they laying off people who they already gave an offer letter?
- x3n0ph3n3 3y agoPeople who were not given an offer letter.
- HenryBemis 3y agoReading the dear John letter it reminded me of two of the companies I worked in the past that wanted to reduce their staff, and they were looking for volunteers. In both cases I found better AND god a very decent payout. I understand that someone in their late 50s may not see this as a blessing, but imagine getting another job and a 15% raise and 5-10-20 salaries (gross) in your pocket (as a great sign-off bonus). I see this a free money!
- ghaff 3y agoOr someone in their late 50s might be ready to retire (or work part-time independently) for the right buyout offer.
- bluGill 3y agoI know I'm hoping that in my late 50s / early 60s my company goes through a round of voluntary layoffs. It remains to be seen how good my 401k and other retirement plans do over the years in between - I can't afford to retire today, but there is a good chance that by 60 I could do so. Having see several relatives die at 64-65 recently I'm not interested in working longer (family history suggests overall I'll have an average lifespan: 78-79 - but the normal bell curves start showing death at 64 is not an outlier)
- ghaff 3y agoIt absolutely depends. Someone can be in a situation where they can prefer their job than an alternative. But, for a lot of people, well it's "work" even if they're generally OK with it. And if they can afford to do something they prefer--especially given possible keeping toe in the river options--why not?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bdcravens 3y agoIn related news, water is still wet.
- factlogic 3y agoIt also has to be reported that those who are staying as a part of the newly formed Vmware (under broadcom) has been offered a very lucrative and generous pay packages and welcome grants . Especially at levels 5 and above it reaches close to a million dollars of RSU . This is in addition to existing VMware stock that employees have.
- alephnerd 3y agoYep. Broadcom pays Google level but with much less fat and demanding an AWS style work ethic.
- stingraycharles 3y ago“with much less fat and demanding an AWS style work ethic” What does that mean? I can’t tell if that’s a positive or a negative.
- tonyedgecombe 3y agoIt means they want to squeeze every last drop of blood out of you. Expect stress related health problems, family breakdown and career ending burnout.
- vkdelta 3y agothey might as well add NCNR (No Cancellation, No Return) and million dollars engagement NREs while they are at it. if you have BRCM as your key supplier, you better plan to keep them for life as otherwise.
- nerdjon 3y agoFirst, question: > Several top VMware executives have left the cloud-computing company over the past year. Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? I am now reaching out to friends to see if everyone is ok, this sucks. I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes. Wouldn't you first expect that people are going to leave just due to them being bought and then do additional cuts if necessary after that? I feel like that has always been the strategy with acquisitions minus redundancy like HR. Otherwise this is a big moral hit, first being bought and then an acquisition at the same time? Who would stay after that?
- IshKebab 3y ago> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? That's like 90% of what they do now. They actually make that really clear with little cloud icons on the "Product" menu on their homepage.
- geodel 3y ago> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company? Well they have this Pivotal Cloud / Cloud Foundry /VMware Tanzu crap. I know this isn't what people mean when they talk about "cloud company" but it works as "private cloud" in enterprises.
- grepfru_it 3y ago>crap What do you suggest as a replacement to CF and Tanzu?
- Stranger43 3y agoWe have had sales people trying to push this to us for the last few years and so far it's been ridiculously priced and nobody seems to come up with plausible real life success stories. My impression is that vmware have had almost no traction for any product beyond stock vsphere and even there the API's see very little use as most customers prefer to point and click in the web interface and are basically happy with what vmware delivered a decade ago in terms of features, but people in this market are also loyal to vmware as it's the known way to get virtualization to smaller server rooms.
- nektro 3y agowhen will these layoffs stop?
- gnicholas 3y agoWhen morale improves.
- brailsafe 3y agoIronically, after getting laid off 8 months ago after some other acquisition, my morale improved dramatically, but it would be good to have an income.
- Ancalagon 3y agoProbably not until interest rates come down or plateau for a long time at the least. Arguably this layoff was more because of the merger though and less because of the economy at broad.
- HDThoreaun 3y agoWhen tech companies get back to pre pandemic staffing levels?
- gopher2000 3y agoThis is standard procedure for Broadcom and acquisitions. Not necessarily a symptom of industry conditions.
- oofta-boofta 3y ago[dead]
- calderwoodra 3y agoMy friend has been feeding me information about the acquisition for almost a year now. They work at VMware and they knew about the layoffs months ago. Apparently another layoff is coming in 3 months or so with a better package and my friend was estatic to make it past this round and to be included in the next round.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pokstad 3y agoThe new American dream: holding out for the better layoff package.
- geraldwhen 3y agoIs that not your dream? Why work for years when you can receive years worth of pay in a single paycheck? A good layoff package can advance retirement age significantly.
- bagels 3y agoIt's more typically a month or two of pay.
- LargeTomato 3y agoI only pocket about 20% of my paycheck after mortgage and other expenses. 4 paychecks is 20 months of extra pay.
- gsich 3y agoBroadcom will ruin it. Nothing good comes out of that company.