this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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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.

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[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 114 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How To Lose Your Top Employees 101

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 46 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

This is why publicly traded companies are trash. No long term vision.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Thoth19@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Software dev, and yes we're hiring. DM me.

[–] chunkystyles@sopuli.xyz 3 points 9 months ago

But is the company publicly traded?

[–] AlecSadler@lemmy.world 54 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hahaha.

  1. Fuck off

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. There are a significant increase in distractions, long lunches, arriving late, leaving early (to name a few) = significant decrease in productivity / output.

  5. 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.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ElectricCattleman@lemmy.world 4 points 9 months ago

I almost forgot about that... Shudder no less efficient way to do something.

[–] 0xF21D@infosec.pub 53 points 9 months ago (9 children)

I’m re-evaluating my use of VMWare products now, that’s for sure.

[–] SheeEttin@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 0xF21D@infosec.pub 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Give Proxmox a burl, very nice.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 1 points 9 months ago

There's a vmware converter

[–] SapphironZA@lemmings.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] Mereo@lemmy.ca 7 points 9 months ago

Proxmox to the rescue.

[–] SeaJ@lemm.ee 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

XCP-ng is a good alternative. ProxMox is good for home labs.

[–] SapphironZA@lemmings.world 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] 0xF21D@infosec.pub 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks I will check those out.

[–] pelya@lemmy.world -3 points 9 months ago

Do they have other products aside from their premium Virtualbox skin?

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] TallonMetroid@lemmy.world 47 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Get your butts back in the office so that you can spend all day in Zoom meetings. Thanks but no thanks.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] Xariphon@kbin.social 38 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Sounds like a whole lot o' quittin' time to me.

[–] Tikiporch@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Moneo@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] eltrain123@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Not only that, they'll lost their best talent first

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

This is called the "dead Sea effect".

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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

[–] chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 9 months ago

One more boss of Late stage capitalism

[–] Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] Zipitydew@sh.itjust.works 5 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

I truly don't understand why this isn't more obvious to the public. Thank you for giving some examples.

[–] SapphironZA@lemmings.world 1 points 9 months ago

Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?

[–] SapphironZA@lemmings.world 0 points 9 months ago

Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?

[–] SapphironZA@lemmings.world 0 points 9 months ago

Can active shooter training consist of giving the shooter directions on where the CEO and board is currently located?

[–] Illuminostro@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago
[–] tjhart85@kbin.social 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

Everyone that still has a job, get your butt back to the office... not so fast you guys.

[–] nilesingalls@mastodon.social 5 points 9 months ago

@MicroWave the ones he didn't lay off that is

[–] girlfreddy@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago