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.
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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Sounds like a whole lot o’ quittin’ time to me.
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.
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.
Good luck with that. It never worked for me.
I’m re-evaluating my use of VMWare products now, that’s for sure.
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.
XCP-ng is a good alternative. ProxMox is good for home labs.
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.
One more boss of Late stage capitalism
“No.”
Everyone that still has a job, get your butt back to the office… not so fast you guys.
@MicroWave the ones he didn’t lay off that is
”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.
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.
What a douche, lay off a bunch of employees, then put the screws to the remaining ones.
I can’t wait for tech workers to unionize and start putting these scumbags in their place.
