this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Broadcom CEO tells VMWare workers to ‘get butt back to office’ after completing a $69 billion merger of the two companies::In a meeting on Tuesday after completing the $69 billion merger, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan told VMWare employees their days of working remotely were over.

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[–] [email protected] 85 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yay. Hope this turns out great for him.

[–] [email protected] 114 points 11 months ago (5 children)

It will. This is just more layoffs disguised as back to office. They'll lose a bunch of good workers, but they bought VMware for the customer base, not the workers.

America needs to start fighting for worker rights, it's just sad how little they have.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They'll lose a bunch of good workers

You're looking at it from the wrong angle: They're ditching anyone that won't lick boots

[–] namingthingsiseasy 11 points 11 months ago

They’ll lose a bunch of good workers, but they bought VMware for the customer base, not the workers.

Yeah, vmware has a pretty good stranglehold on companies using on-premises hardware.

My last job was like this. We had basically 2 sysadmins (now 1) that managed hundreds of servers for about 30+ research scientists. There was no way in hell that people were going to adopt kubernetes (nobody in the entire team had any expertise in containerization, let alone k8s), IaaS was too expensive for their meager budgets, and it's not like anyone is going to switch virtualization vendors.

So anyway, the writing is clearly on the wall for them. Pretty soon, you can be sure that the prices are going to get cranked waayyyy up. Current vmware customers will likely find themselves in a pretty unfortunate position soon.

Oh well. But this is what happens when you depend too much on commercial vendors.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Since they already deal with a fair few of VMware's customers themselves, I'd say they probably bought VMW to bolster it's software offerings. They seem to be wanting to get rid of a lot of the staff there, so customers tend to build relationships with their vendors, and burning those bridges ain't going to help there.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (6 children)

VMware is effectively a monopoly on entreprise virtualization. What else are the costumers going to pick?

HyperV is a joke, promox is amazing but it's free software, and every other relevant provider is just a layer on top of VMware.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don’t do virtualization at the enterprise level but why wouldn’t enterprise use KVM? Does VMWare have any advantage over it?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

VMware has the massive advantage that all the money you're throwing at them gives you support. Yes, communities can and do offer similar if not better support than paid offerings but tell that to the people who decide what software you're buying :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Aside from the fact that it runs on Windows, what makes HyperV so bad?

I've used it a bunch and it seems fine save for some weird quirks with OSs older than 2012 R2

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

We have several big clusters built on mixed virtual and bare metal. I would prefer our system engineer to manually build on virtualbox before even touching hyper-v (which we clearly don't!). For some political reasons our IT forced us to test to build a solution on hyper-v (cost saving on some non critical infrastructure proposed by some very non-tecnical people), I still have nightmares. I am not even the person who had to do it in practice.

It is long to explain it here, just give it a try. Windows server and all releted solutions are simply bad for real workloads. Who use it on server is just a company who doesn't need to be productive on the IT side. Their core business is not tech related and they don't care other than getting cheap sys admins

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well, I mean, that. It's very capable but Microsoft gimps it by bundling it with windows server. The fact you have to use RDP to administer it is itself a non-starter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You don't need to use RDP though. In fact, MS really wants you to use remote powershell or admin center.

Although you could also use whatever 3rd party remote tools you want because you're just running Windows Server

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Every shop I’ve been in that thought they needed VMware would have been just fine on HyperV.

It’s just name recognition.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 11 months ago

You've not seen a wide variety of "shops" then, clearly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

There’s also Nutanix.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I have a bit of insider knowledge on this, and you'd be surprised at how demented a CIO can be at getting away from a company that has pissed them off. VMware is no exception, and I personally know of 2 companies, which are top 5 in the world in their field, that have been exploring alternatives to VMware. The internal culture at VMW has been one of upping prices to match what broadcom will want for almost a year, and it's causing clients to go elsewhere. Companies with an effective monopoly can still fuck it all up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Citrix has xenserver. It's not bad at all.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Do workers in other countries have a right to work from home? I'm not trying to argue with you here, I think wfh is a good thing and forcing people back to the office is stupid, I've just never heard of anything like that.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Not really, but firing people isn't as easy as it is in the us

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Depends on their contract.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Broadcom CEO announces layoffs through obscurity.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

Constructive dismissal

[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago

Goodbye talent

[–] [email protected] 50 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Either they've already inked special exceptions with their top talent, or those guys are about to leave.

Can't imagine it's too big a pool of engineers at the very top of virtualization technology.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

On the other hand, they must think VMware portfolio is a rather stable set of solutions, while the bulk of innovation is moving towards kubernetes like solutions that they don't want to follow, as they are late and don't want to invest to build the know how.

They are considering to transform the business model more like oracle, sap, cisco, where the core business is sales not innovation. Their plan is probably that they have such a strong position in the market that talents are not needed, just average people who can patch out stuff somehow.

I have too much technical experience to agree with them that this is a good call. I believe it will be a disaster on the long run. But their background is clearly different, and they saw on the market a huge amount of successful companies with such business model. First among all pre-nadella Microsoft.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

They'll squeeze 5 years of blood from entrenched customers. That's enough of a win.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The absolute disrespect for workers. Why talk to them this way?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Because they don't see them as people, they see them as disposable assets and resources.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sloan School of Business... Every worker is a cog. Every worker must have a very narrow job to ensure replaceability and low wages.

VMware is on death row.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

VMware is not on death row. VMware is already dead. It no longer exists. All that's left is an entity possessing its corpse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Fair argument. The brain is dead but the body is still animated. Roting parts will start to fall off soon.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That way of treating the younger generation won't fly. The boomers put up with it, even some gen x. But the millennials and zoomers are all about workers rights. This dude is about to find out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I fear that enough people will keep working that it won’t matter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

And they will, but a huge difference in innovation when the majority don't want to be there. Quality will probably start to dip first. Then attrition will rise slowly. It won't happen over night butbas the market improves, the bleeding will begin.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So time to devalue their company after purchasing? Aiming for tax writeoffs?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Literally trying to get people to quit so they don't have to fire them because it is more expensive.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I'm sure that's part of the plan, but this counts as constructive dismissal in most jurisdictions. IOW, they are entitled to unemployment benefits.

The ones that simply find a better job are a different story. That's the Dead Sea Effect.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

git commit -m "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago

To quote a line from Star Wars, "This deal is getting worse all the time!"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Guess which of your competitors offer remote working and has a product that smokes you?

Haven't touched VMware for years Hyper-V does everything I need.

Now with Azure I don't even need to manage the virtualisation just use an arm template to spin something up in 2 secs. I know Azure compute uses something based off Hyper-V, haven't really used AWS, does Amazon use technology from VMware for their virtualisation?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

AWS is all in house but similar to open stack. Enterprises use VMware. But that's been dropping a lot for like a decade. Containers won a long time ago.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


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.

Insurance company Farmers Group faced an outcry from employees when new CEO Raul Vargas reversed his predecessor’s remote work policy.

In KPMG’s annual CEO survey, 90% of respondents said they’d reward employees who make an effort to come into the office with “favorable assignments, raises or promotions.” Others have tried to spin it as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good of the company.

“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.

While Tan admitted ERGs, which provide support for groups of underrepresented employees, weren’t part of Broadcom’s culture, he said he was open to them.

Many of Broadcom’s employees will move into VMWare’s Palo Alto, Calif. headquarters, which ironically had been largely empty thanks to its longstanding remote work policy, according to the San Francisco Standard.


The original article contains 729 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago