[HN Gopher] Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closin...
___________________________________________________________________
Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 239 points
Date : 2023-11-27 18:48 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| ska wrote:
| Least surprising headline of the day?
| p1esk wrote:
| Are there any surprising headlines today?
| rilindo wrote:
| As a public cloud engineer, it feels like this is a mistake to
| cut deeply right when cloud repatriation is starting to be a
| thing.
| wmf wrote:
| Why bother repatriating to VMware? It's probably more
| expensive.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. 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 wrote:
| Most 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.
| wmf wrote:
| Right, but those companies don't benefit from repatriation.
| Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.
|
| Not really. Most of those companies have lax Cloud Cost
| Management hygiene and/or the Cloud Platform team is
| separate from the Infra/Servers team.
|
| If you are F250 you can probably negotiate a nice
| discount if you are able to fully migrate to a single
| cloud, but most companies don't want to keep all their
| eggs in a single basket. This means larger organizations
| cannot avail competitive discounts on public cloud.
|
| By bundling Private Cloud (VMWare ESXi), Network Security
| (VMWare NSX), APM (CA Wiley), Endpoint Protection
| (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security (Symantec
| Enterprise) I can purchase 5 critical pieces of
| Enterprise Infrastructure using a single PO. This is
| critical at large organizations as any PO above $30k
| almost always requires CFO or Comptroller approval, and a
| single PO to Broadcom satisfies your Infra, DevOps, and
| Security needs (which are all cost centers if you aren't
| a tech company).
|
| Btw, Broadcom themselves is almost entirely on GCP [0].
| Almost all their infra and products are served using a
| GCP stack on the backend.
|
| [0] - https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-
| transformation-journ...
| wmf wrote:
| Who do you work for BTW?
| alephnerd wrote:
| PE/VC in the Enterprise space now. I used to be a PM and
| SWE and a staffer for a hot second. Not at Broadcom but
| have worked closely with their team and alumni. The
| Enterprise Infra space is a small world.
|
| Edit: Also, I didn't realize I'm replying to an actual
| legend in the systems/networking space. I read some of
| your papers when I was an undergrad and later as an early
| career SWE.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000
| - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS
| pricing many times, mostly because of ability to burst
| etc. But the VMware workloads are often much flatter in
| terms of demand - ie, many systems just left running so
| the AWS value - while there of course, isn't as obvious
| to me.
| alephnerd wrote:
| "In the cloud" options are often much more expensive than
| what they should be due to customer expectations. The
| margins are much higher than in on-prem (where 80%
| "discounts" are common).
| tempnow987 wrote:
| Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem
| pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other
| costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In
| others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc.
|
| Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6
| CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the
| software side which is a good deal to get started. That
| leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a
| slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware
| is not unreasonable.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for
| AWS
|
| If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most
| companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud
| presence.
|
| The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment
| (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes
| forever and is costly.
|
| It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom -
| but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering
| leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team.
|
| I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be
| entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of
| scalability, but you can't expect a company like
| UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud
| first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a
| minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute
| and litigation.
|
| Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of
| non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in
| 2023, it's still work in progress.
| crmd wrote:
| Every single one of those F1000's has a highly competent
| CTO office team with an effectively unlimited hc and budget
| to find a competitive alternative platform to ESX. I don't
| know if Broadcom is gonna make their money back before open
| source gets good enough.
| sithadmin wrote:
| There isn't a 'competitive alternative platform' that
| achieves feature or performance parity with ESXi.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Every single one of those F1000's has a highly
| competent CTO office team
|
| I agree
|
| > effectively unlimited hc and budget
|
| I disagree.
|
| A company like Google or FB can build in-house tooling
| simply because they have entire dedicated teams of
| engineers to manage their environments in house to meet
| niche needs. A F10 like ExxonMobil or UnitedHealth cannot
| justify a FB size engineering footprint when their
| margins are much lower.
|
| > find a competitive alternative platform to ESX
|
| Yep. The issue is ESX is actually pretty good at getting
| the job done. Your alternatives from a supportability
| standpoint are HyperV from Microsoft (which will probably
| eat up the smaller ESX customers), Citrix Hypervisor
| (owned and operated by ex-Broadcom leadership), and IBM
| RedHat's KVM (which requires you to work with IBM for
| Professional Services).
|
| At the end of the day, you as a CTO or Platform team
| don't want to be fully OSS. Not because OSS is crap
| software (anything but), but because a pure OSS play
| doesn't provide you a dedicated support engineering team
| if shit hits the fan nor SLAs and monetary compensation
| if shit breaks.
|
| This is why most OSS core companies max out revenue via a
| Professional Services play. RedHat is a notable example
| of this.
| riemannzeta wrote:
| I have heard this colorfully and memorably referred to as
| "the need for a single throat to choke."
| alephnerd wrote:
| Pretty much
| alephnerd wrote:
| Broadcom's strategy is to remove sustaining engineering or
| deprecate product lines with limited uptake by F1000 customers.
|
| Also, VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim. I've worked closely with
| teams and alumni of Broadcom/Avago, VMWare, CA Technologies,
| and Symantec, and honestly, the cuts Broadcom does are pretty
| reasonable.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim
|
| Oh, VMware is the 2nd shortest job in my career, primarily
| for that reason.
|
| I don't want to say much in a public forum, but my best
| lesson from working at VMware is how to sniff out an
| incompetent engineer early in a job interview: I just ask
| coding questions that a VMWare engineer would get wrong.
|
| For example:
|
| I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data
| mapping code. If the candidate really pushes back, or just
| can't figure it out, I move on.
|
| I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum
| instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move on.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I used to do that as well when I was still a SWE and then a
| PM. VMWare has good talent (when I first became a PM a long
| time ago, I was mentored by a very smart VMWare PM alum),
| but it also has a lot of empire building (when I first
| became a SWE a large portion of my management was VMWare EM
| alumni who weren't that impressive).
|
| Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit
| wonders in my experience working with them.
|
| It reminds me of how PANW was before Arora joined and
| cleaned house, and Symantec/CA before Broadcom cleaned
| house.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit
| wonders in my experience working with them.
|
| And many of those one hits were ideas crafted and handed
| to them for implementation (still valuable and
| important), but left to distill ideas on their own? Not
| so much.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| > I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum
| instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move
| on.
|
| I'm confused by this. You're saying you move on if the
| engineer uses an enum as you would expect?
| akira2501 wrote:
| Incompetent managers seem to love shorthand "competency"
| tests like this.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| You're not confused. As the OP indicated, he was once a
| VMWare engineer, so he gets his own questions wrong.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data
| mapping code._
|
| Do people usually have the SQL language so well memorized
| that they can pull it out of their head on command? I swear
| to god I'm not the only engineer who regularly goes to the
| cheat sheet.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| As with any language, developers who use SQL a lot do
| memorize it. Maybe not every bit of it but all the
| commonly used bits. I used to write SQL and PL/SQL every
| day at work and I got to the point where I rarely needed
| to consult the manual.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> As with any language, developers who use SQL a lot do
| memorize it. _
|
| If you're hiring for a SQL developer I guess it makes
| sense, buit I use SQL about once every 6-12 months or so,
| so if you hit me with SQL queries on the spot I'll fail
| your interview for sure.
|
| Honestly, I find interviews that revolve around
| memorizing and regurgitating some programing language
| syntax trivia a bit shit.
|
| Wouldn't it be better testing for critical thinking and
| problem solving skills instead of shit people google
| anyway?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you're not hiring a SQL developer I agree it doesn't
| make sense to ask them memory questions about SQL. But it
| does make sense to ask them memory questions about
| whatever it is they claim to know. A developer who has to
| google the basics is not going to be very good at problem
| solving.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| People doing whiteboard coding should not have to get the
| syntax 100% (or even 80%) correct. It should be enough to
| just show conceptual understanding of what kinds of
| syntactical elements and concepts are present in the
| language. When I trained for giving interviews @ Google,
| this was emphasized, at least. It's not about getting the
| syntax exactly right, it's about getting the algorithm
| right. Though obviously if someone is getting something
| fundamental wrong, it raises eyebrows.
|
| If I were interviewing for database/SQL work, I'd be
| personally probing around understanding of the relational
| data model, not specifics of SQL syntax. How would you
| model this table? What's a join? What's normalization?
| What's wrong, conceptually, with the following schema?
| etc
| bluGill wrote:
| When I give coding interviews I often jump in with "it
| doesn't compile because you forgot the semicolon at". The
| tools we use don't make it easy for me to fix such
| mistakes and it doesn't pay to waste their time to search
| out a mistake I (as an observer) already happened to know
| - I want to see their algorithm work so we can move on
| (or see how they debug why it isn't working yet depending
| on what phase we are in). I don't really care how long it
| takes you to find that missing semicolon - we all make
| that mistake once in a while and there isn't much to
| learn from it.
| rf15 wrote:
| I have to use SQL like 1-3 times a month and can confirm
| that the syntactic inconsistencies of the language make
| me go to the cheat sheet regularly.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _Do people usually have the SQL language so well
| memorized that they can pull it out of their head on
| command? I swear to god I 'm not the only engineer who
| regularly goes to the cheat sheet._
|
| I think the key insight for you here is that there are
| many jobs where the _only_ technical skill used is SQL.
| You probably _should_ know this stuff like the back of
| your hand for such roles. Old, slow moving, large
| companies have _many_ people doing this sort of work.
|
| Contrast with a generic "developer" at some startup who
| uses SQL as only one part of much larger and more complex
| applications.
|
| As a "developer" you have to deal with so much obscure
| syntax in your life (actual programming languages,
| shells, dockerfiles, kubernetes yaml, helm, god knows how
| many 3rd party APIs, ci/cd definitions, other rando
| DSLs...) that you won't be able to keep everything in
| working memory.
| vel0city wrote:
| Any time I've participated in a technical interview as an
| interviewer we've had the candidate have full access to a
| computer and web browser.
|
| I don't expect everyone to have everything memorized or
| get it right on the first try, but if you don't even know
| what questions to ask or what resources to confer with,
| I'm usually concerned if the candidate will be a good
| fit. The candidate can't be expected to instantly warp to
| the solution but they need to show they can begin to find
| the path.
| stillwithit wrote:
| As an EE, when someone explains they need SQL, all the
| other hallucinated semantic handlebars to compute, I move
| on.
|
| Abacus, slide rule, grid paper, mechanical pencil, or gtfo!
|
| IT is data librarian work. I compute with raw materials of
| reality, not 1970s semantic babble. Software as an industry
| has a lot of fat to cut.
|
| ...The argument can work from various contexts. Not the
| flex you think it is.
| adolph wrote:
| If said candidate's whiteboard response doesn't use at
| least two main spurving bearings, culture fit comes into
| question.
| broast wrote:
| Unfortunately it sounds like you're filtering on things
| that can be easily taught.
| esafak wrote:
| I think the idea is that if they don't know something
| basic you can forget about the hard stuff.
| didibus wrote:
| Incompetent engineers and fat to trim I feel are seperate
| issues.
|
| Layoffs seem pretty bad at identifying the incompetent from
| the competent from my experience. It seems to cut on all
| front, you're not sure if you're left with the best or the
| worse ones, but you saved a lot of payroll cost either way.
|
| Or if you try to handicap teams by understaffing them, even
| competent engineers will need to reduce the quality of
| their output. This is when fat is trimmed in a bad way,
| where instead of getting rid of low ROI
| venture/projects/services/products and focus on the
| important, you just tighten the budgets accross the board
| for example.
| Icathian wrote:
| I can't speak for the whole org, but my small corner of
| VMware got cut far more than was reasonable. We already ran
| very lean, and with the losses there will be no new features
| on our product for a very long time, if ever. Best we can
| hope for is maintenance unless they're planning to staff back
| up down the line (they're not).
| alephnerd wrote:
| > Best we can hope for is maintenance
|
| This is probably what's going to happen. Companies like
| Broadcom and PANW want pretty high margins on their product
| lines, so they're pretty mercenary in getting it done.
|
| If you got an offer letter, you should probably survive if
| you can justify your value over the next few months (in my
| experience w/ M&A)
| Icathian wrote:
| I got an offer letter, but I've already got an offer
| elsewhere and will be leaving shortly. I'm not interested
| in picking up the pieces of the mess they've made. It
| just makes me very sad, my team was amazing and deserved
| better.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Yep. If I was in your shoes I'd leave as well. If you got
| a very competitive stock grant, that means they really
| want you. If not, best to leave elsewhere.
| redwood wrote:
| Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? I've seen evidence of
| it being a useful threat, just as multi-cloud is. The company
| that most publicly "did it" ended up plateauing as they stopped
| innovating on anything other than that backend migration and
| plus they likely would have gotten the cost they looked for
| from the hyperscalers if they'd continued to negotiate. But
| maybe I'm missing something?
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Have you seen evidence that it's a thing?
|
| Only anecdotally - though the stuff I've seen is more about
| undoing the mistake of letting _anyone_ at the company run-up
| massive bills on cloud-only big-data-processing (CosmosDB,
| Data Lake, etc).
|
| The only other "repatriation" movement I've seen are orgs who
| got burned by limitations and glitches in things like
| OneDrive/GoogleDrive - again, this doesn't really come under
| VMware's remit.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| The other big thing to realize is that for VMware, and Red
| Hat (I used to work on the OpenShift team) is that cloud
| might be big, but our last estimates were that 80% of our
| workloads and capacity were on-prem/hybrid, not cloud.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| I've had the pleasure of contracting on a cloud migration
| project, and then a little while later an on-prem migration
| for the same project. I helped that company build a cost
| model for comparing their on-prem and cloud workloads, and
| they ended up moving quite a bit back on-prem. Even for the
| workloads they didn't move, having a better way of comparing
| on-prem and cloud TCOs helped them negotiate much better
| pricing for their remaining cloud workloads.
|
| One legitimate challenge is that it's actually rather
| difficult to measure the TCO of each option. I've seen
| companies pushed to get better at that as they experience
| cloud sticker shock, and as large enterprise pushes more and
| more work to the cloud, I'd expect to see them continue to
| improve in this area.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > cloud repatriation
|
| You can repatriate VMWare VMs from someone else's datacenter to
| your datacenter. You might even be able to do it with little
| downtime. (I vaguely remember that VMWare has 0-downtime
| movement of a VM among physical hardware.)
| woleium wrote:
| its called vmotion iirc, and it costs more money than we had
| when i looked at it
| auspiv wrote:
| vMotion. works great
| nolist_policy wrote:
| There's nothing special about live migration, really. The
| major implementations (VMWare, Hyper-V, KVM/Qemu, Xen, ...)
| support it for a long time, including shared-nothing
| migration.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that this happening besides random
| anecdotes?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Acquiring and gutting is the Broadcom way.
| outside1234 wrote:
| But this isn't semiconductors.
|
| This will just end up with Microsoft taking all of their
| customers away.
| stackskipton wrote:
| As 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.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Middle management is getting squeezed in a lot of firms.
| Risk averse management won't cut it, IMO.
| bluGill wrote:
| Today... 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 wrote:
| Sure 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.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| That's like saying all Oracle customers are leaving for
| Postgres. VMWare moat is deep.
| mobilio wrote:
| Link:
|
| https://archive.md/V9Y67
| deburo wrote:
| Cost cutting or killing a competitor (does they own another
| virtual host company?)?
| alephnerd wrote:
| Broadcom 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"
| cbsks wrote:
| I interviewed at VMware a couple of years ago. Bullet dodged!
| geodel wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Have you found public companies with generous stock comp that
| allow full remote?
| chihuahua wrote:
| Depending on what exactly qualifies as "generous":
| ZipRecruiter, GE Healthcare, Cloudflare, Atlassian.
| chihuahua wrote:
| I 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.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Probably going to lose the other half promptly as well to be
| honest. I mean, seriously, who wants to work for Broadcom?
| jsdwarf wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| About 20,000 people according to Wikipedia...
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| BRCM 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.
| natbennett wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| People who were not given an offer letter.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Reading 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 wrote:
| Or someone in their late 50s might be ready to retire (or work
| part-time independently) for the right buyout offer.
| bluGill wrote:
| I 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)
| bdcravens wrote:
| In related news, water is still wet.
| factlogic wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| Yep. Broadcom pays Google level but with much less fat and
| demanding an AWS style work ethic.
| vkdelta wrote:
| they 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 wrote:
| First, 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?
| ultrarunner wrote:
| > Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?
|
| I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare.
| Whether that counts as "the cloud" or not is up to you, but
| virtualization within datacenter is pretty standard.
|
| For what it's worth, every experience I've ever had with
| Broadcom in the embedded space has been negative. So this came
| initially as a disappointment, and now I'm disheartened to see
| my expectations were accurate.
| redundantly wrote:
| > I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare.
|
| This is highly unlikely. VMware is too expensive for a VPS
| provider to achieve profitability.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It seems highly unlikely they're not successful and selling
| for $64 billion. I don't get it either :/
| brianwawok wrote:
| F500 companies are paying them millions in licenses to
| save 10x their hardware cost.
| depereo wrote:
| I don't know if it's 'most' but there's plenty of large
| private-cloud B2B setups offering vm-as-a-service / esxi-as-
| a-service or something frontended by vmware cloud director.
| Definitely to the tune of billions of annual revenue
| worldwide.
| alwaysrunning wrote:
| >I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition
| finishes.
|
| Planning layoffs is typically part of the M&A process, so when
| it completes, they typically already know who is going to be
| let go and drop the axe at that point.
| alephnerd wrote:
| The people making the cutting decisions are also a removed
| from individual IC level visibility. These cuts are often
| done based on financial metrics per product line.
|
| You could be an amazing engineer and have a well engineered
| product, but still get laid off because the product didn't
| get market traction.
|
| I've been on both sides of the equation. It sucks but such is
| life sadly.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| And ability doesn't fit in the spreadsheet they use to
| calculate their target profitability.
|
| They are going to cut expenses by 40% and increase costs of
| their products by 20%.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is the point of lay offs. They are not saying you
| are bad they are saying they don't need someone in your
| position.
|
| sometimes a company will let managers in a different
| department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and
| ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > sometimes a company will let managers in a different
| department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and
| ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though.
|
| Depends on the kind of layoff. If it's strategic M&A
| related this happens fairly often. If it's purely a cost
| cutting hail mary, then not as much.
| comprev wrote:
| There's probably some legal loophole by which _technically_
| the employees have a contract with a new company after the
| merge, since their old employer no longer exists on paper.
|
| This means employees get let go with legal bare minimum
| compensation and have little (if any) legal position to fight
| back.
|
| Immoral but not illegal.
| umanwizard wrote:
| In the U.S. (where VMware is based), virtually all jobs can
| fire you for no reason at will. Contractually guaranteed
| jobs are rare.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > This means employees get let go with legal bare minimum
| compensation and have little (if any) legal position to
| fight back.
|
| I don't know what country you're posting this from, but in
| the US none of this matters, and it does not apply. When
| someone is let go there is no "legal bare minimum
| compensation." There are some notice requirements (e.g. the
| WARN act), and many companies will pay out compensation in
| lieu of notice if the WARN act applies, but an acquisition
| makes no difference to these notice requirements.
| comprev wrote:
| In the UK we do have some protections depending on length
| of time with the company. There is some framework for
| redundancy payments.
|
| The US culture of "at will employment" (i.e fire you on
| the spot for little reason) gives me anxiety and I don't
| even live there!
| bluGill wrote:
| There are pros and cons. The ability to lay someone off
| quickly means someone in the US can risk hiring a bunch
| of people on a risky bet - if/when they give up on the
| project they can let the people go and cut their losses.
| Some of those risky bets pay off though and the people
| are not laid off.
|
| Note that I said lay off not fire above. There is an
| important legal difference.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Sure is nice when you hire a bad employee
| olliej wrote:
| sure is nice when you have a bad employer
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| vmware is very popular in the private IAAS space. If you have
| special legal requirements but are too small a fish for the big
| players to spend time catering to, this is where you end up.
| IAAS operators that are competent at operations and business
| logic but not necessarily having the engineering talent needed
| to run a kvm fleet.
| natbennett wrote:
| They sell the tools to build private clouds.
| hello_moto wrote:
| VMWare is used in the cloud as an alternative option from
| docker container.
|
| VMWare is also diving into K8S space, I'm sure they have some
| sort of "managed" service offering that bundles their K8S
| solution.
|
| VMWare owns Spring Framework... that's a cloud toolkit.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Vmware bought heptio and with that things like their managed
| control plane (a la Google's Anthos) and other k8s stuff. I
| think most of those folks are gone now though
| natbennett wrote:
| The headline folks from Heptio are gone but the products
| and staff are still there. They've gotten a lot of internal
| transfers from other parts of VMware.
| rf15 wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out the Spring connection... I wonder how
| that will impact their development.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > 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.
| nektro wrote:
| when will these layoffs stop?
| gnicholas wrote:
| When morale improves.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Probably 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 wrote:
| When tech companies get back to pre pandemic staffing levels?
| calderwoodra wrote:
| My 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.
| gsich wrote:
| Broadcom will ruin it. Nothing good comes out of that company.
| trhway wrote:
| Here at Palo Alto campus Broadcom over the weekend covered the
| VMWare logos at the campus entry points with cloth sheaths with
| the Broadcom logos. Looks cheap and rushed. Sound like what I
| heard about Broadcom :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-27 23:00 UTC)