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.
How To Lose Your Top Employees 101
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.
This is why publicly traded companies are trash. No long term vision.
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.
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?
Software dev, and yes we’re hiring. DM me.