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.
“Get back to the office or you’re fired!”
(fires 1,200 workers anyway)
It’s cool… plenty of other tech companies to hire them.
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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Get your butts back in the office so that you can spend all day in Zoom meetings. Thanks but no thanks.
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.
“No.”
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.
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.
I truly don’t understand why this isn’t more obvious to the public. Thank you for giving some examples.
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”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.
Everyone that still has a job, get your butt back to the office… not so fast you guys.
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.
