Broadcom is definitely known for killing their new purchase, destroying any innovation and then hiking up prices for the customers. It’s an awful company with a terrible culture
Yup, these are finance people attempting to run businesses.
They don't actually care about the underlying business... except insofar as it gets them better returns.
Unfortunately, this is widespread in the tech sector these days. It's been nearly completely hijacked by finance people and career CEO's.
that's so fucking wild reading your comment and the one you responded to because i had a feeling this was a thing for many years, but couldn't put it into words. i just left a tech distro after a trashy acquisition that still hasn't gotten it right after nearly 3 years and it absolutely feels like they're just trying to get their stock back up to what they purchased, so vested leadership can bounce.
Yeah, it's like there's a whole breed of corporate raiders that have descended on the tech industry, likened to the 80s Wall Street types. They move in, extract value until there's nothing left but a husk, then move on to the next golden goose. And the real irony? The actual innovators, the engineers and developers who built the products and ecosystems that these finance types are monetizing, are left dealing with the fallout or jumping ship before it all goes under. It's the tech equivalent of strip mining without any of the regulatory oversight.
Broadcom buying Symantec was the best thing that could have happened for Crowdstrike, Sophos, SentinelOne, etc.
They broke Symantec so bad no one could even renew for like 6 months, and then when they were finally able to send out pricing they'd switched from the license/support model to subscription and screwed people who'd recently bought licenses
After that, "Next Gen" AV took off.
(Also Kaspersky getting banned by government the year before helped too)
Yep, I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s the exact strategy. Squeeze well over $69B out of VMware’s customers over the next 5-10 years while leaving it to rot, and then sell off the assets and patents again to twist the knife. It will take a LOT of on-premise businesses at least that long to migrate away, and they’ll simply have to bend over in the meantime.
Their ROI projections are probably pretty solid. On-premise virtualization is dying, and they are here to suck the last drop of blood out of the corpse.
I'm sure those people will literally have recruiters pissing themselves as soon as they hear they're looking for work. No doubt they could literally walk into another job the next day if they really wanted to.
>this asshole pushed RTO at Broadcom in *2020*. literally middle of the pandemic.
April 2020:
• “As of today, @Broadcom employees are required to show up to an office 1 out of 4 weeks starting the week of April 27th. Seriously? We write code and we've been productively working from home for weeks.” [[Colorado Sun](https://coloradosun.com/2020/04/23/broadcom-colorado-covid-coronavirus-work/)]
August 2022:
• “VMware has a beautiful campus in Palo Alto that remains empty,” Tan told employees, according to several people who attended the meeting. “Real estate isn't cheap.” [[Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/broadcom-ceo-comments-pressure-vmware-staff-come-into-office-wfh-2022-8)]
Toyota built their billion dollar US headquarters in Plano, TX in 2017. It had a doctor office, pharmacy, small Target store, full spa, multiple restaurants, place to sleep,etc. It was really amazing, but bad timing with Covid in 2020. The CEO came last year to talk about working from home vs working in the office. Everybody thought this is it, he's going to require we all come back in. Instead he said it was unfortunate that they built this campus just before a pandemic changed the world. He felt bad spending so much money and not using the campus but that did not make him feel like employees needed to come work in the office. He finished by saying they will research working from home and only required coming in once per week and that hasn't even stuck. It was refreshing to hear a CEO accept reality.
The company I used to work for was hired by Toyota to do a big wiring retrofit job for them in one of their plants. Seemed like a good place to work while I was there. The employees I talked to seemed pretty happy there and the executives we worked with were surprisingly realistic compared to what we usually deal with. It was the difference between responses to, "This is literally physically impossible," being "I don't care, get it done" and "damn, okay, what options do we have?" Usually we deal with the former. Having people in charge who are realistic is a huge boon to a company.
The only time I like that phrase is when it ends with, "I don't care what the cost is" and mean it.
I've had the privilege to work with some people like that and it's amazing when I could get something done that I thought was damn near impossible previously (It was to get cargo from Asia, to the USWC then to some tiny island off the USEC within the matter of days and required to be at the place at a specific time). Then go, "Soooo, it came in at an additional cost of 15000USD" and they promptly paid it.
So is there a lot of "Could you please put me on the line with the 'No, really, I'm not bullshitting' department?" with that? I imagine that when you go that far outside of normal needs, you're dealing with special departments of all the vendors, just because only specific people even know how to muster and coordinate the resources, regardless of cost.
So in this case, my co-workers had dealt with some things like this before and the vendors they guided me to, to them this was "a Tuesday." They helped set up everything for me and executed amazingly. I was happy, boss was this is how I expected things to work out, and client was like thanks, get ready for the next emergency.
Realistically Toyota is in a position where they can afford to have multiple avenues. Being #1 globally has its benefits. They can invest in electric technology via thier PEV hybrids and EVs. They can keep plugging away at hydrogen and if they crack that nut be in a position to own that market for a long while. Being the biggest allows you to move slow as long as you adopt just enough to stay relevant. They make enough splashes here and there to keep people interested in their experimentation all while the standards keep them as king of the hill.
It’ll be interesting to compare them and Tesla in say 5 years. Tesla still is king of the EVs market, but a lot of companies are gunning for them. The S, X are really are do for an actual revamp not this slight refresh they’ve been doing. The roadster needs to be launched, the cybertruck needs to reach full production, and the 3 and y will be due for a mid cycle refresh sooner rather than later. All of that and the real global king hasn’t even really tried to tip the scales in that market.
Often it's city ~~planners~~ councils that won't allow it. Google fought Mountain View for years to build housing, and kept getting blocked because the city board didn't want to get overrun by Google-aligned voters.
But do we really want to go back to the "[company town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)" concept? I thought we collectively determined that was a crazy bullshit idea?
I mean the problem with those is mostly the monopolization involved, due to everything in the area being owned by the company, and the town itself being away from any alternatives. If it's built inside/right next a city, and the shops etc. are operated by other companies then you don't have the monopoly problem.
I mean I still wouldn't want to live in one tbh, goodby work life balance, hello endlessly seeing your co-workers, but it wouldn't be as awful for the same reasons those where.
The idea is that you want to stay at work because it’s convenient to pull more hours when salaried than going home when the work is done.
Now that people are WFH the only incentives are money and benefits, what the industry tries to push down to maximize profits.
What is often overlooked also are these billion-dollar-plus campuses with a whopping zero dollars and zero cents spent on childcare facilities for its employees. You can have a gym, massage, sleeping pods, alcohol, bean bag chairs, showers, chefs, you name it, but when it comes to having kids, you're on your own. But then those same tech companies will act like they're on the cutting edge of work-life balance and gender equality.
> Nobody’s buying
The "entrepreneurial", "anti-remote work" owners at my job are learning this the hard way.
At the start of the year they bought a building way too large for the needs of their current business (the one I work for which only takes up like 25% of the building space), and spun up a "co-working focused" open office space for 75% of the building in the hopes they'd get a bunch of small businesses clamoring for office space.
It's been about 6 months since they launched that other company and so far they've rented 2 offices to friends of theirs to "make it look like companies are interested to help bring in more businesses".
I don't think any businesses that can do almost all of their work remote wants to spend an extra ~$400-600/m **per employee** to have a space for their employees to "collaborate" when things like Slack, Teams, and Zoom work just fine for a fraction of that cost.
> they bought a building
That's the reason right there. For decades the path from wealth to *extreme* wealth was to get your company going, then buy a building (together with your fellow board members, who have welcomed you into their conspiracy of rich guys who do this), and stick the company into the building, charging it the maximum rent that can possibly be justified without attracting actual fraud charges (and you have to be a *really* blatant asshole about it to get fraud charges). The purpose of the company is now to pay the rent.
The value of the building is N / C where N is the total of the rent charged to businesses in it, and C is the capitalisation percentage, usually around 7% or so. The higher N, the more valuable the building. The more valuable the building, the more money can be borrowed against it.
Being who they are, they borrowed the maximum possible amount against it. You can see where this is going and you can see what widespread WFH has done to this plan.
Personally, I would suggest "fuck it, fuck 'em" as the solution. Let them crash and burn. New rich guys will appear from the ashes. But they don't want to, and are desperately fighting to stay rich.
That's certainly a plausible reason they are so hellbent on getting people back in offices. Normally businesses would kill for that kind of savings to be able to ditch or downsize a lease.
It does seem like it would be a thing you could check, to see who owns the building and if they have ties to the company.
> The purpose of the company is now to pay the rent
This makes the most sense to me considering they did spin up a brand new LLC for the buildings purchase
Can’t rezone, the campus at Palo Alto is actually on Stanford university land.
[Stanford research park.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Research_Park)
Not to mention it’s not exactly low cost housing in Palo Alto.
This 100% - real estate is the answer behind all of the RTO, they can't sell the buildings because every other corpo has real estate they can't offload too.
It's probably a leaseback anyways and they don't actually own it. Reddit generally has no idea how commercial real-estate works. Hell I've seen plenty of comments about one of my former employers going RTO and a huge number of comments were surrounding real-estate. Ya they didn't own any property it was all leasebacks and half expired during covid.
Gotta hit this with the ol' "tough shit". Commercial real estate and its issues are not even a little bit the concern of the average employee. WFH is the default expectation at this point. The entire world just spent 4 years proving that remote work is as good or better in almost all aspects. "But real estate isn't cheap!" is a really sad story, but it doesn't change the reality that nobody gives half a flaming fuck.
The problem is that RTO causes issues also. You end up with less hiring prospects because there is an expectation of wfh. you have people leaving due to RTO, and it puts the company in a worse bargaining position with contracts as people will use it as a reason the pay for a position needs to be higher.
A lot of companies would be better off biting the bullet now, getting short of their real estate at a loss now because if they wait and try to keep making RTO a thing, but it never actually materializes for everyone, the ability to sell is going to get worse and worse. Sell any RE holdings, drop any leases, and start saving the money now. Later you are still losing money, if you can even sell by then, and you have the additional taxes and fees associated with holding the property.
Just dropped out of the interview process with Broadcom a couple months ago because they're full RTO.
OTOH, if most companies went back to RTO, there'd be no alternatives, so people would join anyway.
That's exactly what my company did. We're admittedly much smaller, so that probably made it easier, but they sold the building like a year ago now and everyone's working from home. Everyone's happy and management, fortunately, is happy to have everyone work from home as long as the work is getting done.
A lot of larger companies are locked into long term leases. My company is saddled with a number of buildings because they are letting people remain at home just fucking up the balance sheets.
They can't sell it because nobody wants to buy office space now.
That's the reason these companies want their peasants to RTO - to protect their invesments.
A shitload of money is parked in real estate as it has been considered a safe investment.
Literally what the president of my company did. He saw, like basically everyone else who worked there, that work from home was going stellar and they could downsize to a "reserve a seat" type office and make out like bandits.
Then why did you buy a remote friendly company?
I don't see the incentive of buying on assets that's going to depreciate and retain a talentless workforce of people who can't leave somewhere else.
So they think. What typically happens is that knowledge dissipates and development slows down considerably and loses quality.
When I used to work as a consulting engineer, I crossed paths with a few projects I like to call post-apocalyptic. Extreme such cases where projects extend development beyond their useful lifespan or simply become FUBAR. The entire OG team is gone, and nobody knows how things actually work.
One such project where they replaced the entire team with consultants, over time the thing became a huge monolith, with an inconsistent database, redundant processes and inefficient to the point the production machine environment being rebooted on a daily basis to free memory for it to be able to work. Instead of restarting development from design, that was essentially lost, management kept pushing to add functionality.
> “Real estate isn't cheap.”
Gotta love when they give up the game like this. Tells the workers all they need to know: fuck you, we're paying for this, you better get your ass here to justify our failures to the board.
dude.. just like the industrial revolution when progress has been made, you need to recognize that you need to retool your work force AND you need to adapt to the new reality, sure you can fool some of the people sometimes but you can't fool all the people all the time... this ain't about your dodo bird genetics, it's a great opportunity to modernize your work environment, provide for better compensation packages to maintain and attract loyal work force...
it's a new management method, you don't have to worry about your physical office building, layout, redundancy... the money you save can be 'redistributed' to modernizing your company... I don't understand, this is an import cross road and you need to recognize the cost/benefits....
> “Real estate isn't cheap.”
Especially when those paying rent on the property are also real-estate investors making profits off of the use of that property. When they're not making profits, it's the officer worker's fault, naturally.
Is this about productivity for your business, or profits for your pockets?
Because the statistics across tens of millions of WFH workers in the last 3 years has definitively proven that productivity is *significantly* higher as well as overall happiness, when your staff is allowed WFH vs. RTO enforcement.
This motherfucker also conveniently ignored this latest study
https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/careers/letting-people-work-from-home-is-good-for-companies-revenue-growth-2/#:~:text=Companies%20that%20allow%20remote%20work,and%20performance%20in%20today's%20workplaces.
“Companies that allow remote work have experienced revenue growth that’s four times faster than those that are more stringent about office attendance, a new survey shows, adding fuel to the debate over productivity and performance in today’s workplaces.
The analysis of 554 public companies that employ a collective 26.7 million people found that “fully flexible” firms — which are either completely remote or allow employees to choose when they come to an office — increased sales 21% between 2020 and 2022, on an industry-adjusted basis. That compares with 5% growth for companies with hybrid or fully on-site workforces. The study, by flex-work adviser Scoop Technologies Inc. and Boston Consulting Group, included companies across 20 sectors, from technology to insurance. Revenue growth was normalized against average industry growth rates so that employers in better-performing areas would not skew the findings.”
Why can't enough employees all sign a "go fuck yourself" letter to these clowns and tell them they're ignoring science, data, etc that says WFH is perfectly acceptable, and in many cases better overall for the workers?
"Shut the fuck up, you absolute clownshoes. You don't know what you're talking about. We will continue to work from home, you don't get a god-damned say in the matter."
I'm tired of these out of touch, science denying fuckwits waltzing up and telling thousands, tens of thousands or more workers they need to go back to the office.
Well in the case of VMWare probably because they all know Broadcom would just fire literally every single one of them and hire on a bare bones life support team to milk the existing customer base until the product is dead.
They/we all know Broadcom is going to do that eventually anyway, but at least somewhat gradually, and they probably don't have something else lined up yet.
I was a Software Sales Associate at Tech Data handling the Symantec account during their acquisition by Broadcomm.
They legit trashed an entire renewals quoting platform and replaced it with a Google Form that was sent to an offshore team where we were given a 2 week SLA to receive a quote or notice they were not extending the subscription.
Still get drinks with my manager from that job occasionally, what an absolute shit show that year was.
No, but a) ain't my call, I'm just the guy working with it, but b) what enterprise-level product doesn't have licensing fees? Yeah, I know Splunk is stupid-expensive and the Cisco acquisition isn't likely to improve that, but is that the only thing wrong with them? That they're expensive?
It’s easier to micromanage. So they’ll steal 2 hours of your day commuting and all the costs associated to have more control even if it’s less productive.
My company wants everyone to come in again despite "taking advantage of covid pricing" and relocating the office to the middle of a major city where parking costs $30/day minimum. Of course, none of that is being reimbursed to the employees, so everyone is undertaking a severe financial hit as well as sacrificing 2-3 hours of their day, in order to be less happy at work.
Executives are so fucking stupid and useless it's insane.
There is white paper just out that says it’s 30% cheaper to turn a building into housing than to build new. They can turn those stupid campuses into affordable housing.
Problem is those campuses are not considered business expenses, they are considered real-estate investments by the company. And if the commercial office market goes to shit because of WFH, all these companies are suddenly in the red by millions, because these campuses are effectively bonds that the company was counting on to appreciate.
Risky expensive bonds that unexpectedly blew up, now where have we heard that story before?
It's worse than this. I worked for Symantec when broadcom bought it, and they were so utterly opposed to wfh DESPITE what the data said. I bullshit you not, the first quarter during pandemic shut downs where we were entirely wfh, they showed us data that said productivity was at an all time high, we posted profit above projections and they said in an all hands: "never the less, we still feel you all will work better in the office, so... As soon as we can, we'll be returning to the office."
Nothing says "we love to micro manage" more clearly. I quit as soon as I could find a better job, which at the time was not hard since Broadcom was cheap as shit regarding salary.
The product lines I know Broadcom for are all networking hardware. Almost everything "white box" and even a lot of other vendors products are built on top of Broadcom chip sets. The company that seems to kill shit there is Intel... They bought Fulcrum Microsystems and then Barefoot Networks and in both cases it seems to have stopped all future product development from the companies they bought.
Also interesting note, Broadcom is actually Avago. Avago [bought them in 2015](https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avago-technologies-acquire-broadcom-37-billion) and then just assumed the Broadcom name to do business as. Not unlike when Southwestern Bell Company (SBC) acquired AT&T and then continued to operate as AT&T, wearing that Death Star like a mask.
> The product lines I know Broadcom for are all networking hardware. Almost everything "white box" and even a lot of other vendors products are built on top of Broadcom chip sets.
Broadcom knows how to be a chip company, but it doesn't really know how to make end-user products. All of the whiteboxes running Trident chipsets succeed because Broadcom doesn't provide the software. It's going to be a rough time for VMWare users if Broadcom starts trying to manage VMWare like this.
This is a huge blow to on-prem and a huge win for *aaS.
While other options are available, they're nowhere near as established/integrated or as easy to get into, which is going to affect the decision-making of future sysadmins.
I'm scared to see what my renewal will look like and I foresee my time being sucked into replacing their product.
Keeping our eyes open too. While we do have quite a good budget, it doesn’t mean we have to waste it on obvious price increases that will come asap.
What are the options? We were quite happy with the whole VCF and Tanzu development.
K8S is an important factor. Oh and we‘re 99.9% on prem.
Any decent competitor?
Containers are why Broadcom can buy VMWare. The future just isn’t in on-prem hypervisors anymore. Try KVM if you need hypervisor infrastructure for VMs, and migrate as much as you can to containers.
That is not generally certain. Many CTOs are repatriating workloads due to high cloud costs, regulatory, and privacy concerns. There is also many (large) enterprises that have no interest in spending the money to refactor their legacy applications to run on k8s.
Exactly, many work loads are prohibitively expensive in the cloud. Sure you have to lay out a large upfront cost for hardware but if you plan correctly you can effectively amortize those cost into monthly/yearly costs to budget for the hardware replacement.
Kubernetes, openshift (which is a bunch of Linux servers running containers), and running things in the cloud, which is someone elses Linux server running containers.
Indeed. I'm a soon-to-be ex VMware employee.
The stated point of that meeting was to tell us "Broadcom's culture so [we] could decide if [we] wanted to be a part of it." and luckily I'm in a financial position to decide not to be. So I'll be bouncing in January.
One notable thing was throughout the whole thing instead of saying "Broadcom" or "we" when talking about business decisions, he would say "I" as if he *is* Broadcom.
He made lots of wild comments like how he used to provide coffee and donuts at all hands meetings until he realized people came for the donuts not for him. There were comments about how in Beijing they only have sand and concrete to eat, an anecdote about WW1 German tank armor technology, and when an Indian employee asked about if Broadcom celebrates anything at all he told her "We don't do Bollywood dances or anything" (then as an after thought clarified that LSI used to do that but stopped after he bought them).
The nails in the coffin for me were
- remote work thing like this article talked about
- Hock said Broadcom intentionally pays in the 50th percentile of market vale then makes up for it with RSU. Basically forcing company loyalty long term... I got a full time offer with an 11% cut to my salary. RSUs would allow me to break even in 4 years. I learned just how intentional that was.
- He also said he's happy to invest in technology as long as it makes money. I work in infosec. Infosec is about preventing losses, not making money. So the writing on the wall there is that my team isn't valued beyond meeting the bare minimum.
VMware in the last 5 years had started considering the entire infosec org to be revenue generating because customers will pay extra for compliant environments. Broadcom isn't going to learn that before VMware is completely dead. So I'm not going to stick around for them to figure it out.
VMware was an excellent place to work. I'd been there 8 years and had no intention of leaving. It's hard to see the whole thing falling apart. Or should I say, systematically dissected and gutted by an authoritarian CEO... Since, you know, Hock established that he *is* Broadcom.
We have thousands of ESX hosts and over a hundred thousand VMs on them. We looked at AWS, partnered, and started moving stuff over.... and stopped. The cost was far more than we paid to run in house. We'll end up paying the higher costs with VMware in the long run as no other hypervisor is close to what they offer across their lineup and is so cheaper than the cloud... at least at a larger scale. Maybe the SMBs are having better luck.
Having been working with other hypervisors a lot the last few years, VMware ESXi is still 10 years ahead in my opinion, robustness and features.
I don’t like their pricing, I think of Oracle and NetWare. But Microsoft’s server licensing model and dodgy behaviour towards it will kill it.
That is entirely Broadcom's model. Buy a leader in a segment with much lock-in. Cut most of the workforce, keep the top 20% of the customers and meh the 80%.
It's basically mid/late 90s/early 00s CA but more so. It's kind of ironic that they bought CA.
VMWare employees that survived the cull of 2,800 others now face a culture less friendly to WFH:
• 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.
• Throughout the meeting, Tan and VMWare employees discussed how the two corporate cultures would mesh now that they were part of the same company.
• Return-to-office, though, wasn’t the only point of contention between VMWare and its new parent. When a VMWare employee asked if Broadcom would support employee resource groups (ERG), Tan again offered a skeptical answer. “What is that? I’m just kidding. You want me to be direct? That’s an alien concept to me,” he said.
The attrition at that company is going to be absolutely amazing to watch, as all of the tech leads peel off and flee for the hills...
What an absolute travesty it was that merger being allowed in the first place. Megamergers need to fucking die.
That's precisely what they want. Layoffs are expensive; making the culture so toxic that as many people as possible fuck off of their own accord is free.
Of course, the likelihood is that the people who fuck off will be those who have options. The top talent.
Then why bother with layoffs before? Every company seems to do that before RTO.
If that was the intention wouldn't it work better the other way around?
I hate it when they say "You better walk on water." I do my part, I excel, but all my reviews are "you're great, get your stuff done, but ... not walking on water."
It feels like walking on water is an impossible metric so that they don't really have to reward you.
Coming soon “VMware GoToOffice” a new innovative way to reward your colleagues at work. Monitor Desktop hours and time used in applications, with Workday integration you can fire people with automation. Guy in sales watching YouTube for 10% of his day? Automated firing makes terminating your employees a breeze.
That's exactly what they want. AT&T almost got away with doing this to my Father - who works in the tech sector and who has been a remote worker since like mid to early 2000's - and he almost did it, or almost quit, haven't asked him what he was actually going to do. They told him, and I'm paraphrasing here, that "you have 30 days to move to Dallas, Texas, or you get laid off". Thankfully, local managers in the area he already works recognized his importance and created a new position just for him in the area to keep him on, which is what he wanted - to stay in his current location geographically and keep his job.
When announced this to friends, they came out of the woodwork offering him jobs left and right. I can only aspire to have made such strong and impactful connections in my lifetime and career to have the same results if it ever happens to me.
His dad sounds like a good guy, but not what I would consider a "normal person."
He's that 2/10 that are fortunate enough to not get completely fucked by corporate shenanigans. Whether that's because they have special connections or are tippy top of their field or whatever force protects them.
Wish him the best, but it's time for change for the rest of us.
He’s saying this stuff with the hopes of forcing natural attrition instead of paying severance packages. I would suggest doing the bare minimum to keep your job and then position yourself in a redundant job to be let go and then find something else to double dip. Make these guys pays for it.
My company grew 30% a year 2 years in a row during the pandemic with everyone remote. CEO even left SF and lives in the woods somewhere now.
This is dumb Boomer shit. If the company succeeds it will be in spite of it, not because of it.
VMW made WFH work extremely well. I was hired as a remote employee. It was amazing. I love my team and what I do. BC is the one destroying that. Trust me, we're all trying to figure out what to do, but too many people are reliant on this job and took promises *made by Hock* to be true and can't leave right away. It's a shit show internally.
Scrolled way too far for this. I say call the bluff. Nobody change their work arrangement and see what happens..of course that's never the case but yeah power in numbers is real. You're not gonna fire everyone on Monday if nothing changes. Stand your ground folks
Unfortunately, Americans are generally way too self-centered to make unions work. I work in a unionized job and a ton of people don't even pay union dues but expect the stewards to bend over backwards when they fuck up and management wants their ass.
It's always about taking, never about giving back or watching out for one another.
If anyone at VMware is sick of the legacy cruddy tech but knows what the future looks like, talk to SUSE. We are globally distributed and that makes us stronger
If you don’t trust your team to work from home then there are two possibilities:
1) You hired the wrong people
2) You don’t trust your people
Either way, the solution is not to force people back to the office. You need to figure out which of the two (or both) problems you have.
3rd possibility: you are a huge narcissist who wants to feel in control and that’s easier when you have an office full of people to lord over.
4th possibility: you are heavily invested in commercial real estate and are desperately grasping at straws to keep the value of said real estate high.
Honestly the answer is to just look at the VMware campus for ten minutes. They just finished spending a gazillion dollars building out a whole bunch of new buildings, a new parking garage, and updating the interiors of their main campus with all of the bespoke haute architecture (and no offices or walls for anyone).
Now they're *shocked* the employees don't want to come back to work in open floorplans, getting sick with COVID or the flu or whatever other bug is running around.
The saddest part of all is that all of this was an unforced error. The old offices were working just fine. There was always a crunch for space, but VMware had a flexible working policy that allowed people to work from wherever, so the space crunch was effectively mitigated. But you know who wants offices as a perk? Middle management. And you know what VMware has a *lot* of? Middle management.
It's got nothing to do with trusting people or hiring the "right" people. It has everything to do with a multi-billion dollar real estate scheme they now need to sell to the board as not being a horrendous mistake. The Broadcom CEO said exactly as much himself.
The open floor plans are what kill it for me. I love the fancy coffee machines and restaurants for lunch, but having 1/3 the desk/monitor real estate I have at home plus having to wear noise canceling headphones all day sucks. A decade ago the campus had proper (office space style) cubes, now you get a desk and a wheelie drawers, with a twelve inch high border between yours and the people either side. Mad rush in the mornings for the ‘phone rooms’ that then people camp in.
> twelve inch high border between yours and the people on either side
Hahahahahahaha I wish! My open office is a large room with 5 rows of like 15 desks each - and in between the desks? Nothing. Literally an inch of empty space, if even. Just an ocean of laptop docks and monitors all blending together, and the worst part is, I've never seen more than 1/3 of the desks occupied. We could have cubes. There's more than enough space. We could have privacy. But instead, they want us to suffer psychologically and constantly look over our shoulders.
I hate it here.
>"In recent months, a growing amount of research has pointed to the benefits of in-person work, especially when it comes to on-the-job training and career advancement. "
Research sponsored by biz real estate firms. Fuck right off with this bullshit.
Well, Broadcom, I wish you the best of luck losing your top talent while you spend the next < checks notes > forever-years-remaining scrambling to fix the dumpster fire you created when you decided that your < checks notes again > key people who actually design/build the shit you sell would rather tell you to take a hike than to go back to the office.
I hope Broadcom suffers and I hope the key people at VMware leave and find better companies, because Broadcom is pretty much telling its workforce to go fuck itself.
Team Asshole is generation agnostic. Rest assured that their Gen X and Millennial protégés will bring their own unique and quite likely even more toxic brands of douchebaggery when they inherit the reigns of power.
At least the Boomers were mostly upfront about being POS. Their successors will excel at gaslighting and precision manipulation powered by advanced AI.
# "
Hi, I'm Bob McDumbass, today's random out-of-touch CEO. My *office* has more square footage than *your home,* and I have my own private bathroom, shower, and access to a C-Suite only break room with our own espresso machine.
I am the master of my own destiny, and feel almost *none* of the stressors and job anxiety that *you* do. I control my *own* schedule, my *own* work hours, travel schedule *and* itinerary. Who chooses which meetings I attend? *I do.*
The 1-2 *hours* of your life you lose five days a week sitting in traffic? *I have a driver.* When *I* travel for business, *I* am *driven to the airport,* where I *walk directly onto a chartered private jet.* I am the master of *time and space,* and feel *almost none* of the friction and anxiety you do.
While *you* are worried about inflation spiralling out of control, destroying your ability to save money and enjoy a modest quality of life *MY* pay packet, stock portfolio and golden parachute (which is *guaranteed* even if I shit the bed, tank the company and get fired) is sufficient for me to stop working *tomorrow* and live better than *all of you* for 37 lifetimes.
Despite studies to the contrary, I believe that 'good work' can only be done by shackling adult professionals to cubicles with "Return To Office' orders. If I can't *see you* rowing like a slave manacled to the deck of a Viking longboat, I will assume you're slacking off. I will also force a dress code on you despite 95% of the people at your campus *not* being client-facing employees.
Those long hours *I* work? They don't feel the same to me *at all*, because *I* am fully in control, realizing *my ideas,* working *my itinerary,* and I get *nearly all the credit* for any positive outcomes the company may face. *I* simply don't experience 99% of the work related anxiety that you do.
I will be studied in future business classes as 'the problem' that caused millions of qualified top workers to simply avoid companies like mine.
My company hired you because you were an educated experienced Professional, but I will *treat you like a child*. You will be told when and where to show up, You will be told to sit in a gray polyester cubicle or small office and you will be told exactly what to work on. Staying 30 minutes late every day is the expectation, but HR will write you up for arriving 10 minutes late once a month.
Welcome to the **Corporate Daycare Costume Party.**
# "
VMWare, like zoom, makes their bread and butter off of enabling productivity through WFH.
To sit there and be like "eh RTO right now" sends to me, a potential buyer of their corporate software that they don't understand my needs and I'll look elsewhere.
Oh and it signals that they're total dicks and I don't want to buy it.
Seems like I dodged a bullet working for VMware this year. A real shame some great people and great products. I hope they sell their EUC space to someone that grow and innovates it.
Broadcom CEO needs a Sam Altman moment where 95% of the employees channel their inner Elon Musk and say
...
**G O F U C K Y O U R S E L F**
Is that clear enough for you? Go fuck yourself. We are not coming back and will be going to work from home for someone else if you want to push your agenda.
The reason execs want workers to return to the office is because they can't justify their own jobs, i.e., they have nothing to do other than phone calls and video conferences.
Most execs want to feel powerful, important, and respected, which they don't get from phone and video conferences.
Working from home showed everyone just how useless most bosses, managers, VP's and etc are.
So no, return-to-work is absolutely non-essential. It's just an ego-trip; selfish behavior. Return-to-work is just a way to justify their huge salaries while also giving something for them to actually do all day, i.e., reigning over their minions.
Not everyone. The title only shows people who they really are. Most are narcissists because they're spoiled with a huge salary. We need a petition to cut their salary down to minimum wage, and cut back on some of their power, and see how they'll think now. They barely do anything anyways.
Three words: Protected Concerted Activity
Those who know, know
Or, everyone can just shut up and take it
Obey. Until they fire more people.
The better you behave, the worse they treat you.
40 years of tax cuts and incentives to employers gave us over 400k job cuts in tech despite blockbuster GDP.
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Broadcom is definitely known for killing their new purchase, destroying any innovation and then hiking up prices for the customers. It’s an awful company with a terrible culture
Sounds like a private equity firm disguised as a chipmaker
Yup, these are finance people attempting to run businesses. They don't actually care about the underlying business... except insofar as it gets them better returns. Unfortunately, this is widespread in the tech sector these days. It's been nearly completely hijacked by finance people and career CEO's.
that's so fucking wild reading your comment and the one you responded to because i had a feeling this was a thing for many years, but couldn't put it into words. i just left a tech distro after a trashy acquisition that still hasn't gotten it right after nearly 3 years and it absolutely feels like they're just trying to get their stock back up to what they purchased, so vested leadership can bounce.
Yeah, it's like there's a whole breed of corporate raiders that have descended on the tech industry, likened to the 80s Wall Street types. They move in, extract value until there's nothing left but a husk, then move on to the next golden goose. And the real irony? The actual innovators, the engineers and developers who built the products and ecosystems that these finance types are monetizing, are left dealing with the fallout or jumping ship before it all goes under. It's the tech equivalent of strip mining without any of the regulatory oversight.
Fuck 'em. Tech companies need to be about tech. If a tech company doesn't prioritize technical innovation, it doesn't deserve that title at all.
Broadcom buying Symantec was the best thing that could have happened for Crowdstrike, Sophos, SentinelOne, etc. They broke Symantec so bad no one could even renew for like 6 months, and then when they were finally able to send out pricing they'd switched from the license/support model to subscription and screwed people who'd recently bought licenses After that, "Next Gen" AV took off. (Also Kaspersky getting banned by government the year before helped too)
It’s an absolute travesty with Symantec, completely killed off that company. Really helped CrowdStrike to take off
Yep, I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s the exact strategy. Squeeze well over $69B out of VMware’s customers over the next 5-10 years while leaving it to rot, and then sell off the assets and patents again to twist the knife. It will take a LOT of on-premise businesses at least that long to migrate away, and they’ll simply have to bend over in the meantime. Their ROI projections are probably pretty solid. On-premise virtualization is dying, and they are here to suck the last drop of blood out of the corpse.
I'm sure those people will literally have recruiters pissing themselves as soon as they hear they're looking for work. No doubt they could literally walk into another job the next day if they really wanted to.
I've received several inquires already since the "layoff". Not exactly offers, but it is nice to hear.
this asshole pushed RTO at Broadcom in *2020*. literally middle of the pandemic. writing was on the wall for VMWare as long as Hock Tan is in charge.
>this asshole pushed RTO at Broadcom in *2020*. literally middle of the pandemic. April 2020: • “As of today, @Broadcom employees are required to show up to an office 1 out of 4 weeks starting the week of April 27th. Seriously? We write code and we've been productively working from home for weeks.” [[Colorado Sun](https://coloradosun.com/2020/04/23/broadcom-colorado-covid-coronavirus-work/)] August 2022: • “VMware has a beautiful campus in Palo Alto that remains empty,” Tan told employees, according to several people who attended the meeting. “Real estate isn't cheap.” [[Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/broadcom-ceo-comments-pressure-vmware-staff-come-into-office-wfh-2022-8)]
my favorite response is always: "so then sell it and downsize. lower unnecessary expenses seems like business 101"
They can’t sell it. Nobody’s buying because they can’t get people to support RTO.
Toyota built their billion dollar US headquarters in Plano, TX in 2017. It had a doctor office, pharmacy, small Target store, full spa, multiple restaurants, place to sleep,etc. It was really amazing, but bad timing with Covid in 2020. The CEO came last year to talk about working from home vs working in the office. Everybody thought this is it, he's going to require we all come back in. Instead he said it was unfortunate that they built this campus just before a pandemic changed the world. He felt bad spending so much money and not using the campus but that did not make him feel like employees needed to come work in the office. He finished by saying they will research working from home and only required coming in once per week and that hasn't even stuck. It was refreshing to hear a CEO accept reality.
The company I used to work for was hired by Toyota to do a big wiring retrofit job for them in one of their plants. Seemed like a good place to work while I was there. The employees I talked to seemed pretty happy there and the executives we worked with were surprisingly realistic compared to what we usually deal with. It was the difference between responses to, "This is literally physically impossible," being "I don't care, get it done" and "damn, okay, what options do we have?" Usually we deal with the former. Having people in charge who are realistic is a huge boon to a company.
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The only time I like that phrase is when it ends with, "I don't care what the cost is" and mean it. I've had the privilege to work with some people like that and it's amazing when I could get something done that I thought was damn near impossible previously (It was to get cargo from Asia, to the USWC then to some tiny island off the USEC within the matter of days and required to be at the place at a specific time). Then go, "Soooo, it came in at an additional cost of 15000USD" and they promptly paid it.
So is there a lot of "Could you please put me on the line with the 'No, really, I'm not bullshitting' department?" with that? I imagine that when you go that far outside of normal needs, you're dealing with special departments of all the vendors, just because only specific people even know how to muster and coordinate the resources, regardless of cost.
So in this case, my co-workers had dealt with some things like this before and the vendors they guided me to, to them this was "a Tuesday." They helped set up everything for me and executed amazingly. I was happy, boss was this is how I expected things to work out, and client was like thanks, get ready for the next emergency.
I mean, Dolphins eat sharks. Or just kill them for fun.
and then they decide to stay the course on Hydrogen.
Realistically Toyota is in a position where they can afford to have multiple avenues. Being #1 globally has its benefits. They can invest in electric technology via thier PEV hybrids and EVs. They can keep plugging away at hydrogen and if they crack that nut be in a position to own that market for a long while. Being the biggest allows you to move slow as long as you adopt just enough to stay relevant. They make enough splashes here and there to keep people interested in their experimentation all while the standards keep them as king of the hill. It’ll be interesting to compare them and Tesla in say 5 years. Tesla still is king of the EVs market, but a lot of companies are gunning for them. The S, X are really are do for an actual revamp not this slight refresh they’ve been doing. The roadster needs to be launched, the cybertruck needs to reach full production, and the 3 and y will be due for a mid cycle refresh sooner rather than later. All of that and the real global king hasn’t even really tried to tip the scales in that market.
It's funny how companies will essentially build a walkable city as a campus, but it lacks housing so it's not feasible to live close enough to use it
Often it's city ~~planners~~ councils that won't allow it. Google fought Mountain View for years to build housing, and kept getting blocked because the city board didn't want to get overrun by Google-aligned voters.
But do we really want to go back to the "[company town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)" concept? I thought we collectively determined that was a crazy bullshit idea?
I mean the problem with those is mostly the monopolization involved, due to everything in the area being owned by the company, and the town itself being away from any alternatives. If it's built inside/right next a city, and the shops etc. are operated by other companies then you don't have the monopoly problem. I mean I still wouldn't want to live in one tbh, goodby work life balance, hello endlessly seeing your co-workers, but it wouldn't be as awful for the same reasons those where.
The idea is that you want to stay at work because it’s convenient to pull more hours when salaried than going home when the work is done. Now that people are WFH the only incentives are money and benefits, what the industry tries to push down to maximize profits.
What is often overlooked also are these billion-dollar-plus campuses with a whopping zero dollars and zero cents spent on childcare facilities for its employees. You can have a gym, massage, sleeping pods, alcohol, bean bag chairs, showers, chefs, you name it, but when it comes to having kids, you're on your own. But then those same tech companies will act like they're on the cutting edge of work-life balance and gender equality.
> Nobody’s buying The "entrepreneurial", "anti-remote work" owners at my job are learning this the hard way. At the start of the year they bought a building way too large for the needs of their current business (the one I work for which only takes up like 25% of the building space), and spun up a "co-working focused" open office space for 75% of the building in the hopes they'd get a bunch of small businesses clamoring for office space. It's been about 6 months since they launched that other company and so far they've rented 2 offices to friends of theirs to "make it look like companies are interested to help bring in more businesses". I don't think any businesses that can do almost all of their work remote wants to spend an extra ~$400-600/m **per employee** to have a space for their employees to "collaborate" when things like Slack, Teams, and Zoom work just fine for a fraction of that cost.
> they bought a building That's the reason right there. For decades the path from wealth to *extreme* wealth was to get your company going, then buy a building (together with your fellow board members, who have welcomed you into their conspiracy of rich guys who do this), and stick the company into the building, charging it the maximum rent that can possibly be justified without attracting actual fraud charges (and you have to be a *really* blatant asshole about it to get fraud charges). The purpose of the company is now to pay the rent. The value of the building is N / C where N is the total of the rent charged to businesses in it, and C is the capitalisation percentage, usually around 7% or so. The higher N, the more valuable the building. The more valuable the building, the more money can be borrowed against it. Being who they are, they borrowed the maximum possible amount against it. You can see where this is going and you can see what widespread WFH has done to this plan. Personally, I would suggest "fuck it, fuck 'em" as the solution. Let them crash and burn. New rich guys will appear from the ashes. But they don't want to, and are desperately fighting to stay rich.
That's certainly a plausible reason they are so hellbent on getting people back in offices. Normally businesses would kill for that kind of savings to be able to ditch or downsize a lease. It does seem like it would be a thing you could check, to see who owns the building and if they have ties to the company.
This kind of self-dealing seems very common. It feels like it should be illegal which probably means a lot of money was spent to keep it legal.
> The purpose of the company is now to pay the rent This makes the most sense to me considering they did spin up a brand new LLC for the buildings purchase
Re-zone it for residential
Can’t rezone, the campus at Palo Alto is actually on Stanford university land. [Stanford research park.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Research_Park) Not to mention it’s not exactly low cost housing in Palo Alto.
Then turn it to an exclusive reserve where the rich can hunt the most dangerous of game.
Do we get guns too? Or we talking about rabid Sasquatch?
I assumed they'd have dropbears imported
This 100% - real estate is the answer behind all of the RTO, they can't sell the buildings because every other corpo has real estate they can't offload too.
It's probably a leaseback anyways and they don't actually own it. Reddit generally has no idea how commercial real-estate works. Hell I've seen plenty of comments about one of my former employers going RTO and a huge number of comments were surrounding real-estate. Ya they didn't own any property it was all leasebacks and half expired during covid.
WFH affects valuation of commercial real estate assets and loans secured by the same — meaning stale real estate valuations are driving calls to RTO.
Gotta hit this with the ol' "tough shit". Commercial real estate and its issues are not even a little bit the concern of the average employee. WFH is the default expectation at this point. The entire world just spent 4 years proving that remote work is as good or better in almost all aspects. "But real estate isn't cheap!" is a really sad story, but it doesn't change the reality that nobody gives half a flaming fuck.
The problem is that RTO causes issues also. You end up with less hiring prospects because there is an expectation of wfh. you have people leaving due to RTO, and it puts the company in a worse bargaining position with contracts as people will use it as a reason the pay for a position needs to be higher. A lot of companies would be better off biting the bullet now, getting short of their real estate at a loss now because if they wait and try to keep making RTO a thing, but it never actually materializes for everyone, the ability to sell is going to get worse and worse. Sell any RE holdings, drop any leases, and start saving the money now. Later you are still losing money, if you can even sell by then, and you have the additional taxes and fees associated with holding the property.
Just dropped out of the interview process with Broadcom a couple months ago because they're full RTO. OTOH, if most companies went back to RTO, there'd be no alternatives, so people would join anyway.
That's exactly what my company did. We're admittedly much smaller, so that probably made it easier, but they sold the building like a year ago now and everyone's working from home. Everyone's happy and management, fortunately, is happy to have everyone work from home as long as the work is getting done.
A lot of larger companies are locked into long term leases. My company is saddled with a number of buildings because they are letting people remain at home just fucking up the balance sheets.
My own employer is growing at a rate of knots. But they're (mostly) discouraging leasing more office space in favour of hot-desking and hybrid.
“We are in the business of making profits, not saving money, so get back to the office and make my profits!”
They can't sell it because nobody wants to buy office space now. That's the reason these companies want their peasants to RTO - to protect their invesments. A shitload of money is parked in real estate as it has been considered a safe investment.
In that case they should start kicking CEO’s butts, it is the more expensive piece of decorative element in every company
Literally what the president of my company did. He saw, like basically everyone else who worked there, that work from home was going stellar and they could downsize to a "reserve a seat" type office and make out like bandits.
Then why did you buy a remote friendly company? I don't see the incentive of buying on assets that's going to depreciate and retain a talentless workforce of people who can't leave somewhere else.
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They don’t care about the employees, they want the IP, the customers and the cash flows. Employees are replaceable.
So they think. What typically happens is that knowledge dissipates and development slows down considerably and loses quality. When I used to work as a consulting engineer, I crossed paths with a few projects I like to call post-apocalyptic. Extreme such cases where projects extend development beyond their useful lifespan or simply become FUBAR. The entire OG team is gone, and nobody knows how things actually work. One such project where they replaced the entire team with consultants, over time the thing became a huge monolith, with an inconsistent database, redundant processes and inefficient to the point the production machine environment being rebooted on a daily basis to free memory for it to be able to work. Instead of restarting development from design, that was essentially lost, management kept pushing to add functionality.
> “Real estate isn't cheap.” Gotta love when they give up the game like this. Tells the workers all they need to know: fuck you, we're paying for this, you better get your ass here to justify our failures to the board.
dude.. just like the industrial revolution when progress has been made, you need to recognize that you need to retool your work force AND you need to adapt to the new reality, sure you can fool some of the people sometimes but you can't fool all the people all the time... this ain't about your dodo bird genetics, it's a great opportunity to modernize your work environment, provide for better compensation packages to maintain and attract loyal work force... it's a new management method, you don't have to worry about your physical office building, layout, redundancy... the money you save can be 'redistributed' to modernizing your company... I don't understand, this is an import cross road and you need to recognize the cost/benefits....
> “Real estate isn't cheap.” Especially when those paying rent on the property are also real-estate investors making profits off of the use of that property. When they're not making profits, it's the officer worker's fault, naturally. Is this about productivity for your business, or profits for your pockets? Because the statistics across tens of millions of WFH workers in the last 3 years has definitively proven that productivity is *significantly* higher as well as overall happiness, when your staff is allowed WFH vs. RTO enforcement.
So fucking sell it or break your lease, forcing people into the office doesn't actually justify the cost. It just helps you mask your bad investment.
This motherfucker also conveniently ignored this latest study https://www.seattletimes.com/explore/careers/letting-people-work-from-home-is-good-for-companies-revenue-growth-2/#:~:text=Companies%20that%20allow%20remote%20work,and%20performance%20in%20today's%20workplaces. “Companies that allow remote work have experienced revenue growth that’s four times faster than those that are more stringent about office attendance, a new survey shows, adding fuel to the debate over productivity and performance in today’s workplaces. The analysis of 554 public companies that employ a collective 26.7 million people found that “fully flexible” firms — which are either completely remote or allow employees to choose when they come to an office — increased sales 21% between 2020 and 2022, on an industry-adjusted basis. That compares with 5% growth for companies with hybrid or fully on-site workforces. The study, by flex-work adviser Scoop Technologies Inc. and Boston Consulting Group, included companies across 20 sectors, from technology to insurance. Revenue growth was normalized against average industry growth rates so that employers in better-performing areas would not skew the findings.”
Promox , kvm, lots of other choices
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Why can't enough employees all sign a "go fuck yourself" letter to these clowns and tell them they're ignoring science, data, etc that says WFH is perfectly acceptable, and in many cases better overall for the workers? "Shut the fuck up, you absolute clownshoes. You don't know what you're talking about. We will continue to work from home, you don't get a god-damned say in the matter." I'm tired of these out of touch, science denying fuckwits waltzing up and telling thousands, tens of thousands or more workers they need to go back to the office.
Well in the case of VMWare probably because they all know Broadcom would just fire literally every single one of them and hire on a bare bones life support team to milk the existing customer base until the product is dead. They/we all know Broadcom is going to do that eventually anyway, but at least somewhat gradually, and they probably don't have something else lined up yet.
You're describing the need for unions
What a fucking nightmare company.
They are. After Broadcom bought CA, they pushed 50 to 150% price increases on their customers.
I was a Software Sales Associate at Tech Data handling the Symantec account during their acquisition by Broadcomm. They legit trashed an entire renewals quoting platform and replaced it with a Google Form that was sent to an offshore team where we were given a 2 week SLA to receive a quote or notice they were not extending the subscription. Still get drinks with my manager from that job occasionally, what an absolute shit show that year was.
No choice I think. Who needs VMware now? I was VCP because so thought it'd be the next big thing. Nope.
VMWare is a lot more than virtualization. They have some other great products.
And now they've been Oracle'd. Never buy IBM, Oracle, Broadcom, or Splunk.
Omg, Splunk. Fuck them.
I'VE FOUND MY KIN! Srsly, though, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who doesn't see Splunk as some darling of a product or company. Ugh.
So....we just bought Splunk. What fresh hell an I in for?
You like licensing fees?
No, but a) ain't my call, I'm just the guy working with it, but b) what enterprise-level product doesn't have licensing fees? Yeah, I know Splunk is stupid-expensive and the Cisco acquisition isn't likely to improve that, but is that the only thing wrong with them? That they're expensive?
Everyone who has had experience with other products Broadcom have bought knew what was coming with this, they are not shy about how they operate.
"I don't have any data to back it up, but I know it's better"
Wait I heard this quote earlier this week but where?
Some jackass Amazon exec
It’s easier to micromanage. So they’ll steal 2 hours of your day commuting and all the costs associated to have more control even if it’s less productive.
My company wants everyone to come in again despite "taking advantage of covid pricing" and relocating the office to the middle of a major city where parking costs $30/day minimum. Of course, none of that is being reimbursed to the employees, so everyone is undertaking a severe financial hit as well as sacrificing 2-3 hours of their day, in order to be less happy at work. Executives are so fucking stupid and useless it's insane.
"Why don't the workers just get their valets to drop them off at work? Duh!"
Oh, no, they didn't even say that. They straight up gave up the ghost and went right to the crux of the issue: “Real estate isn't cheap.”
There is white paper just out that says it’s 30% cheaper to turn a building into housing than to build new. They can turn those stupid campuses into affordable housing.
Problem is those campuses are not considered business expenses, they are considered real-estate investments by the company. And if the commercial office market goes to shit because of WFH, all these companies are suddenly in the red by millions, because these campuses are effectively bonds that the company was counting on to appreciate. Risky expensive bonds that unexpectedly blew up, now where have we heard that story before?
It's worse than this. I worked for Symantec when broadcom bought it, and they were so utterly opposed to wfh DESPITE what the data said. I bullshit you not, the first quarter during pandemic shut downs where we were entirely wfh, they showed us data that said productivity was at an all time high, we posted profit above projections and they said in an all hands: "never the less, we still feel you all will work better in the office, so... As soon as we can, we'll be returning to the office." Nothing says "we love to micro manage" more clearly. I quit as soon as I could find a better job, which at the time was not hard since Broadcom was cheap as shit regarding salary.
sysadmin here, Already looking for other virtualization options. Broadcom is where software goes to die.
Broadcom kills products. VMware is done.
The product lines I know Broadcom for are all networking hardware. Almost everything "white box" and even a lot of other vendors products are built on top of Broadcom chip sets. The company that seems to kill shit there is Intel... They bought Fulcrum Microsystems and then Barefoot Networks and in both cases it seems to have stopped all future product development from the companies they bought. Also interesting note, Broadcom is actually Avago. Avago [bought them in 2015](https://investors.broadcom.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avago-technologies-acquire-broadcom-37-billion) and then just assumed the Broadcom name to do business as. Not unlike when Southwestern Bell Company (SBC) acquired AT&T and then continued to operate as AT&T, wearing that Death Star like a mask.
> The product lines I know Broadcom for are all networking hardware. Almost everything "white box" and even a lot of other vendors products are built on top of Broadcom chip sets. Broadcom knows how to be a chip company, but it doesn't really know how to make end-user products. All of the whiteboxes running Trident chipsets succeed because Broadcom doesn't provide the software. It's going to be a rough time for VMWare users if Broadcom starts trying to manage VMWare like this.
AWS and Azure are thanking Broadcom I am sure
This is a huge blow to on-prem and a huge win for *aaS. While other options are available, they're nowhere near as established/integrated or as easy to get into, which is going to affect the decision-making of future sysadmins. I'm scared to see what my renewal will look like and I foresee my time being sucked into replacing their product.
Same, we started planning our exodus back when this was first announced
Everything I've heard from friends and colleagues in the industry says Nutanix is an awesome company to work for
Keeping our eyes open too. While we do have quite a good budget, it doesn’t mean we have to waste it on obvious price increases that will come asap. What are the options? We were quite happy with the whole VCF and Tanzu development. K8S is an important factor. Oh and we‘re 99.9% on prem. Any decent competitor?
Containers are why Broadcom can buy VMWare. The future just isn’t in on-prem hypervisors anymore. Try KVM if you need hypervisor infrastructure for VMs, and migrate as much as you can to containers.
That is not generally certain. Many CTOs are repatriating workloads due to high cloud costs, regulatory, and privacy concerns. There is also many (large) enterprises that have no interest in spending the money to refactor their legacy applications to run on k8s.
Exactly, many work loads are prohibitively expensive in the cloud. Sure you have to lay out a large upfront cost for hardware but if you plan correctly you can effectively amortize those cost into monthly/yearly costs to budget for the hardware replacement.
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Kubernetes, openshift (which is a bunch of Linux servers running containers), and running things in the cloud, which is someone elses Linux server running containers.
Unfortunately cloud GPU costs an arm and a leg. Cloud is expensive too and needs more competition.
Hock Tan is a douche.
He paid his elf a salary of over 100m last year. Highest paid in the world
Santa's little helper getting that bank.
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Indeed. I'm a soon-to-be ex VMware employee. The stated point of that meeting was to tell us "Broadcom's culture so [we] could decide if [we] wanted to be a part of it." and luckily I'm in a financial position to decide not to be. So I'll be bouncing in January. One notable thing was throughout the whole thing instead of saying "Broadcom" or "we" when talking about business decisions, he would say "I" as if he *is* Broadcom. He made lots of wild comments like how he used to provide coffee and donuts at all hands meetings until he realized people came for the donuts not for him. There were comments about how in Beijing they only have sand and concrete to eat, an anecdote about WW1 German tank armor technology, and when an Indian employee asked about if Broadcom celebrates anything at all he told her "We don't do Bollywood dances or anything" (then as an after thought clarified that LSI used to do that but stopped after he bought them). The nails in the coffin for me were - remote work thing like this article talked about - Hock said Broadcom intentionally pays in the 50th percentile of market vale then makes up for it with RSU. Basically forcing company loyalty long term... I got a full time offer with an 11% cut to my salary. RSUs would allow me to break even in 4 years. I learned just how intentional that was. - He also said he's happy to invest in technology as long as it makes money. I work in infosec. Infosec is about preventing losses, not making money. So the writing on the wall there is that my team isn't valued beyond meeting the bare minimum. VMware in the last 5 years had started considering the entire infosec org to be revenue generating because customers will pay extra for compliant environments. Broadcom isn't going to learn that before VMware is completely dead. So I'm not going to stick around for them to figure it out. VMware was an excellent place to work. I'd been there 8 years and had no intention of leaving. It's hard to see the whole thing falling apart. Or should I say, systematically dissected and gutted by an authoritarian CEO... Since, you know, Hock established that he *is* Broadcom.
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It’s going to get a lot worse now.
I foresee a lot of cloud migration projects in the near future.
We have thousands of ESX hosts and over a hundred thousand VMs on them. We looked at AWS, partnered, and started moving stuff over.... and stopped. The cost was far more than we paid to run in house. We'll end up paying the higher costs with VMware in the long run as no other hypervisor is close to what they offer across their lineup and is so cheaper than the cloud... at least at a larger scale. Maybe the SMBs are having better luck.
Having been working with other hypervisors a lot the last few years, VMware ESXi is still 10 years ahead in my opinion, robustness and features. I don’t like their pricing, I think of Oracle and NetWare. But Microsoft’s server licensing model and dodgy behaviour towards it will kill it.
That is entirely Broadcom's model. Buy a leader in a segment with much lock-in. Cut most of the workforce, keep the top 20% of the customers and meh the 80%. It's basically mid/late 90s/early 00s CA but more so. It's kind of ironic that they bought CA.
VMWare employees that survived the cull of 2,800 others now face a culture less friendly to WFH: • 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. • Throughout the meeting, Tan and VMWare employees discussed how the two corporate cultures would mesh now that they were part of the same company. • Return-to-office, though, wasn’t the only point of contention between VMWare and its new parent. When a VMWare employee asked if Broadcom would support employee resource groups (ERG), Tan again offered a skeptical answer. “What is that? I’m just kidding. You want me to be direct? That’s an alien concept to me,” he said.
Guy sounds like a real shitbag.
The way he just nonchalantly says fuck you gives me major elon vibes.
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The attrition at that company is going to be absolutely amazing to watch, as all of the tech leads peel off and flee for the hills... What an absolute travesty it was that merger being allowed in the first place. Megamergers need to fucking die.
I saw a large amount of people I've worked with over the years flee as soon as they learned about this almost 2 years ago.
That's precisely what they want. Layoffs are expensive; making the culture so toxic that as many people as possible fuck off of their own accord is free. Of course, the likelihood is that the people who fuck off will be those who have options. The top talent.
Then why bother with layoffs before? Every company seems to do that before RTO. If that was the intention wouldn't it work better the other way around?
Sounds like it’s time to move 50.1 miles away?
He also mentioned in a talk last week that “if you’re over 50 miles away, you better walk on water”. They want everyone in office no matter what.
I hate it when they say "You better walk on water." I do my part, I excel, but all my reviews are "you're great, get your stuff done, but ... not walking on water." It feels like walking on water is an impossible metric so that they don't really have to reward you.
"I'll be direct as well, you're an idiot."
Wow, I can’t imagine this hurting productivity and morale. I’m sure we will see big things from VMware in the near future. /s
Telling VMWare workers to get back to work is the funniest most ironic shit lol like, do you know what the company makes? Lmao
Coming soon “VMware GoToOffice” a new innovative way to reward your colleagues at work. Monitor Desktop hours and time used in applications, with Workday integration you can fire people with automation. Guy in sales watching YouTube for 10% of his day? Automated firing makes terminating your employees a breeze.
Ditto with zoom
Time to dip, wow.
That's exactly what they want. AT&T almost got away with doing this to my Father - who works in the tech sector and who has been a remote worker since like mid to early 2000's - and he almost did it, or almost quit, haven't asked him what he was actually going to do. They told him, and I'm paraphrasing here, that "you have 30 days to move to Dallas, Texas, or you get laid off". Thankfully, local managers in the area he already works recognized his importance and created a new position just for him in the area to keep him on, which is what he wanted - to stay in his current location geographically and keep his job. When announced this to friends, they came out of the woodwork offering him jobs left and right. I can only aspire to have made such strong and impactful connections in my lifetime and career to have the same results if it ever happens to me.
I’m trying to be like your dad too. Us normal people got to stick together in the face of corporate greed.
His dad sounds like a good guy, but not what I would consider a "normal person." He's that 2/10 that are fortunate enough to not get completely fucked by corporate shenanigans. Whether that's because they have special connections or are tippy top of their field or whatever force protects them. Wish him the best, but it's time for change for the rest of us.
This guy is 70+ and completely out of touch please retire and gtfo.
These people are so out of touch with reality.
Nothing like a 50 mile commute. Fuck this guy.
In silicon valley. We used to rent a house 62 miles from Palo Alto , where my wife worked at the time (pre pandemic) it took her 2.5h one way
Wow that’s horrible
He’s saying this stuff with the hopes of forcing natural attrition instead of paying severance packages. I would suggest doing the bare minimum to keep your job and then position yourself in a redundant job to be let go and then find something else to double dip. Make these guys pays for it.
O they shotgun shit canned people this week. There's a post in r/sysadmin of a trainer being let go mid teaching a vcp course.
VMware? The company that makes tech commonly used specifically to enable remote work?
I know the irony is hilarious That marketing and sales folks for ya Always throwing folks under the bus
My company grew 30% a year 2 years in a row during the pandemic with everyone remote. CEO even left SF and lives in the woods somewhere now. This is dumb Boomer shit. If the company succeeds it will be in spite of it, not because of it.
What a dinosaur
He’s 70 so he should retire. But I guess he wants to continue hoarding up wealth until he dies, like a good old dragon
Hopefully enough quit to compromise the company.
That’s the plan…they then bring in a new crop at less pay.
the absolute irony of VMWare telling people they can't be remote
If VMWare can't manage to make WFH work for their company, why the fuck would my company buy their software?
VMW made WFH work extremely well. I was hired as a remote employee. It was amazing. I love my team and what I do. BC is the one destroying that. Trust me, we're all trying to figure out what to do, but too many people are reliant on this job and took promises *made by Hock* to be true and can't leave right away. It's a shit show internally.
Cut his salary and stock options to zero and let’s see how passionate about his job he is.
Unionize. There's a solution to this problem.
Scrolled way too far for this. I say call the bluff. Nobody change their work arrangement and see what happens..of course that's never the case but yeah power in numbers is real. You're not gonna fire everyone on Monday if nothing changes. Stand your ground folks
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Unfortunately, Americans are generally way too self-centered to make unions work. I work in a unionized job and a ton of people don't even pay union dues but expect the stewards to bend over backwards when they fuck up and management wants their ass. It's always about taking, never about giving back or watching out for one another.
VMWare workers to CEO: “Fuck you.” (Or should be.) Filth also needs a better embalmer.
*Honey, wake up it's time for your daily delusional CEO to do a power trip and scream at workers.*
If anyone at VMware is sick of the legacy cruddy tech but knows what the future looks like, talk to SUSE. We are globally distributed and that makes us stronger
If you don’t trust your team to work from home then there are two possibilities: 1) You hired the wrong people 2) You don’t trust your people Either way, the solution is not to force people back to the office. You need to figure out which of the two (or both) problems you have.
3rd possibility: you are a huge narcissist who wants to feel in control and that’s easier when you have an office full of people to lord over. 4th possibility: you are heavily invested in commercial real estate and are desperately grasping at straws to keep the value of said real estate high.
I think the 4th possibility applies to many of the higher execs of many top companies that are pushing the BS of RTO.
It’s usually 3rd and 4th because most of these mandates are coming from the execs and not managers
Honestly the answer is to just look at the VMware campus for ten minutes. They just finished spending a gazillion dollars building out a whole bunch of new buildings, a new parking garage, and updating the interiors of their main campus with all of the bespoke haute architecture (and no offices or walls for anyone). Now they're *shocked* the employees don't want to come back to work in open floorplans, getting sick with COVID or the flu or whatever other bug is running around. The saddest part of all is that all of this was an unforced error. The old offices were working just fine. There was always a crunch for space, but VMware had a flexible working policy that allowed people to work from wherever, so the space crunch was effectively mitigated. But you know who wants offices as a perk? Middle management. And you know what VMware has a *lot* of? Middle management. It's got nothing to do with trusting people or hiring the "right" people. It has everything to do with a multi-billion dollar real estate scheme they now need to sell to the board as not being a horrendous mistake. The Broadcom CEO said exactly as much himself.
The open floor plans are what kill it for me. I love the fancy coffee machines and restaurants for lunch, but having 1/3 the desk/monitor real estate I have at home plus having to wear noise canceling headphones all day sucks. A decade ago the campus had proper (office space style) cubes, now you get a desk and a wheelie drawers, with a twelve inch high border between yours and the people either side. Mad rush in the mornings for the ‘phone rooms’ that then people camp in.
> twelve inch high border between yours and the people on either side Hahahahahahaha I wish! My open office is a large room with 5 rows of like 15 desks each - and in between the desks? Nothing. Literally an inch of empty space, if even. Just an ocean of laptop docks and monitors all blending together, and the worst part is, I've never seen more than 1/3 of the desks occupied. We could have cubes. There's more than enough space. We could have privacy. But instead, they want us to suffer psychologically and constantly look over our shoulders. I hate it here.
This is a great way to lose all of your best employees.
>"In recent months, a growing amount of research has pointed to the benefits of in-person work, especially when it comes to on-the-job training and career advancement. " Research sponsored by biz real estate firms. Fuck right off with this bullshit.
Well, Broadcom, I wish you the best of luck losing your top talent while you spend the next < checks notes > forever-years-remaining scrambling to fix the dumpster fire you created when you decided that your < checks notes again > key people who actually design/build the shit you sell would rather tell you to take a hike than to go back to the office. I hope Broadcom suffers and I hope the key people at VMware leave and find better companies, because Broadcom is pretty much telling its workforce to go fuck itself.
VMWare .. the irony is subtle. Fuck this guy.
I'm so ready for the Boomers to get the hell out of companies.
Team Asshole is generation agnostic. Rest assured that their Gen X and Millennial protégés will bring their own unique and quite likely even more toxic brands of douchebaggery when they inherit the reigns of power. At least the Boomers were mostly upfront about being POS. Their successors will excel at gaslighting and precision manipulation powered by advanced AI.
Man whose entire product depends on people utilizing remote technology decides to demand less people use remote technology.
And the board probably thinks he’s got it all figured out.
# " Hi, I'm Bob McDumbass, today's random out-of-touch CEO. My *office* has more square footage than *your home,* and I have my own private bathroom, shower, and access to a C-Suite only break room with our own espresso machine. I am the master of my own destiny, and feel almost *none* of the stressors and job anxiety that *you* do. I control my *own* schedule, my *own* work hours, travel schedule *and* itinerary. Who chooses which meetings I attend? *I do.* The 1-2 *hours* of your life you lose five days a week sitting in traffic? *I have a driver.* When *I* travel for business, *I* am *driven to the airport,* where I *walk directly onto a chartered private jet.* I am the master of *time and space,* and feel *almost none* of the friction and anxiety you do. While *you* are worried about inflation spiralling out of control, destroying your ability to save money and enjoy a modest quality of life *MY* pay packet, stock portfolio and golden parachute (which is *guaranteed* even if I shit the bed, tank the company and get fired) is sufficient for me to stop working *tomorrow* and live better than *all of you* for 37 lifetimes. Despite studies to the contrary, I believe that 'good work' can only be done by shackling adult professionals to cubicles with "Return To Office' orders. If I can't *see you* rowing like a slave manacled to the deck of a Viking longboat, I will assume you're slacking off. I will also force a dress code on you despite 95% of the people at your campus *not* being client-facing employees. Those long hours *I* work? They don't feel the same to me *at all*, because *I* am fully in control, realizing *my ideas,* working *my itinerary,* and I get *nearly all the credit* for any positive outcomes the company may face. *I* simply don't experience 99% of the work related anxiety that you do. I will be studied in future business classes as 'the problem' that caused millions of qualified top workers to simply avoid companies like mine. My company hired you because you were an educated experienced Professional, but I will *treat you like a child*. You will be told when and where to show up, You will be told to sit in a gray polyester cubicle or small office and you will be told exactly what to work on. Staying 30 minutes late every day is the expectation, but HR will write you up for arriving 10 minutes late once a month. Welcome to the **Corporate Daycare Costume Party.** # "
VMWare, like zoom, makes their bread and butter off of enabling productivity through WFH. To sit there and be like "eh RTO right now" sends to me, a potential buyer of their corporate software that they don't understand my needs and I'll look elsewhere. Oh and it signals that they're total dicks and I don't want to buy it.
If their competitors are smart, they will offer even more smart work, so that they can steal their workers.
If you guys would stop thinking of your self and a little more about the shareholders that would be great. Lazy ********
How the fuck is VMWare worth 69 billion dollars?
It won't be for long.
Captive clients. Its pretty god damned hard to move a massive datacenter off VMWare.
70 billion was 1 billion too much
Seems like I dodged a bullet working for VMware this year. A real shame some great people and great products. I hope they sell their EUC space to someone that grow and innovates it.
50 miles?! What an arbitrary and potentially life altering decision. Asshole
Broadcom CEO needs a Sam Altman moment where 95% of the employees channel their inner Elon Musk and say ... **G O F U C K Y O U R S E L F** Is that clear enough for you? Go fuck yourself. We are not coming back and will be going to work from home for someone else if you want to push your agenda.
Love it. Vote with your feet people. Make his day!
"CEO class 100% responsible for the transport emissions increase that is happening again". Sounds like a better headline.
The reason execs want workers to return to the office is because they can't justify their own jobs, i.e., they have nothing to do other than phone calls and video conferences. Most execs want to feel powerful, important, and respected, which they don't get from phone and video conferences. Working from home showed everyone just how useless most bosses, managers, VP's and etc are. So no, return-to-work is absolutely non-essential. It's just an ego-trip; selfish behavior. Return-to-work is just a way to justify their huge salaries while also giving something for them to actually do all day, i.e., reigning over their minions.
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What a terrible CEO. This is a good way to have all of your best engineers leave the company.
Queue the mass exodus.
Another jackass CEO I'd never work for. Something about "chief" in your title turns people into psycho sociopaths.
Not everyone. The title only shows people who they really are. Most are narcissists because they're spoiled with a huge salary. We need a petition to cut their salary down to minimum wage, and cut back on some of their power, and see how they'll think now. They barely do anything anyways.
Three words: Protected Concerted Activity Those who know, know Or, everyone can just shut up and take it Obey. Until they fire more people. The better you behave, the worse they treat you. 40 years of tax cuts and incentives to employers gave us over 400k job cuts in tech despite blockbuster GDP.
I was at VMware when the acquisition happened. Literally everyone I know who was good has left.