this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 155 points 11 months ago (6 children)

"As part of integration planning, and following an organizational needs assessment, we identified go-forward roles that will be required within the combined company."

Totally devoid of any humanity. Corporate jargon freaks me out. It shouldn't, but it really gets to me.

[–] [email protected] 108 points 11 months ago

Shareholders are the worst creation of capitalism so far.

It allows you to create anonymous gray masters that you must serve at any cost no matter how humanly heinous they are.

Also, the bad thing that can happen to the shareholders is that they lose a little money whereas the people beholden to the shareholders can lose everything they have including their souls, and all the shareholders have to do is say "I had nothing to do with it, I just bought a piece of paper, I didn't even get a piece of paper I got an nft" and wash their hands of the whole thing.

The fact that our retirement accounts are being used to fund the hedge managers that create small shareholders that run the businesses that fire us so that the large shareholders get more money now in hopes that in some theoretical future the small shareholders get enough money to enjoy our twilight years is absolute insanity.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago

I think it's totally reasonable to be weirded out by corporate jargon. It's so 1984 esque. It seems like it's created to help capitalists do their best not to lie in legal terms while at the same time communicating to their shareholders that money matters while also still trying to put on a facade of humanity for the PR front.

It's so gross.

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

It is jargon for sure, and bloviating to mask layoffs.

A merger will always have layoffs because there will be duplication of roles, especially in lower/middle management.

Some duplication may also occur in boots-on-the-ground roles, depending on the companies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They’re masking it? Seems pretty plain to me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Maybe only masking in terms of trying to somehow make it seem justified and as a natural part of their company's growth. But you're not wrong.

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

That's capitalism. It's a system that is devoid of humanity. Money is above everything, including human life.

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[–] [email protected] 94 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If your company is being acquired, you need to assume you, the employee, are disposable and not the reason for the acquisition.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Particularly Broadcom, which is where old technologies go to die.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There are several places - Computer Associates was the olther classic place - until it was bought by Broadcom.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Yup. Warm up that resume and work on an exit strategy.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Mergers always mean layoffs.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Especially with their sizes: Broadcom has 20,000 employees and VMWare has 38,000.

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

And Broadcom has a history of buying companies and squeezing every cent from them before they destroy them. I don’t expect VMWare to be around in 10 years.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (3 children)

VMWare has 38k? holy hell. I was surprised by slack having over 3k.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

VMware is shockingly massive. Hundreds of different products and many, many teams.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Guess I'm moving to proxmox

Free ESXi will also be killed off I bet

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I’ve been using PM for about a year now. It’s quite nice, although I’ll fully admit I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. I’ve heard a lot of people transition to Prox and adapt fairly quickly.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (6 children)

As someone who moved to Proxmox for my 3-node homelab, good luck.

I find the automation for deploying VMs to be woefully incapable compared to Terraform/PowerCLI on the VMware side. Not to mention things like load balancing/DRS are flat out missing.

I managed to get it stable enough for homelab-y things like *arr, plex, DNS, etc - but at this point I would quit rather than use it in a production environment. Or maybe I would just look at bare metal kubernetes instead.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Have you seen xcp-ng and xen orchestra?

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

What OS would you use for the bare metal install?

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I still fail to see how this benefitted anyone at either Broadcom or vmware

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago

It didn't have to. It had to benefit shareholders and stock prices, that's it.

That said, you can be damn sure it benefited the executive teams at both companies, very lucratively. Anyone below VP level can get bent, of course, as is tradition with M&A deals.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wait how in the ever loving fuck is VMware worth $70B?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago

They're the single largest name in virtualization. Almost half of all companies using virtualization are using VMware. And that's a lot of companies. Companies who have to pay licenses to use it. That's a lot of worth.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago

They run their servers on a $69.9B Yacht.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago

Damn vmware was miserable enough to work with already. Guess broadcom felt like pissing in the piss lake.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

At this point, if you find out you're getting or have gotten bought out, you should immediately just update your resume and start looking.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Although I agree, it is also nice to stick around and see what severance is offered as well. I've had friends who got paid out and were able to find a new job within a month of being let go and we're able to pocket the extra money as a bonus. I get that it's not always the case, and who knows if you will be so lucky to even find a job.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I mean sure but be prepared, I think that's the important part

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

When my internship was ending one of the Sysadmins gave some solid resume advice: make sure you can add at least one new skill to your resume every year. This forces you to keep your resume updated and gives you a warning sign for when your skills/tooling may be getting stale

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago

I'm shocked. This definitely wasn't predicted by literally everyone.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Paid time off and a severance and they don't have to return to office? Sounds like the folks getting laid off got the better deal

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

What do I use now? I've tried virtualbox and it didn't work well for me. Do I use Proxmox?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

Proxmox for the win. As a complete hobbyist it's been amazingly easy to use with enough features to keep me learning.

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

Yeah, it's solid. Also be sure to check out Proxmox Backup.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

In a previous article: Everything we know about what's going on at VMware as employees leave in droves ahead of the $61 billion Broadcom acquisition

talent at VMware has started to leave the company because of uncertainty around the deal's influence and hints from Broadcom's CEO about ending remote work

From the get-go, Broadcom's plan to buy VMware seemed far-fetched. The companies have little overlap, and with its massive price tag, the acquisition would rank among the highest ever in tech.

Yeah, this was doomed. It looks like nobody in the know was surprised. Customers, employees and analysts saw the layoffs coming.

I wonder where these people went. With the announcement of Apple's gaming support, my bet is on that or over to Oracle to work on VirtualBox.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Many VMware employees learned Monday that their positions will be eliminated following Broadcom closing its acquisition of the company.

Employees whose positions were eliminated received an email on Monday viewed by Business Insider that said, "Broadcom recently completed its acquisition of VMware.

As part of integration planning, and following an organizational needs assessment, we identified go-forward roles that will be required within the combined company.

We want to make this transition as smooth as possible, including offering you a generous severance package and providing you a non-working paid notice period," the email continued.

VMware had already begun job cuts prior to the acquisition closing, BI previously reported.

In the past year, several top VMware executives have left the cloud computing company.


The original article contains 333 words, the summary contains 121 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm already investigating alternatives for my company to move away from vmware for when it inevitably turns to shit. We have not forgotten the shit Broadcom pulled with Veritas and finally managed to move away from that fully last year. Azure Arc seems promising and I have heard that a lot of companies are already switching from an old colleague.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Thankfully we have KVM still ticking along

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

That was fucking fast, interesting, maybe that makes space for the competitors than

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

They’ve had a year to work on the layoffs.

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

Yep my buddy at VMware was waiting to get laid off all year. Finally happened two weeks ago

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm curious about how the rise of docker/kubernetes has affected these companies. I would have thought VMWare and Oracle would have been affected by the fall in the use of tools such as Vagrant for VMs.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Uhh what does this mean for workspace one?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

They will be gutted of talent, like all other vmware products.

It will get more fragile, with less updates and features, and likely cost considerably more when your renewal is up.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

What does this mean for the spring framework? Doesn’t VMware maintain spring these days ? Or is it unrelated ?

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