Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom lays off many VMware employees after closing acquisition

businessinsider.com

339 pointsmfiguiere210 comments

First, question:

> Several top VMware executives have left the cloud-computing company over the past year.

Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?

I am now reaching out to friends to see if everyone is ok, this sucks. I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes. Wouldn't you first expect that people are going to leave just due to them being bought and then do additional cuts if necessary after that?

I feel like that has always been the strategy with acquisitions minus redundancy like HR.

Otherwise this is a big moral hit, first being bought and then an acquisition at the same time? Who would stay after that?

> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?

I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare. Whether that counts as "the cloud" or not is up to you, but virtualization within datacenter is pretty standard.

For what it's worth, every experience I've ever had with Broadcom in the embedded space has been negative. So this came initially as a disappointment, and now I'm disheartened to see my expectations were accurate.

> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare.

This is highly unlikely. VMware is too expensive for a VPS provider to achieve profitability.

It seems highly unlikely they're not successful and selling for $64 billion. I don't get it either :/

F500 companies are paying them millions in licenses to save 10x their hardware cost.

It's usually proxmox or virtuozzo, or some other kvm front end. I've worked at 4 huge webhosts and they never used vmware for vps/shared servers. Only our dedicated customers paying for support (think RAX) used vmware and that was their own.

VMware is extremely common in hosted solution providers. This is not just web hosting, this is hosting stuff like your payroll or ERP systems.

There a big difference between hosted solutions and VPS services. VMware might be used a lot in the former, but in the latter it's mostly KVM or Xen.

I don't know if it's 'most' but there's plenty of large private-cloud B2B setups offering vm-as-a-service / esxi-as-a-service or something frontended by vmware cloud director. Definitely to the tune of billions of annual revenue worldwide.

I worked at some fairly large hosting companies before cloud took over and never once saw vmware. It was almost always virtuozzo/openvz

There are two classes of hosting companies, enterprise and small business. Enterprise hosting companies serve enterprise fortune500 customers. They are VMWare. The ones catering to small business are using everything but VMware because of costs. They are not typically large, digital ocean and linode aside.

I still disagree. Verizon serves every fortune 500 company in existence and our enterprise compute offering was not vmware. Not a single vmware node in all 100+ pops. I also worked at Godaddy, zero vmware, even after IPO, and they most certainly have B2B customers too.

I have never used a non VMware environment at a Fortune 500.

I worked at one of the biggest private cloud providers in Australia.

It was VMWare VCentre/VSphere end to end for all private clients.

There were some great GUIs and great management but if you wanted serious API access it was the one of the most hacked up thing I have ever seen in my career.

Oh my lord, I remember dealing with a VSphere API early in my career. They didn't have a concept of service accounts so the official advice for our nightly automation was:

Pay a sysadmin to be up at night, then before your job is meant to run, have them log into the VSphere GUI, open devtools, click refresh to trigger a GET request, copy the cookie, paste the cookie into our custom software, and send it in the cookies of our API requests.

When we asked if there was an easier way, they said that we could probably use Selenium to automate that.

Needless to say, we did not sign the contract, and moved wholesale into AWS.

That's about it. Although, instead of using Selinium, you could work out the XML that the GUI runs from and `POSTS`, then make scripts pretend to be the GUI. Then maybe going into the internal postgres database that runs it to get the data that is not on the GUI.

Not funny. :)

Oh haha I forgot how much information was not exposed in the API at all. I remember having to bring in a senior engineer because I thought I was going crazy. I could only ever find like half of the useful data on a server I just provisioned.

As someone with a vast amount of experience automating vsphere, this is made up bullshit.

API access got a lot better once they introduced the powershell API (which can also be used via C#) but the solution you're describing is the result of people not knowing what they're doing.

It looks like the automation api was introduced in 2021. (!!!)

I stopped using it in like 2014 or 2015 after years of requesting improvements (like better ways to automate things without stuff breaking all the time).

Me too. I have not touched it for over 2 years and big clients sre unlikely to make huge upgrades quickly anyway.

It sounds great they have arrived at the 20th century. Powershell and C#? Don't tell me it is SOAP and all XML? I kinda like the way most cloud apis are just REST and json under the hood with vendor supported python packages that work well on all major platforms.

This sounds like a Ruby on Rails developer who cannot fathom that not everyone thinks having to update their framework every 6 months is unacceptable.

PowerCLI is something like 10+ years old, and all it did was used the existing API's but put a pretty sheen on it for those that were confused by the graph ideas used in their full-on API.

This was almost a decade ago, I assume (hope?) things have changed in a decade of trying. But it was official VMWare advice! It was literally in their documentation too.

In my experience in these situations (I was always being acquired), the acquiring company is at least partially counting on cost saving from getting rid of departments like finance, marketing, sales and legal as they believe they can do that with their own teams. The acquiring company also will have their own metrics for proper sizing (employee count and spend) for engineering, support, product, etc which is likely lower than the company being acquired. But in this case VMWare is pretty mature so those metrics maybe ok Can’t say I support this, but the bean counters love it.

Edit: “ Broadcom has not returned CRN’s request for comment about the job cuts. The company, which closed its acquisition of VMware Wednesday, had previously stated it could find $250 million in synergies once it completed the deal.” Synergies is code for the redundancies I mentioned above.

    Synergies

Also: Less competition.

> I think most VPS hosting providers are running on VMWare.

Out of date info, but last time I really looked there used to be 3 tiers of VPS provider:

* VSphere with SAN and blades (I think there was an HP reference implementation for this - many providers seemed to use it). These were by far the most expensive, and not really very good performance for the money due to SAN speeds and ESX not cpu scheduling multi core VMs that well.

* Xen/KVM. Mid range in terms of cost, and less fault tolerant than the SAN backed VSphere stuff. But usually out performed it.

* VServer / OpenVZ at the very cheap end. These were more like early LXC containers than VMs. The price point meant that you got what you paid for, and there were tech limitations with what you could do with the kernel (they were sharing the host kernel). Security wasn't great either.

I doubt the VMWare providers are as common now as they were 15yrs ago though. Even back then, they weren't the most common though.

VPSes use Xen and such, not VMware because of $. VMware was born out of the need to increase utilization of expensive enterprise servers by putting many virtual machine guests on fewer physical hosts.

>I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes.

Planning layoffs is typically part of the M&A process, so when it completes, they typically already know who is going to be let go and drop the axe at that point.

The people making the cutting decisions are also a removed from individual IC level visibility. These cuts are often done based on financial metrics per product line.

You could be an amazing engineer and have a well engineered product, but still get laid off because the product didn't get market traction.

I've been on both sides of the equation. It sucks but such is life sadly.

And ability doesn't fit in the spreadsheet they use to calculate their target profitability.

They are going to cut expenses by 40% and increase costs of their products by 20%.

That is the point of lay offs. They are not saying you are bad they are saying they don't need someone in your position.

sometimes a company will let managers in a different department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though.

> sometimes a company will let managers in a different department that is hiring know about coming lay offs and ask/force them to take good people. this is rare though.

Depends on the kind of layoff. If it's strategic M&A related this happens fairly often. If it's purely a cost cutting hail mary, then not as much.

There's probably some legal loophole by which _technically_ the employees have a contract with a new company after the merge, since their old employer no longer exists on paper.

This means employees get let go with legal bare minimum compensation and have little (if any) legal position to fight back.

Immoral but not illegal.

In the U.S. (where VMware is based), virtually all jobs can fire you for no reason at will. Contractually guaranteed jobs are rare.

> This means employees get let go with legal bare minimum compensation and have little (if any) legal position to fight back.

I don't know what country you're posting this from, but in the US none of this matters, and it does not apply. When someone is let go there is no "legal bare minimum compensation." There are some notice requirements (e.g. the WARN act), and many companies will pay out compensation in lieu of notice if the WARN act applies, but an acquisition makes no difference to these notice requirements.

In the UK we do have some protections depending on length of time with the company. There is some framework for redundancy payments.

The US culture of "at will employment" (i.e fire you on the spot for little reason) gives me anxiety and I don't even live there!

There are pros and cons. The ability to lay someone off quickly means someone in the US can risk hiring a bunch of people on a risky bet - if/when they give up on the project they can let the people go and cut their losses. Some of those risky bets pay off though and the people are not laid off.

Note that I said lay off not fire above. There is an important legal difference.

There are both side of the coin when it comes to at-will employments with layoff. They can use it to get rid of high paying employees to hire lowest quality of employee for little pay that will affects the quality of their product. And they don't care because it looks good on their balance sheet. And there is no recourse for high paying employee against the company (unless they have a signed contracts that have a clause to prevent this).

My former job laidoff few people because of high paying salary. They got high salary because positions required a specialized and niche knowledge for their jobs. They are good at what they do which earned their justification for high paying. It took the company a year to hire a barely qualified person because they don't want to increase the pay after declined job offers from multiple potential candidates.

> an important legal difference.

so what is the difference?

a layoff is due to business "loss" or changes? How is that really any different to a firing?

Fire is for cause and that means they will tell others when asked. This also means more paperwork to prove you are bad. That is they want someone doing the job you are supposed to do,but for whatever reason not you.

Laid off just means they don't need the job done anymore, and has nothing to do with how good or bad you are.

> Laid off just means they don't need the job done anymore, and has nothing to do with how good or bad you are.

Eh, in theory maybe. Not really in practice. When layoffs happen, companies often prioritize laying off lower performers. And they often still need the jobs done, just fewer people.

Of course none of these are legal differences. The legal difference I know of is that being fired for cause affects whether you are eligible for unemployment insurance benefits.

Sure is nice when you hire a bad employee

sure is nice when you have a bad employer

Then find an alternate employer?

The whole problem is employers abusing employees by firing without any reason, and using the threat of firing employees if they complain. That is used to force employees to accept unsafe and illegal working conditions, because if you're an employee who's choice is "report workplace problems" or "pay rent" you're kind of forced into accepting unsafe or unreasonable work places.[1]

Because it turns out that is what employers do. That's why most countries have have laws preventing employers from arbitrarily dismissing employees unless you have an actual reason.

If you have a bad employee, you can fire them. You don't need at will employment for that. Unless you mean "I don't like this employee, who is doing their job properly" in which case you don't have a bad employee, you're an asshole.

[1] If you're ever fired and your employer claims they're allowed to do so because "at will" employer, note that "at will" only covers "legal" reasons. Retaliation, bias, anti-pregnancy, anti-child, anti-religion, etc are all illegal reasons. Always ensure that everything you communicate with your employer is in writing. As @nxm is demonstrating your only safe option is to assume that your employer is your enemy.

In Germany, we have a 6 month "probationary period" during which either side can terminate the employment contract. That's more than enough time to check if you got a dud.

Especially notable in an easy to fire environment when health insurance is tied to employment. Everything feels higher stakes when there is minimal social safety net.

Ever since the ACA passed, you can jump right onto a marketplace plan with very little out of pocket (based on your income, which is $0 if you’re unemployed!). And they can’t exclude preexisting conditions anymore. Would be even better if employer-based health insurance went away completely, but at least it’s better than the old status quo.

To clarify my earlier comment I know "to fire" and "to let go" are quite different - the former implies you broke contract, be it illegal means or poor performance reasons.

"to let go" means redundancy.

It appears some countries see little difference between the two and others have a clear distinction and legal process.

Why is it immoral to fire employees that the owner thinks are not needed?

vmware is very popular in the private IAAS space. If you have special legal requirements but are too small a fish for the big players to spend time catering to, this is where you end up. IAAS operators that are competent at operations and business logic but not necessarily having the engineering talent needed to run a kvm fleet.

They sell the tools to build private clouds.

VMWare is used in the cloud as an alternative option from docker container.

VMWare is also diving into K8S space, I'm sure they have some sort of "managed" service offering that bundles their K8S solution.

VMWare owns Spring Framework... that's a cloud toolkit.

Vmware bought heptio and with that things like their managed control plane (a la Google’s Anthos) and other k8s stuff. I think most of those folks are gone now though

The headline folks from Heptio are gone but the products and staff are still there. They’ve gotten a lot of internal transfers from other parts of VMware.

Thanks for pointing out the Spring connection... I wonder how that will impact their development.

https://x.com/odrotbohm/status/1729231722498425092?s=20

If it's true that they'll lay off Oliver Drotbohm and Dan Vega then "seriously bad" could describe the impact.

> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?

That's like 90% of what they do now.

They actually make that really clear with little cloud icons on the "Product" menu on their homepage.

> Since when is VMWare a "cloud-computing" company?

Well they have this Pivotal Cloud / Cloud Foundry /VMware Tanzu crap. I know this isn't what people mean when they talk about "cloud company" but it works as "private cloud" in enterprises.

>crap

What do you suggest as a replacement to CF and Tanzu?

We have had sales people trying to push this to us for the last few years and so far it's been ridiculously priced and nobody seems to come up with plausible real life success stories.

My impression is that vmware have had almost no traction for any product beyond stock vsphere and even there the API's see very little use as most customers prefer to point and click in the web interface and are basically happy with what vmware delivered a decade ago in terms of features, but people in this market are also loyal to vmware as it's the known way to get virtualization to smaller server rooms.

Back in 2020, VMware pivoted hard into the cloud computing/software space with the acquisitions of Carbon Black, Heptio, and Pivotal—I was a Pivot prior the acquisition. They rolled all these acquisitions into a single business unit to sell (formerly) Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and other products in an on-prem, enterprise PaaS offering.

I left shortly after the Pivotal acquisition closed, so I didn't see firsthand how it unfolded, but from folks I talked to, it seemed that VMware batted teams around and really mixed the whole thing up.

Picked up where you left off. It seems that VMware was pulled apart and its carcass was sold off

>" They rolled all these acquisitions into a single business unit to sell (formerly) Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF), Pivotal Container Service (PKS), and other products in an on-prem, enterprise PaaS offering."

So what happened to Heptio exactlY? Were they combined with Pivotal and spun-off?

Their staff got smooshed together with Pivotal and a few other acquired odds-and-ends and largely set to work building a suite of Kubernetes-related products under the “Tanzu” brand. This included a Kubernetes manager (TKG) and an application platform (TAP) that were supposed to replace the BOSH-based Kubernetes installer (TKG-i, formerly known as PKS) and application platform (TAS, formerly known as PCF, better known as Cloud Foundry).

They got stirred around a few times via reorg, then the Heptio founders retired. Last I heard everyone in Tanzu was trying to get themselves reclassified as somehow part of the Cloud Foundry/BOSH stuff because it has significant revenue and was believed to be safe(r) from Broadcom layoffs.

Wow, what a mess. Thanks for the recap. So is the Tanzu product going away then and were they hit hard in these layoffs?

The exact opposite. Tanzu is a cash cow due to their customer base from pivotal. Its a mix between they left the good parts of the Tanzu portfolio alone while they chased their Kubernetes vision. The commercialized version of Cloud Foundry never went away post pivotal acquisition, the “legacy” products VMware tried so hard to move away from accounted for a overwhelming majority of Tanzu’s revenue stream

disclaimer: ex tanzu support

Yeah I don’t know what they’re doing with the new parts of Tanzu that don’t have revenue (will ask the next time I talk to folks, but I mostly don’t know people in that part of the org) but I haven’t seen any sign they’re cutting TAS. The only folks I know who got laid off so far took an optional severance package that was offered to everyone. The continuing offers were strong.

Cloud Foundry customers really, really like Cloud Foundry, and are uninterested in running it without support from a vendor.

> I don't really get doing layoffs as soon as the acquisition finishes.

It is pretty standard procedure. Buyer usually absorbs leadership first, then they gut sales, then marketing after that. Leadership is kicked out or leaves after a while.

They are treated like redundancies, even if they aren't so.

I feel for the VMWare folks. I may have my issues with their pricing, but their products have historically been quite solid, while Broadcom strategy is, well, just "buy and spread".

If Broadcom lets the VMware employees decide to leave on their own, they will be losing the top performers and those with highest prospects of getting a job elsewhere quickly. They end up left with the less good employees.

But if instead Broadcom proactively sheds the underperformers, then the desired employees are reminded to be scared of unemployment by the carnage. And at the same time the market is flooded with a bunch of people looking for the same jobs a high performing employee would have, so now it's harder to jump ship.

All this is disastrous for morale, but no worries, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Our Full hosting service / IaaS / PaaS builts on ESXi / vSphere HA, with custom or OTS orchestrators. It is quite common actually in service provider clouds, at least the ones that are more traditional and not relying on fancy, nwer stacks.

My friend has been feeding me information about the acquisition for almost a year now.

They work at VMware and they knew about the layoffs months ago. Apparently another layoff is coming in 3 months or so with a better package and my friend was estatic to make it past this round and to be included in the next round.

The new American dream: holding out for the better layoff package.

Is that not your dream? Why work for years when you can receive years worth of pay in a single paycheck?

A good layoff package can advance retirement age significantly.

It's more typically a month or two of pay.

I only pocket about 20% of my paycheck after mortgage and other expenses. 4 paychecks is 20 months of extra pay.

Look at Mr. Moneybags over here with living expenses under 50%...

Mr. Moneybags over here with a paycheck

It’s not where I work. The packages are truly envious!

Per Blind, the first round is getting two months severance plus two months of garden leave to allow WARN Act compliance.

Yeah, my point being that years of severance pay is an extreme outlier.

I have worked at software places where it was 2 weeks severance, even if on family leave.

Personally, I would prefer to stay as long as I can in one place, and work on something I really like until retirement. But, I admit, these kind of jobs are rather rare in the modern economy (even though I'm not in the US and from my experience it's a bit better for someone with my wishes here in Germany).

Some people aren't completely alienated from the value of their labor.

As a public cloud engineer, it feels like this is a mistake to cut deeply right when cloud repatriation is starting to be a thing.

Why bother repatriating to VMware? It's probably more expensive.

Yeah. Repatriation is probably an overstated trend even if companies are generally getting smarter about where and how they run workloads. But, while it's hard to migrate companies off VMware to a different on-prem solution, I'm not sure that you'll see workloads being repatriated going onto VMware (unless the company already has a large installed base).

Most F1000s use ESXi by default. You can concentrate only on direct sales to F1000s and make more than enough revenue.

Look at Zscaler and Crowdstrike for examples - both follow this strategy.

As a business, you optimize for Net Revenue after Cost of Operation. It's always good to drop customers if it costs more to support them than the revenue you get.

Right, but those companies don't benefit from repatriation. Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.

> Their on-prem IT is more expensive than public cloud.

Not really. Most of those companies have lax Cloud Cost Management hygiene and/or the Cloud Platform team is separate from the Infra/Servers team.

If you are F250 you can probably negotiate a nice discount if you are able to fully migrate to a single cloud, but most companies don't want to keep all their eggs in a single basket. This means larger organizations cannot avail competitive discounts on public cloud.

By bundling Private Cloud (VMWare ESXi), Network Security (VMWare NSX), APM (CA Wiley), Endpoint Protection (Symantec Enterprise), and Data Security (Symantec Enterprise) I can purchase 5 critical pieces of Enterprise Infrastructure using a single PO. This is critical at large organizations as any PO above $30k almost always requires CFO or Comptroller approval, and a single PO to Broadcom satisfies your Infra, DevOps, and Security needs (which are all cost centers if you aren't a tech company).

Btw, Broadcom themselves is almost entirely on GCP [0]. Almost all their infra and products are served using a GCP stack on the backend.

[0] - https://www.broadcom.com/blog/broadcoms-transformation-journ...

Who do you work for BTW?

PE/VC in the Enterprise space now. I used to be a PM and SWE and a staffer for a hot second. Not at Broadcom but have worked closely with their team and alumni. The Enterprise Infra space is a small world.

Edit: Also, I didn't realize I'm replying to an actual legend in the systems/networking space. I read some of your papers when I was an undergrad and later as an early career SWE.

I looked at VMware "in the cloud". It was around $50,000 - $100,000 per year for 48 cores. I've defended AWS pricing many times, mostly because of ability to burst etc. But the VMware workloads are often much flatter in terms of demand - ie, many systems just left running so the AWS value - while there of course, isn't as obvious to me.

"In the cloud" options are often much more expensive than what they should be due to customer expectations. The margins are much higher than in on-prem (where 80% "discounts" are common).

Sure. That said, the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS. The cost is low enough to other costs on a project that gain on velocity is worth it. In others gains on reliability, maintenance savings etc.

Ended up doing a small on-prem solution. VMWare for 6 CPUs x 32 cores = 192 cores runs about $3K/year for the software side which is a good deal to get started. That leaves about $240K/year or so to cover other costs. Not a slam dunk necessarily, but the on-prem store with vmware is not unreasonable.

> the cost / benefit tradeoffs often seem pretty good for AWS

If it's greenfield I'd agree. There's a reason why most companies founded after 2008 have a heavy public cloud presence.

The issue is if you are a large brownfield deployment (like most F1000s), a "Cloud Transformation" takes forever and is costly.

It can be done - for example Capital One and Broadcom - but it requires executive buy-in to respect engineering leadership and build a solid DevOps/Platform team.

I know if I was to found my own company tomorrow, I'd be entire cloud first because of velocity and ease of scalability, but you can't expect a company like UnitedHealth Group to transition to an entirely cloud first environment within a 2-3 year timeframe as even a minor outage represents millions of dollars lost a minute and litigation.

Over the next 10-15 years we'll see a large number of non-tech first companies becoming multi-cloud, but in 2023, it's still work in progress.

Every single one of those F1000’s has a highly competent CTO office team with an effectively unlimited hc and budget to find a competitive alternative platform to ESX. I don’t know if Broadcom is gonna make their money back before open source gets good enough.

There isn't a 'competitive alternative platform' that achieves feature or performance parity with ESXi.

> Every single one of those F1000’s has a highly competent CTO office team

I agree

> effectively unlimited hc and budget

I disagree.

A company like Google or FB can build in-house tooling simply because they have entire dedicated teams of engineers to manage their environments in house to meet niche needs. A F10 like ExxonMobil or UnitedHealth cannot justify a FB size engineering footprint when their margins are much lower.

> find a competitive alternative platform to ESX

Yep. The issue is ESX is actually pretty good at getting the job done. Your alternatives from a supportability standpoint are HyperV from Microsoft (which will probably eat up the smaller ESX customers), Citrix Hypervisor (owned and operated by ex-Broadcom leadership), and IBM RedHat's KVM (which requires you to work with IBM for Professional Services).

At the end of the day, you as a CTO or Platform team don't want to be fully OSS. Not because OSS is crap software (anything but), but because a pure OSS play doesn't provide you a dedicated support engineering team if shit hits the fan nor SLAs and monetary compensation if shit breaks.

This is why most OSS core companies max out revenue via a Professional Services play. RedHat is a notable example of this.

I have heard this colorfully and memorably referred to as "the need for a single throat to choke."

Pretty much

It doesn’t take Facebook level engineering to architect a substitute for VMware in 2023. Mid market IT contractors are replacing ESX for their clients en mass with proxmox. It’s only a question for enterprise until open source gets good enough.

I don't get this. We currently run proxmox and it is a poor substitute for what you get with vsphere.

If you are running vpshere and move to proxmox, you are in for major differences.

People have been waiting well over 10 years for the open source to get good enough: OpenStack, RHEV, Proxmox, etc.

Billions of have been wasted trying to get rid of the vTax. It has been rarely successful.

The open source will be eventually "good enough" like Postgres is "good enough" over Oracle, but this doesn't stop Oracle from taking in $50 billion every year.

> Facebook level engineering to architect a substitute for VMware in 2023

A tech company can justify 30-50% R&D spend, which is where IT/Software falls.

As a non-tech company like ExxonMobil or UnitedHealth this is a much harder ask while being a distraction from other work your IT/SWE team needs to get done.

Time spend managing your custom OSS virtualization stack is time taken away from managing compliance, security posture, networking, data management, etc.

Why re-invent the wheel when it's cheaper to buy?

> "Your alternatives from a supportability standpoint are..."

Don't forget Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/virtualization/

Oops. Totally forgot about them.

Tbf they target renewals more so than new accounts.

They used to be pretty good at virtualization back in the day

> I don’t know if Broadcom is gonna make their money back before open source gets good enough.

OpenStack is nasty to get up and running (I've ranted a bit about my experiences here on HN) and it's a PITA to get consulting, much less actual staff you can hire, for it... but once it's running, it's extremely impressive. Literal entire large research labs like CERN are no issue for it (CERN runs >300k cores AFAIK).

If you got the compute demand to justify the headcount and initial effort, absolutely go for OpenStack.

I disagree about the F1000's having a highly competent CTO office team. Much less unlimited HC and budget.

Earlier in my career I worked my way up from Linux sysadmin to Enterprise architect and designed a private vSphere/vCAC private cloud (100K+ ESXi hosts, 12PB SAN, US east/west, Canada, EU) for a F15 company and the level of incompetence I saw in tech leadership from the CTO office down was staggering.

Most CTO leadership in the F1000 has determined long ago that kingdom building and protecting headcount is their top priority, so they don't want things to be too efficient. They have to protect their 300 Windows admin HC and 100 Linux admin HC at all costs, so if you give their customers (the line of business unit managers and developers) an API that lets them provision a virtual server in minutes and might automate away the job of 80% of those Windows admins who were doing manual builds, they will slow it down to the point that it is just as slow as the old 6 month long manual provisioning process.

I watched this play out first hand. On my small team we designed a private cloud that could give you a Linux/Windows server in ~20 minutes with as much storage as you wanted, and it was so effective at stealing internal customers that the VPs who managed the server build/run teams made sure to break it apart into their separate storage, compute, and database silos so that the provisioning process got slow again. It still takes them 6 months and a project manager to provision a single server now.

These dinosaurs don't want change. They want to kingdom build and make sure they have hundreds of dead weight server admins so that when they get forced to cut due to budget reductions they won't get cut too deep. They could care less about the bottom line, and the CEO and executive leadership don't know they're being gaslit by their CTO office on down about the "dangers of public cloud."

Broadcom's strategy is to remove sustaining engineering or deprecate product lines with limited uptake by F1000 customers.

Also, VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim. I've worked closely with teams and alumni of Broadcom/Avago, VMWare, CA Technologies, and Symantec, and honestly, the cuts Broadcom does are pretty reasonable.

> VMWare has A LOT of fat to trim

Oh, VMware is the 2nd shortest job in my career, primarily for that reason.

I don't want to say much in a public forum, but my best lesson from working at VMware is how to sniff out an incompetent engineer early in a job interview: I just ask coding questions that a VMWare engineer would get wrong.

For example:

I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data mapping code. If the candidate really pushes back, or just can't figure it out, I move on.

I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move on.

I used to do that as well when I was still a SWE and then a PM. VMWare has good talent (when I first became a PM a long time ago, I was mentored by a very smart VMWare PM alum), but it also has a lot of empire building (when I first became a SWE a large portion of my management was VMWare EM alumni who weren't that impressive).

Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them.

It reminds me of how PANW was before Arora joined and cleaned house, and Symantec/CA before Broadcom cleaned house.

> Also, a lot of their early management feel like one hit wonders in my experience working with them.

And many of those one hits were ideas crafted and handed to them for implementation (still valuable and important), but left to distill ideas on their own? Not so much.

> I ask a question where the engineer should use an enum instead of a string. If the engineer uses an enum, I move on.

I’m confused by this. You’re saying you move on if the engineer uses an enum as you would expect?

Incompetent managers seem to love shorthand "competency" tests like this.

You're not confused. As the OP indicated, he was once a VMWare engineer, so he gets his own questions wrong.

Takes one to know one. Checkmate.

No I should have said string

>I have an engineer write some very basic manual SQL data mapping code.

Do people usually have the SQL language so well memorized that they can pull it out of their head on command? I swear to god I'm not the only engineer who regularly goes to the cheat sheet.

As with any language, developers who use SQL a lot do memorize it. Maybe not every bit of it but all the commonly used bits. I used to write SQL and PL/SQL every day at work and I got to the point where I rarely needed to consult the manual.

>As with any language, developers who use SQL a lot do memorize it.

If you're hiring for a SQL developer I guess it makes sense, buit I use SQL about once every 6-12 months or so, so if you hit me with SQL queries on the spot I'll fail your interview for sure.

Honestly, I find interviews that revolve around memorizing and regurgitating some programing language syntax trivia a bit shit.

Wouldn't it be better testing for critical thinking and problem solving skills instead of shit people google anyway?

If you're not hiring a SQL developer I agree it doesn't make sense to ask them memory questions about SQL. But it does make sense to ask them memory questions about whatever it is they claim to know. A developer who has to google the basics is not going to be very good at problem solving.

People doing whiteboard coding should not have to get the syntax 100% (or even 80%) correct. It should be enough to just show conceptual understanding of what kinds of syntactical elements and concepts are present in the language. When I trained for giving interviews @ Google, this was emphasized, at least. It's not about getting the syntax exactly right, it's about getting the algorithm right. Though obviously if someone is getting something fundamental wrong, it raises eyebrows.

If I were interviewing for database/SQL work, I'd be personally probing around understanding of the relational data model, not specifics of SQL syntax. How would you model this table? What's a join? What's normalization? What's wrong, conceptually, with the following schema? etc

When I give coding interviews I often jump in with "it doesn't compile because you forgot the semicolon at". The tools we use don't make it easy for me to fix such mistakes and it doesn't pay to waste their time to search out a mistake I (as an observer) already happened to know - I want to see their algorithm work so we can move on (or see how they debug why it isn't working yet depending on what phase we are in). I don't really care how long it takes you to find that missing semicolon - we all make that mistake once in a while and there isn't much to learn from it.

I have to use SQL like 1-3 times a month and can confirm that the syntactic inconsistencies of the language make me go to the cheat sheet regularly.

I am a SQL wizard and I have to lookup and experiment with the syntax every time I use it. Every engine handles it differently, which is a little maddening.

> Do people usually have the SQL language so well memorized that they can pull it out of their head on command? I swear to god I'm not the only engineer who regularly goes to the cheat sheet.

I think the key insight for you here is that there are many jobs where the only technical skill used is SQL. You probably should know this stuff like the back of your hand for such roles. Old, slow moving, large companies have many people doing this sort of work.

Contrast with a generic "developer" at some startup who uses SQL as only one part of much larger and more complex applications.

As a "developer" you have to deal with so much obscure syntax in your life (actual programming languages, shells, dockerfiles, kubernetes yaml, helm, god knows how many 3rd party APIs, ci/cd definitions, other rando DSLs...) that you won't be able to keep everything in working memory.

Ironically working at a big old company I wrote almost no SQL, because the database was DB2, so we had dedicated Data developers to write stored procedures in COBOL / SQL. While at a small shop and a more modern tech company I wrote tons of SQL.

Same, my best experiences with getting data out of DBs - in an earlier job where I had to work with many external customers directly - were the big ones, cause they always had dedicated Database dev teams that could prepare the data in a way that worked for me and the database. Contrast this with the small shops, which - if at all - had someone as a db admin (usually in addition to their normal job) and could only provide database access and "here, figure it out", which meant I had to write all the SQL myself.

But I think that supports the GPs point. At big companies you are more specialized, which means if you get hired into the database dev team you better know SQL really well, cause the non-database devs won't even get access to it and instead depend on you.

Any time I've participated in a technical interview as an interviewer we've had the candidate have full access to a computer and web browser.

I don't expect everyone to have everything memorized or get it right on the first try, but if you don't even know what questions to ask or what resources to confer with, I'm usually concerned if the candidate will be a good fit. The candidate can't be expected to instantly warp to the solution but they need to show they can begin to find the path.

Ideally, yes you should be able to understand and recall all of the basic commands:

- DDL: create, drop, alter, truncate

- DML: insert, update, delete, call, explain, lock

- TCL: commit, savepoint, rollback

- DQL: select

- DCL: grant, revoke

If you've used them before, you'll have a good enough intuition to understand what each does and when to bring them out of the toolbox. Some database engines have extended versions of these or other ways to achieve the same result, but the underlying concepts are the same.

From there, you should be able to create a basic SELECT statement, and understand the basic flags:

- FROM

- WHERE

- GROUP BY

- HAVING

- ORDER BY

- LIMIT

Then understand joins and how this is all just relational calculus/algebra with sets.

Honestly, I couldn't list these off the top of my head, but I know what each one does when I see them, and I'll instinctively reach for them when I'm writing SQL. But once you know all of this, you know 80% of the SQL you will ever need, and won't have to reach for an ORM. It only takes one weekend to grok SQL, but it will serve you for the rest of your career.

>It only takes one weekend to grok SQL, but it will serve you for the rest of your career.

Can't agree on that. If I don't use a language or certain concepts I learned more than 6-12 months, I forget it. Groking something in one weekend that you won't immediately put to use then it gets immediately flushed by the garbage collector. At least for me.

I provided the query, the skeleton of the function, and I explained the API of a simplified data reader.

It's like asking a chef to make a hamburger, and telling them how to turn on the grill and where the ingredients are. Either they can do it, or they can't; but you can learn a lot about them by watching them do it.

As an EE, when someone explains they need SQL, all the other hallucinated semantic handlebars to compute, I move on.

Abacus, slide rule, grid paper, mechanical pencil, or gtfo!

IT is data librarian work. I compute with raw materials of reality, not 1970s semantic babble. Software as an industry has a lot of fat to cut.

…The argument can work from various contexts. Not the flex you think it is.

If said candidate's whiteboard response doesn't use at least two main spurving bearings, culture fit comes into question.

You should really check out Agile if you want to understand why software is so messed up now. It’s been perverted to basically mean “rush out product features every two weeks that product managers think are interesting” in many places.

Unfortunately it sounds like you're filtering on things that can be easily taught.

I think the idea is that if they don't know something basic you can forget about the hard stuff.

That's kinda the point.

The project I was on at VMware failed because the developers refused to learn how to use a database and just threw an ORM at it.

So I would write on the whiteboard a skeleton method that had a SQL query, explain a simple data reader API, and have them fill it in.

The good candidates got it fast, and then we'd discuss various error conditions and how to handle them.

The bad candidates would get stuck, whine that I didn't allow an ORM, or hallucinate that they could answer with an ORM: IE, the question did it's job.

Incompetent engineers and fat to trim I feel are seperate issues.

Layoffs seem pretty bad at identifying the incompetent from the competent from my experience. It seems to cut on all front, you're not sure if you're left with the best or the worse ones, but you saved a lot of payroll cost either way.

Or if you try to handicap teams by understaffing them, even competent engineers will need to reduce the quality of their output. This is when fat is trimmed in a bad way, where instead of getting rid of low ROI venture/projects/services/products and focus on the important, you just tighten the budgets accross the board for example.

I can't speak for the whole org, but my small corner of VMware got cut far more than was reasonable. We already ran very lean, and with the losses there will be no new features on our product for a very long time, if ever. Best we can hope for is maintenance unless they're planning to staff back up down the line (they're not).

> Best we can hope for is maintenance

This is probably what's going to happen. Companies like Broadcom and PANW want pretty high margins on their product lines, so they're pretty mercenary in getting it done.

If you got an offer letter, you should probably survive if you can justify your value over the next few months (in my experience w/ M&A)

I got an offer letter, but I've already got an offer elsewhere and will be leaving shortly. I'm not interested in picking up the pieces of the mess they've made. It just makes me very sad, my team was amazing and deserved better.

Yep. If I was in your shoes I'd leave as well. If you got a very competitive stock grant, that means they really want you. If not, best to leave elsewhere.

Have you seen evidence that it's a thing? I've seen evidence of it being a useful threat, just as multi-cloud is. The company that most publicly "did it" ended up plateauing as they stopped innovating on anything other than that backend migration and plus they likely would have gotten the cost they looked for from the hyperscalers if they'd continued to negotiate. But maybe I'm missing something?

> Have you seen evidence that it's a thing?

Only anecdotally - though the stuff I've seen is more about undoing the mistake of letting anyone at the company run-up massive bills on cloud-only big-data-processing (CosmosDB, Data Lake, etc).

The only other "repatriation" movement I've seen are orgs who got burned by limitations and glitches in things like OneDrive/GoogleDrive - again, this doesn't really come under VMware's remit.

The other big thing to realize is that for VMware, and Red Hat (I used to work on the OpenShift team) is that cloud might be big, but our last estimates were that 80% of our workloads and capacity were on-prem/hybrid, not cloud.

If I'm not mistaken, something like 90% of the K8s market is in the public cloud at this point (mostly not using VMware or openshift) so there's a bit of a a biased sample there if you look at the on-prem software orchestration customers as the sample. But maybe I'm exaggerating things

That's an extremely valid point. I'm no longer there, but I definitely can acknowledge that there is likely some inherent bias in the subset of customers that VMware/Red Hat has versus the entire market.

I’ve had the pleasure of contracting on a cloud migration project, and then a little while later an on-prem migration for the same project. I helped that company build a cost model for comparing their on-prem and cloud workloads, and they ended up moving quite a bit back on-prem. Even for the workloads they didn’t move, having a better way of comparing on-prem and cloud TCOs helped them negotiate much better pricing for their remaining cloud workloads.

One legitimate challenge is that it’s actually rather difficult to measure the TCO of each option. I’ve seen companies pushed to get better at that as they experience cloud sticker shock, and as large enterprise pushes more and more work to the cloud, I’d expect to see them continue to improve in this area.

> cloud repatriation

You can repatriate VMWare VMs from someone else's datacenter to your datacenter. You might even be able to do it with little downtime. (I vaguely remember that VMWare has 0-downtime movement of a VM among physical hardware.)

its called vmotion iirc, and it costs more money than we had when i looked at it

vMotion. works great

There's nothing special about live migration, really. The major implementations (VMWare, Hyper-V, KVM/Qemu, Xen, ...) support it for a long time, including shared-nothing migration.

Do you have any evidence that this happening besides random anecdotes?

Cloud repatriation is a myth perpetuated by consulting companies to get more hours. No one is seriously considering moving off the cloud

False

I honestly cannot tell if this comment is a joke or not.

Fun fact 0: Much of VMware's practical success was born out of its sales and consulting arm that was born out of the subsuming of an East Coast consulting company. (A long time ago, I found a deep link to an IT shop redirect mentioned somewhere on early documentation or in a support article.)

Fun fact 1: Between VMware and Citrix, there was an unspoken gentleman's agreement that piracy in the service of the industry and functional interoperability was OK. Licensing became nag-based because of the pushback from customers who experienced hard licensing restrictions interfering with critical business operations.

Fun fact 2: One of VMware's office moves was blocks away around Palo Alto. Legend has it, some servers were kept running by migrating to/from standalone UPSes and datacenter PDUs one PSU at a time.

Fun fact 3: VMware Workstation was usable and interesting in 2000.

Fun fact 4: VMware's early story is almost as desperate as Dropbox's and Cisco's. All 3 could make interesting Netflix docudramas.

Fun fact 5: VMware's ~2015 microkitchens were better than Facebooks. Breadracks of jars of tasty snacks from wall to wall.

Fun fact 6: Most of VMware Workstation and Fusion yearly major versions skew to UI/UX and theme changes rather than functionality improvements because of incredibly lean, under-resourced teams.

Disclaimer: Once upon a time (c. 2004), {{big name university}} paid me to go to in-person training and pass the VCP exam. LOL.

It also has to be reported that those who are staying as a part of the newly formed Vmware (under broadcom) has been offered a very lucrative and generous pay packages and welcome grants . Especially at levels 5 and above it reaches close to a million dollars of RSU . This is in addition to existing VMware stock that employees have.

Yep. Broadcom pays Google level but with much less fat and demanding an AWS style work ethic.

“with much less fat and demanding an AWS style work ethic”

What does that mean? I can’t tell if that’s a positive or a negative.

It means they want to squeeze every last drop of blood out of you. Expect stress related health problems, family breakdown and career ending burnout.

Reading the dear John letter it reminded me of two of the companies I worked in the past that wanted to reduce their staff, and they were looking for volunteers. In both cases I found better AND god a very decent payout. I understand that someone in their late 50s may not see this as a blessing, but imagine getting another job and a 15% raise and 5-10-20 salaries (gross) in your pocket (as a great sign-off bonus). I see this a free money!

Or someone in their late 50s might be ready to retire (or work part-time independently) for the right buyout offer.

I know I'm hoping that in my late 50s / early 60s my company goes through a round of voluntary layoffs. It remains to be seen how good my 401k and other retirement plans do over the years in between - I can't afford to retire today, but there is a good chance that by 60 I could do so. Having see several relatives die at 64-65 recently I'm not interested in working longer (family history suggests overall I'll have an average lifespan: 78-79 - but the normal bell curves start showing death at 64 is not an outlier)

It absolutely depends.

Someone can be in a situation where they can prefer their job than an alternative. But, for a lot of people, well it's "work" even if they're generally OK with it. And if they can afford to do something they prefer--especially given possible keeping toe in the river options--why not?

Least surprising headline of the day?

Are there any surprising headlines today?

Acquiring and gutting is the Broadcom way.

But this isn't semiconductors.

This will just end up with Microsoft taking all of their customers away.

As former admin of both, HyperV is nowhere near as good as VMware ESXi offering. Also, switching Hypervisors at F1000 is such a massive project that no risk adverse manager is going to sign off on it.

I've been at F1000 with ESXi clusters, they had 20 racks full of blades/switches/SANs that made up 4000 core cluster. They will ride or die ESXi no matter how hard VMware screws them over.

Middle management is getting squeezed in a lot of firms. Risk averse management won't cut it, IMO.

Today... However if Microsoft (or someone unknown) works hard for a while they can build a more compelling offering and get F1000 to switch over the next 10-20 years.

Sure but until then, they can squeeze the hell out of F1000s.

Problem with creating competitive offering is F1000 are not going to take risk on you. Last thing CIO wants to remember for is someone who greenlit moving core infrastructure to product that went under. They also need to provide decent support so startup today has about 15 years before they even think of breaking into this market.

So it's got to be a major player like Microsoft who seems to not care about this market because Azure. Nutanix is there but they are all in hyperconverged meaning traditional compute/storage separated hardware would have to be thrown out. Red Hat exited in 2020. So I don't see a competitor on the horizon.

A CIO will not move core infrastructure, but they will often let you try things in a lab, and if that goes well move non core things off, then as confidence grows the core goes too. That is why I said 10 to 20 years.

Unless broadcom has made the CIO (or CFO...) mad, then it is all hands on deck to replace them.. I know one company (by personal conversation with insiders, but I don't think they want to be named) replacing otherwise good tools because broadcom now owns them and the license fees are too high

However awesome some of their products are, I've not been seeing VMware displacing very cost conscious customers running homogeneous workloads of Windows on HyperV, or Linux on RHEV due to the attractiveness of the licensing.

I didn't say HyperV/RHEV was bad, just VMware is gold standard of virtualization.

If my experience is anything to go by those clusters will fade and die over the next 20 years just like the equally critical and irreplaceable unix(tm) vms and mainframe system is in the process of doing.

But it will be a long process and a lot of money will be made by vmware and partners even as the market wound down and move to whatever it is that going to replace it(im willing to bet it wont be kubenetes as we know it today).

That's like saying all Oracle customers are leaving for Postgres. VMWare moat is deep.

In my low labor cost neck of the woods VMware employ a lot of people. I wonder if they will pick up hiring and shift work from US/UK here or will decimate the current offices too. Or both and work current people here to the bone. It's broadcom after all.

Is this reporting that Broadcom is implementing the layoffs that were announced through the offer letter process? Or are they laying off people who they already gave an offer letter?

People who were not given an offer letter.

Probably going to lose the other half promptly as well to be honest. I mean, seriously, who wants to work for Broadcom?

There are golden handcuffs called RSUs, shares that are distributed to employees over a longer period of time. The longer you stay, the more shares you get ;-)

I know a surprising number of people who hope that Broadcom will be better managed than VMware and that it’ll be easier to get good work done there. Mostly folks who came into VMware through acquisitions and then had layers and layers of VMware management piled on top of them.

About 20,000 people according to Wikipedia...

BRCM comp is about 50% stock, and the stock has been a runaway hit in the last few years. So a lot of people.

They also gave crazy 4 years of RSU grants in one hit right before COVID.

Link:

https://archive.md/V9Y67

Cost cutting or killing a competitor (does they own another virtual host company?)?

Broadcom is almost 50% Hardware and 50% Enterprise SaaS (CA Technologies' APM product line, Symantec's EPP product line, and now VMWare's entire private cloud product line) by revenue.

I wouldn't be surprised if Broadcom did this acquisition in order to pull of a HP/HPE type split. Broadcom alumni did a similar thing with Citrix, TIBCO, and NetScaler merging into the "Cloud Security Group"

I interviewed at VMware a couple of years ago. Bullet dodged!

I think they allow(ed) permanent remote positions. For someone who care (like me!) it maybe worth quite a bit. So far I am stuck with this RTO mandate in most places.

Have you found public companies with generous stock comp that allow full remote?

Depending on what exactly qualifies as "generous": ZipRecruiter, GE Healthcare, Cloudflare, Atlassian.

NVIDIA has fully remote positions.

Arista has fully remote positions globally.

I interviewed there a few weeks ago. They mentioned the pending acquisition, and said they had been trying to fill as many positions as possible before that event. They would continue interviewing candidates, but if they wanted to make an offer, that offer would have to wait until after the acquisition completed.

I found a job elsewhere in the meantime, so it's not relevant to me anymore.

Firing people is how corporations fund M&A. It creates an ILLUSION of growth for investors. The layoffs inevitably impact the business and that LOB's revenues will soften or decline over time as customers get frustrated with lower quality and poor service, and as they have fewer people advocating, selling, etc. This is why M&A is, on balance, a JOB DESTRUCTION ENGINE.

Broadcom will ruin it. Nothing good comes out of that company.

In related news, water is still wet.

Surprised their union agreed to this given the extraordinary profits being made...

they might as well add NCNR (No Cancellation, No Return) and million dollars engagement NREs while they are at it.

if you have BRCM as your key supplier, you better plan to keep them for life as otherwise.

when will these layoffs stop?

When morale improves.

Ironically, after getting laid off 8 months ago after some other acquisition, my morale improved dramatically, but it would be good to have an income.

Probably not until interest rates come down or plateau for a long time at the least.

Arguably this layoff was more because of the merger though and less because of the economy at broad.

When tech companies get back to pre pandemic staffing levels?

This is standard procedure for Broadcom and acquisitions. Not necessarily a symptom of industry conditions.

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