Broadcom is laying off 1,267 Palo Alto-based VMware workers following its acquisition of the company
Chip manufacturer Broadcom wrote the latest chapter in the long story of return-to-office tensions between bosses and employees.
After completing its $69 billion acquisition of cloud computing company VMWare, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan issued a direct order to his new employees about where they must work. “If you live within 50 miles of an office, you get your butt in here,” he told the workers of previously remote-friendly VMWare.
The comments came during a meeting Tan hosted on Tuesday after the merger between the two companies officially closed, following approval from Chinese regulators. Like many other executives, Tan cited in-person work’s benefits to collaboration and company culture. “Collaboration is important and a key part of sustaining a culture with your peers, with your colleagues,” he said.
Hahaha.
Fuck off
A 50mi commute where I am is going to be ~2 hours each way due to traffic. That’s 4hrs each day of lost life which, if I had to do, I’d demand to be compensated for. At even a low 225 days a year that’s 900 hours of time at tech-level per hour pay.
There are no collaboration benefits. My Product Manager friend and I disagree on this greatly - but I’m still confident from an engineering standpoint that there is no material value add to in-person meetings that cannot be realized remotely with simple concessions (if anything at all).
There are a significant increase in distractions, long lunches, arriving late, leaving early (to name a few) = significant decrease in productivity / output.
A lot of tech places where I am that are 40-50 miles away will require me to pay for parking. Screw that.
RTO can die. Commercial landlords can burn for all I care. I do feel bad for neighboring small businesses that are negatively impacted by the loss of foot traffic - but if my area is at all indicative, many of them just left the city and went suburban or rural and are just as successful with lower rents.
I’m going to take point three a step further and suggest there are ENHANCED collaboration benefits for virtual meetings, of course depending on the field.
I work in a field that produces a shit ton of SOPs and technical documents. We’re better able to collaborate when we can all work on a document simultaneously instead of having one person input all the changes while we do our best to explain to them what we want them to do.
There has been so much meeting time dedicated to something like “up three lines… No, three, so one more line. Now go there… Keep going… You got it. Okay, now add ‘this’… No, that’s not quite right, try ‘that’ instead,” and so on. So much wasted time.
I almost forgot about that… Shudder no less efficient way to do something.