Can we assume that the U.S. positions are going to be hit much harder than the rest? Europe has better employment laws that protect their employees and most of the employees at South America and Asia locations are cheaper than us. That leaves us as the mane scapegoat. Am I wrong?
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Correct, it might take longer but statutory severance is pi-s poor. Well depends on age. For instance, in the UK you get
half a week’s pay for each full year you were under 22
one week’s pay for each full year you were 22 or older, but under 41
one and half week’s pay for each full year you were 41 or older
Length of service is capped at 20 years.
Anyway, there are other rules too - like a 12 weeks consultation at large layoffs, not allowed to hire into same jobs for number of weeks or months etc.
So yes, it takes longer, but the severance isn't great either which is why companies tend to offer a larger package to skip all that.
I was thinking about this recently as we have teams in Costa Rica and VMware has a huge presence there. It's true that most of these other countries have stronger labor laws, but that usually just means it takes longer to lay them off, or they need to offer some kind of minimum severance. Not sure what that is, but it's not like these people can't be fired or laid off. Broadcom will happily pay what it needs to if that means taking someone off the payroll in perpetuity, whatever that might cost.
Now, as to the labor cost factor in these regions. It seems that Broadcom is not really concerned with how much it has to pay its employees. With $1.5 million in revenue per employee, they have no problem affording engineers in the US and because they claim to run a very lean organization, and I have a hard time believing they would split teams across multiple geos to save money. This doesn't mean they won't have teams outside the US because I do believe they already have development centers in India and east Asia (probably China).
If Broadcom doesn't already have operations in Costa Rica it will be interesting to see if they decide to keep our office there. Most people in CR do support and back office work, exactly the kind of thing that Broadcom is trying to minimize its spend on. It's likely they may eliminate a lot of positions due to redundancy and even for the ones that are left, if you can hire two people in CR for the cost of one in the US, Broadcom would probably just prefer to hire in the US since they're all about doing more with less anyway. There is also a lot of overhead that comes with running a business in multiple countries and it makes sense that BC would try to reduce that burden as much as possible by simplifying its workforce distribution.