A fictional note from Hock

Dear Valued Employees:

I have read the comments posted on this site and can say without any reservation that most of what you are here is accurate.

I personally don’t care about Diversity. If you do your job well, your gender is irrelevant to me. I don’t believe in these programs and they don’t add money to the bottom line. My pronouns are “he, him and your excellency”. Such nonsense.

Working from an office is and will always be my preference. No one gets promoted that works from their living room. The reason your company is being purchased is because too many of you were dialing it in. I am super excited to cut all the fat out of VMWare. There is a lot to cut. My level of excitement is through the roof.

I will listen to what you have to say, but I won’t be making any changes. I am OK with you leaving now if you need to.

My promise to you is pretty basic. I will pay you well and ask you to actually work hard. If you don’t perform you will be fired. I will continue to cut the headcount every year. This is how you run a business. I don’t care about shiny new toys or pet projects. You want chair massages, go work for Google.

Bottom line: if your management knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t be here. Just like CA and Symantec, I came in and fixed and over bloated mess and am now making money on their products.

Thank you.

Message from the ghost writer. As I finished this, I realized, he would say all of this. Not really fictional. One thing I can say for certain though, he is not looking at this site or any other employee sites like Glassdoor. He doesn’t care.

Comment! It's anonymous!

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Dear @idxc+1haEUnZ0

I will treat all employees as a number , just like your anonymous handle.

I’ll have my lawyers work hard and creatively to ensure the company fulfills the minimal legal obligations required as an employer.

I will innovate to bribe politicians to reduce employee rights and benefits.

This is not personal, just business as usual.

If you can’t handle the truth, may I suggest you resign.

Sincerely,
Hock

Fictional Hock? What is your position on the abortion ban and what will the company do to support employees impacted by this change like other large companies are doing?

Fictional Hock here!

I am not even remotely concerned about the EU. They like to over complicate everything, but in the end, they typically cave, they just delay things, which means I will have to cut deeper than I planned for originally. I am not a fan of Europe and the various protections that exist for the people there, it is why I try to do very little in Europe unless it is an employer friendly country (not France, Italy or Germany). Also, do the poster that said if the deal falls through it will be worse for VM - you are spot on.

As far as creating my own empire, that is what I am doing buying everything I can. Once I show the world I can make equal or more money with 70% less staff, Wall Street is going to send my stock to new heights.

Love, Daddy Hock

Fun fact. $69 billion is more than the GDP of a half dozen or so EU member countries - combined.

https://statisticstimes.com/economy/european-countries-by-gdp.php

Dear Fictional Hock,
Ever thought of building a real empire, as in Roman?

Dear fictional hock

What is up with the eu issue? Are you concerned and should we be?

Dear Sleepless in Seattle:

I have many things I am proud of, the one I would like to highlight here is in the US in 2017, I was the highest paid CEO: earning US$103.2 million that year.

While most people I only hear the negatives about me and how I expertly run a company, I give to many charities as well.

Thank you for the question and if you are a top performing engineer in a product that makes money, I look forward to meeting you when we close. If not, best of luck to you.

Love, Fictional Hock (he/his/your excellency)

Dear Fictional Hock,

What are you the most proud of in your career?

Sincerely,
Sleepless in Seattle

Hello Humble Servant: I am aware of what despair means. My people live this most days: “the complete loss or absence of hope”. The good news is, most people don’t care as long as they are being paid. I typically like to retain people that are not A+ players, but people that will be happy making money, but have low self-esteem. I realized how quickly people sell out for the almighty dollar. I can basically do anything I want, and the people will agree with me or do as I say (nothing se-ual).

Love, Fictional Hock.

Dear Fictional Hock,

Do you know the meaning of despair?

Sincerely,
Humble servant

These notes are really accurate, FictionalHock must know the real Hock.

Dear ConfusedDesi,

What do I think of the teams in India? I promise to always be completely honest with you all. India is not a place I like to have many employees. The people are always complaining (cribbing as you say locally), about their title and compensation, and now even complaining about having to work in an office. I tire of hearing about lunch vouchers and continuing education. If you want those things, Microsoft may be a better place for you.

I don’t care about titles and if that is important to you, best you leave right away. Working from home is not an option for people in India (no one will work from home in India). You will be expected to show up in an office 5 days a week. And yes, I do personally check badge reports.

We will keep a presence in India, but it won’t be at the level you have today. My current people in India are generally miserable with life at Broadcom, but because I pay them well in equity, they stay around.

Good luck at your next company.

Dear Fictional Hock,

What do you think of the teams in India and it is a location you would like to see grow or shrink, the team in Bangalore is doing good work that adds to the bottom line. What should we come to expect once we are officially part of Broadcom?

Dear IT Person: we will keep some of you on transition to learn how and what you do. I usually then just have my people already in existence so the work. Based on the size of VMWare I may keep a few (less than 10 people) full time after the transition, but will ask that you report to an actual office.

We have a strong sales operations team that can take on an infinite amount of work. They like showing Daddy Hock all the work they can accomplish without ever really growing the headcount.

Good luck.

Dear IT crowd,

You will learn to write Cuneiform on clay tablets as a system of record. It is in Silver Lake’s private equity playbook. They taught me everything I know.

Hack Tab

Dear fictional Octane,

What is your approach towards us, the IT people responsible for business systems, such as "lead to quote", "order to cash", "hire to retire", "record to report", etc. I mean the folks doing Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, Anaplan, and others. Those systems are important to be online, supported, maintained, compliant, and reliable for you to enjoy milking your new cash cow.

Do these suckers, including me, get axed immediately, or do you transition them? If the latter, what percentage you ship to the fire squad when HCL is ready to take over? Any thoughts?

By the way, I and most of my colleagues in this function do and love WFH.

Dear Code Monkey: you will have to provide your own p_ss bottle. I will pay you enough that these perks can be easily afford at your own expense and discretion. While I’m at it, you will also need to supply your own toilet paper. Usually teams buy a couple of rolls and just share them when they need to go during approved bathroom breaks.

Welcome to the team - assuming you write code for a cash cow product.

Love, Hack

Fictional Hack,

Do I have to bring my own bottle to pi-s in or are those provided?

Sincerely,
Code Monkey

Dear HR:

I don’t believe in big bloated HR departments like you have at VMWare and CA and Symantec had prior to my arrival. HR is a necessary function but not one I believe requires a lot of people, or one I find valuable. Just like Legal, we have it because we need it. I will always operate these functions as lean as possible and each year I continue to squeeze them to do less with less.

Today I have about 50 people in HR (and shrinking) supporting around 20,000 employees. Based on this ratio, and the fact that I plan on keeping about 5,000 - 7,000 VMWare employees initially, I will probably keep about 8 people from HR. I would look for people that can come to the San Jose Office. I don’t believe any HR person should ever be permitted to work from home. So if you are a lower paid person open to coming to an office 5 days a week, you may be one of the people that I would retain. I may also keep some HR people to help with the transition for a period of time. If you are a WFH HR person (or really any G&A person that WFH), you will have some time off beginning early November.

Best of luck.

This is the best thing on this site right now.

Dear Fictional Hock: I’m in HR, I know that Broadcom runs incredibly lean in HR; but surely you will need to retain some of us to support that VMW people that do make the cut? Can you tell me how you will select which people will remain with the combined company? There is a lot we do to support the employees.

Dear Concerned in Iowa: you are saying things that I like to hear (minus your location), if you are with a profitable business unit and in engineering, I may overlook your location for the time being. If your management is supportive of you, I may be able to overlook it for a few years. Once your BU is not profitable I will most likely come after you before people sitting in an actual office. Fictional Hock says you currently have a greater than 75% chance of being retained in the first year.

This is the 3rd in my trilogy miniseries "The wrath of Hock"

The 3rd episode is called "Taming the VMware beast", if you have not seen the 1st two episodes "The drop kick of Symantec" and "Wipeout nights in CA-landia" I strongly suggest you don't miss those gems. They may be available from your streaming provider.

it comes down to greed. I blame Mr. Dell on this as well.

Fictional-Hock: Responding to the work-from-home messaging at VMware during the pandemic, my family moved from the Bay Area to a fly-over state to enjoy greater quality of life. Given the housing cost runnup since then we could not afford to move back. I'm a respected senior engineer in a profitable BU, but will i be road-ki-l on the Broadcom highway?

This is hilarious! Thanks .
I am sure he exactly thinks this and would say this if he can speak .
But the question is - how Google and few other companies can be successful and human ?It means it is possible.
Tan is who he is , it’s not anyones fault , that he decided to destroy this company , but not other one. We just have been in a wrong place in a wrong time . It’s like some unpredictable disaster . Being hit by a car .

This is a good one Fictional Hock. I think we all should post questions to Fictional Hock in this chain and have him (or her) respond to us as the boss.

Thread regarding VMware layoffs

A fictional note from Hock

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