Hi, ex-VMware guy here who just went thru the trauma of being acquired by, and integrated into, Broadcom. While certainly there is a lot of turmoil and uncertainty within INTC at the moment, for your sake as an INTC employee I truly hope that you are not acquired by Broadcom. Please allow me to provide a few facts to help you understand why:
- Broadcom is effectively a publicly-traded private equity firm disguised as a semiconductor and infrastructure software vendor. Everything (and I mean everything) is managed via P&L spreadsheet. Cuts come fast and deep, and never end.
- BC cares little about its employees, partners or customers. Decisions are made quickly, in a “ready-fire-aim” fashion, without serious evaluation of downstream impacts and with extremely poor internal communication. Ex: I had sales reps discover VMW no longer supported fixed-fee services contracts when the BC deals desk REJECTED agreements that customers had signed. AYFKM?
- BC is such a stark place to work, they have no choice but to offer oversized comp to employees. Base salary is decent/about average, then they load everyone up with a massive RSU grant – in my case 4x what I was granted as a VMW employee. BC boasts that they pay the best in the industry. Think about why they do that.
- Broadcom has an incredibly flat command-and-control organization. Every business unit is a completely independent division, with its own P&L. At the top sits Hock Tan who makes just about every decision in the entire company (does the man ever sleep?). During integration planning the general guideline was no employee should be more than 5 layers removed from Hock. Managers have massive spans of control (some literally >100+ direct reports). When I took an early exit package to leave the company, my exit had to be individually approved by Hock himself.
Finally, you may hear people say “Broadcom has no culture”. That’s not true. Broadcom does have a culture… it’s a culture of fear (of being the next to be laid off), appeasement (robotically execute every decision that’s made by Hock without question) and greed (how can I acquire more RSUs and stick around to vest them). People keep their heads down, and march in formation. I’ve found a more appropriate way to capture the BC zeitgeist is that “Broadcom has no soul”. There is no higher purpose than boosting margin, period. No sense of mission. No sense of team. No empathy for partners or customers. No thought of supporting or contributing to the community. Sure, every company has a fiduciary duty to return profits to shareholders, but at BC that is THE ONLY priority – sc--w employees, partners and even customers.
I wish all INTC employees the best of luck, as your proud company navigates the challenging waters ahead.