With the likelihood of UK dragging this another 6 months for phase II and assuming all regulatory boards green lights the merge with UK being the last holdout, it will be around Thanksgiving and Christmas timeframe when Broadcom has to announce the mass layoffs. What a PR nightmare!
14 replies (most recent on top)
"As an analogy, how much respect did CA have in the job market? None. They were considered a joke. VMware is the new CA. Time to find another job"
This. ^^. CA had been irrelevant for many years, considered a transactional vendor at best. Their firmer CEO was simply putting lipstick on a pig..
A long term and very dedicated VMW customer told me "VMware just isn't cool anymore". That was five years ago, and he was already correct. The early mis-steps with VCAC and VCOps told me that we had lost our way, not to mention the terrible VDI story at the time.
https://ibb.co/gdZjcPt
Unfortunately, the "multi-cloud" story is an absolute joke. A universal virtual machine format that can be used across public clouds? umm, big deal?
We had meetings talking about MEGAcloud and ULTRAcloud - absolute joke.
Another example of how VMware mgmt could explain the process accurately instead of sticking their head in a bag of money and saying nothing.
Oh Magoo, you’ve done it again!
Not sure where you got 40 days. I think that’s for phase I. Even our Slack has this:
The CMA has 24 weeks, beginning with the date of the reference, to undertake its Phase 2 analysis and to prepare and publish its final report and decision (including with regard to remedies). One extension of no more than eight weeks may be allowed. Historically, Phase 2 investigations have generally taken at least 20 weeks and usually the full 24 weeks. There is no option to speed up this Phase 2 process.
CMA has 40 working days (8 weeks) from the time they decide to start a phase 2 to the time they have to publish a decision. It is in the CMA articles so it should all come together between end May and the 21st June which is the EC deadline. Still means FTC needs to weigh in but it would be highly rare for the EC to approve and still have radio silence from the FTC as they both have suggested they are approaching this review on the same basis of conglomerate powers and not direct market concentration. They both work off the same WTO playbooks so likely to arise at similar conclusions.
"Newsflash. No one cares. The market has moved on and if you think you are relevant on the market as staff architect that knows how to deploy VCF and complain that downloads take 16 hours and hope you earn the same package ? Nope."
I can't agree with this more. Over the past few years it really felt like our relevance was sliding away into nothing more than an really great hypervisor. Now that I'm a few months removed from VMware and met with a few dozen customers, that suspicion has been completely solidified. The outside perception is almost that as the next Novell Networks.
I can't count the times I've heard the term "VMware environment" simply used synonymously for "on-prem", because the company just does one thing and nobody is looking to VMware as a guiding light like they were 10-15 years ago. Sometimes a customer will bring up VMC or AVS, not even as a strategic play but a panic lever to avoid the vSphere+ uncertainty that's getting jammed down their throats.
Unfortunately, the "multi-cloud" story is an absolute joke. A universal virtual machine format that can be used across public clouds? umm, big deal?
A common kubernetes runtime across clouds? kubernetes solved the portability problem on its own.
A common platform to automate deployments across public clouds? Sorry vRA, Terraform won that battle years ago and no sane organization is going to make a capital or personnel investment to learn a platform which has been re-written from scratch three times already.
The solution soup of load balancing, sd-wan, mobile management, cloud posture, endpoint detection, etc? For each, there's at least two vendors who do a better job than VMware and are thought leaders in that space. We had visionaries who thought the SASE quilt of Velo + Carbon Black + WS1 was going to actually work.
I hate to bash a company which I truly loved and still is home to so many great people. If you're on the fence, please level up on the new tablestake technologies (terraform, k8s, git, jenkins, etc) and leave on your terms. VMware on your resume unfortunately means nothing in 2023, nobody cares.
Ambassador Borat of Kazakhstan has voiced fierce opposition to the acquisition, and will be overseeing an arbitration session with Hok and Magoo in the near future.
As an analogy, how much respect did CA have in the job market? None. They were considered a joke. VMware is the new CA. Time to find another job.
Just make sure you stay relevant. I see that the majority of colleagues at VMware assume everything will be alright because they know VCF, vRA or vSphere and have an Architect title - whether staff or otherwise.
Newsflash. No one cares. The market has moved on and if you think you are relevant on the market as staff architect that knows how to deploy VCF and complain that downloads take 16 hours and hope you earn the same package ? Nope.
Speaking of package. I bet this is why a lot of people moaning about the acquisition. Because they know VMware pays over the odds and has one of the best benefits.
But check out LinkedIn. Here in the UK you can find VMware related architect roles in the center of London for £45-50k, with someone in VMware probably earning more like £100k with bonus.
Even field roles like Senior Consultants. Worked in PSO myself. Earned about £25k more at VMware per year compared to what companies in London offer.
At the very least educate yourself and get some cloud skills. Even better, modern apps, get relevant then you don’t have to worry about no acquisition or layoff.
But also if you think you can just walk into AWS or Google - think again. That was a year ago. Now they are going through 1000s of layoffs and ask people to go back to office. Sounds familiar?
Anyway, I am sure this gets downvoted and if you are one of the people that votes this down, think about why. Likely because my post got some merit.
Hock out.
It sure is a lot of delay and fuss about a hypervisor. I mean, aren't those pretty much FREE anymore?
I heard Mongolia is going to block it also…
The deal could be blocked by any of the regulators. Heard China is going to block the deal.