I have been acquired by Broadcom. how long did it take after acquiring you guys until they started doing layoffs?
11 replies (most recent on top)
Also depends on location - places like US, UAE and Singapore are legally straightforward and will therefore start to be ‘rationalized’ almost immediately. However France and, to some extent, Germany are still intact VMware entities - more than 6 months pos-acquisition!
Soon!
here's how it'll go..
1- your bosses boss, assuming they are well liked, will be assigned a headcount target. they'll choose the employees who survive
2- those who don't survive will be offered a transition package. usually, some period (months) where they get paid and then a severance package (whatever your company's package) after the transition ends
3- expect continued cuts until hock is happy
Those who are able to survive will be very well paid.
I will never leave Broadcom for as long as they'll keep me. You can get rich working here even as a mid level employee.
Wait, Broadcom acquired another company??
It is a sh-t show.. it is much worse than you expect or have experienced before unless you were acquired by Broadcom before, in which case, you would have already left
impacting a majority % of employees in all departments.
This part is not true.
Not OP, but speak for yourself. Our R&D team was reduced 30%. This included most of our North Stars and senior devs. The feature set we owned went down a week later since we couldn't maintain it. Leadership later admitted that they may have made mistakes and cut the wrong people.
Six months later, we have features that are still not working. We have customer tickets stacking up but have sorted comms to customers to tell them that it was a designed outage that is taking longer than expected Working with PM regularly on what feature to cut next because we don't have the proper skillset anymore to do our jobs. All based upon which A List is yelling at us the loudest.
"Not true", bu---r that.
Unhock yourself! Don’t wait!
impacting a majority % of employees in all departments.
This part is not true. Might have been in the soft roles (HR, legal, etc), but it varied widely across VMW. I'd recommend you don't take the VMW acquisition as a model. It took 18 months for the acquisition to close, during which many divisions saw high attrition and few or no backfills.
The layoffs that came between day 0 and day 1 were based on the negotiated operating plans for each division (Hock basically forced orgs to get to a particular burn rate that he saw as appropriate and tried to get closer to the operating margins he wants). In engineering, some orgs saw <10% layoffs and some saw north of 30%. The day 2 blood bath was worse in some orgs too.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
And when is the next round? I need to get on that..can't take this sh-t show anymore..
This is the way!
The first wave was literally announced the week after the acquisition was finalized. It was minimally impactful, just some house cleaning basically. The huge wave came 90 days after, impacting a majority % of employees in all departments.