Thread regarding CA Technologies (CA Inc.) layoffs

The response about is CA Management aware is hilarious. They are not aware because most of them stopped working on July 11. I won’t mention names but it is pretty clear which person is still working. They will all be out of jobs and only one of them is taking their responsibilities seriously. I didn’t care for this management team at all, except for a few of the old timers, but I am told everyone will miss them when they compare to the AVGO management team. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Good luck everyone.

I was an engineer on a very high growth product for Info Sec, but you wouldn’t catch me in a chair at CA/Broadcom come November. I have interviewed several people in ITC to take over my position as well as backfill other US resources that were laid off. Again, if you’re in Burlington, possibly Plano and Santa Clara, I would deem your position a little safer. I think if there will be a US presence, it will be in Burlington where all the other cronies are.

I'm not sure if CA management is aware of this but every time someone in the US leaves their position and we're told it won't be backfilled, and then a week later a new engineer starts in ITC working US hours, morale dies a little. Keep up that increasing footprint and pretty soon you won't be able to attract US engineers even if you want to.

It's natural to try to connect the dots given current circumstances, but you're reading too much into the product training plans that have recently been put in place. I have direct knowledge of what's happening there and it has everything to do with the fact that we lost 46 Support Engineers and we need to train their replacements so they can get up to speed quickly. Admittedly, at least 20 of the 34 ppl are being hired back in the ITC, but that's nothing new ... our footprint there has grown steadily in past years. We're hiring 11 ppl in the UK right now as well, so that's hardly a single site strategy.

Great Question from Piper Jaffray. Not a very convincing answer. World of difference between embedded software and enterprise software engineering.

franchise. When we buy companies over the last five, six years, just as many companies and businesses we add in, if you look at the finer print and we have that data, we divest as many businesses out there. Just let it go. Because those are businesses we believe are not sustainable. Are not strong. Are commoditized. And where you don't have an advantage for whatever reasons that comes into play. So in that sense, you might call it financial, I don't. I call it very strategic focus on businesses you can win.

Maybe reading what Hock is actually saying will help clarify things for people. Here's his opening remarks re: CA during his opening statement on the earnings call last night:

"Contrary to popular belief, over the last ten years, mainframe web loads have actually increased 3.5 times driven actually by increasing amounts of data generated with every single transaction. Given mainframe's part of the most important parts of large enterprises, we believe this will remain strong and stable market opportunity for us for a long time. CA's a leader in delivering a suite of mainframe solutions across application development and ITOM too. So bottom line, we actually see this opportunity, a great opportunity I might say, to double down for future growth"

There's a bunch of questions posed by analysts too that are worth reading. I interpret the net of it to be mainframe, mainframe, mainframe and some tools that enable mainframe connectivity are worth investment. Otherwise expenses need to be aligned with the Octane business model.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/broadcom-inc-avgo-q3-2018-235500030.html

Matrix management will end. We don’t need PDMs and SDMs. The ones who have performed well will be retained. The others will not. Plain and simple.

The director/VP positions will be thinned down as well. Pretty sure we don’t need 8 managers between the support engineer and the CEO.

As far as the engineers, they will trim down teams. If you are on a team that has been recently been cross trained, guess what? That means more engineers working on similar products and redundant people will be gone. Also top heavy support groups with a lot of Principal Engineers will be evened out. Too many chefs not enough cooks.

Broadcom will be royally f---ed if they decide to keep the products and off shore support. The escalations...!

I know they will do it despite the risks

Yes my impression is Broadcom does not care about high quality customer service and so they will just go to the lowest bidder.

this is not intended as any offense against my colleagues in ITC. I have worked with many support engineers in ITC who are excellent. But many times American customers have the perception that they want to speak to Americans when they call support. Whether this is right or wrong, good or bad, it is the way it is -- Americans believe when they call a 1-800-# and get someone from India they will get lower quality support, even if that is not always true.

CA and some other companies have used "US-based support" as a marketing advantage, and in some cases I think it really does work. I have worked in call centers in the US where I answered the phone and the customer on the other end says "Oh thank goodness, someone who speaks English as their first language." I am not saying I support this behavior but it's a fact of life.

The same is true, by the way, in other countries around the world for their own people. If our customers in Brazil call the 1-800 number they are very happy to speak to someone who can speak Portuguese. If our customers in Mexico call the 1-800 number they are happy to speak to someone who can speak Spanish. This is human nature.

So in some cases if a company thinks it provides a big enough advantage they will spend more money on US-based support if they are mostly a US company. If they are a worldwide company they might have support in many countries and languages.

But doing this is much more expensive than hiring a bunch of people in a bulk call center in India, so a lot of companies aren't willing to pay what it costs.

I don't know much about Broadcom but just looking around and googling "Broadcom Support" and looking at the options etc it does not seem like a huge priority for them. However - it is not a huge priority for any hardware company I've ever encountered. Hardware is a different world. So maybe, just maybe, Broadcom will see that supporting software around the world needs support engineers around the world.

I am not counting on it though.

Logic : Remove a guy getting 7000$ or 6000 Pounds . 10 Engineers can be replaced in ITC with same amount . My assumption about ITC is 70% safe compared to other locations.

Yes , ITC Support still hiring and we see lot of new engineers joining day by day . One new manager joined few days back ( poor guy) . May be support in other locations will be firmed more and ITC will have support for all the regions because its low cost .

ITC is not safe. Products will be sold off.

Pray you get laid off and not divested ( you will lose options and severance). I’m sticking around for the severance (if I’m lucky).

Sabotage Broadcom.

Cooperate as little as possible and make the training guides full of errors and gaps.

Force Broadcom to pay you to come back as a high priced contractor.

Not sure on what's goanna happen. We have to wait and see.

I can confirm previous posters. We are increase hiring for the support positions in ITC. My prediction is most support will move here and only few if any will remain in NA. Its just lower cost kind of thing.

I'm a high performing support engineer with a long tenure at CA. My managers recently approached me to help with a project to develop training for new hires. We haven't been hiring on my team in years. I assume this is actually training that is being developed for my eventual overseas replacement.

I am only guessing but I suspect the most senior and knowledgeable support people will be retained only long enough to hand things over and that's it.

An assumption. CA support will be gutted. All the people you have will not be kept. Jobs will be outsourced to low cost municipalities. Assume 2 out of 10 will be kept. Stay positive, better to be out now than later.