Shareholders are the worst creation of capitalism so far.

It allows you to create anonymous gray masters that you must serve at any cost no matter how humanly heinous they are.

Also, the bad thing that can happen to the shareholders is that they lose a little money whereas the people beholden to the shareholders can lose everything they have including their souls, and all the shareholders have to do is say "I had nothing to do with it, I just bought a piece of paper, I didn't even get a piece of paper I got an nft" and wash their hands of the whole thing.

The fact that our retirement accounts are being used to fund the hedge managers that create small shareholders that run the businesses that fire us so that the large shareholders get more money now in hopes that in some theoretical future the small shareholders get enough money to enjoy our twilight years is absolute insanity.

I think it's totally reasonable to be weirded out by corporate jargon. It's so 1984 esque. It seems like it's created to help capitalists do their best not to lie in legal terms while at the same time communicating to their shareholders that money matters while also still trying to put on a facade of humanity for the PR front.

It's so gross.

It is jargon for sure, and bloviating to mask layoffs.

A merger will always have layoffs because there will be duplication of roles, especially in lower/middle management.

Some duplication may also occur in boots-on-the-ground roles, depending on the companies.

That's capitalism. It's a system that is devoid of humanity. Money is above everything, including human life.

Particularly Broadcom, which is where old technologies go to die.

Yup. Warm up that resume and work on an exit strategy.

Especially with their sizes: Broadcom has 20,000 employees and VMWare has 38,000.

I’ve been using PM for about a year now. It’s quite nice, although I’ll fully admit I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. I’ve heard a lot of people transition to Prox and adapt fairly quickly.

As someone who moved to Proxmox for my 3-node homelab, good luck.

I find the automation for deploying VMs to be woefully incapable compared to Terraform/PowerCLI on the VMware side. Not to mention things like load balancing/DRS are flat out missing.

I managed to get it stable enough for homelab-y things like *arr, plex, DNS, etc - but at this point I would quit rather than use it in a production environment. Or maybe I would just look at bare metal kubernetes instead.

It didn't have to. It had to benefit shareholders and stock prices, that's it.

That said, you can be damn sure it benefited the executive teams at both companies, very lucratively. Anyone below VP level can get bent, of course, as is tradition with M&A deals.

They run their servers on a $69.9B Yacht.

They're the single largest name in virtualization. Almost half of all companies using virtualization are using VMware. And that's a lot of companies. Companies who have to pay licenses to use it. That's a lot of worth.

Although I agree, it is also nice to stick around and see what severance is offered as well. I've had friends who got paid out and were able to find a new job within a month of being let go and we're able to pocket the extra money as a bonus. I get that it's not always the case, and who knows if you will be so lucky to even find a job.

When my internship was ending one of the Sysadmins gave some solid resume advice: make sure you can add at least one new skill to your resume every year. This forces you to keep your resume updated and gives you a warning sign for when your skills/tooling may be getting stale

Proxmox for the win. As a complete hobbyist it's been amazingly easy to use with enough features to keep me learning.

Yeah, it's solid. Also be sure to check out Proxmox Backup.

They’ve had a year to work on the layoffs.

They will be gutted of talent, like all other vmware products.

It will get more fragile, with less updates and features, and likely cost considerably more when your renewal is up.