Broadcom Laying Off LTE and Modem Design Employees 71
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Within days of closing its deal to acquire LTE-related assets from Renesas Electronics, Broadcom is now taking the hatchet to its own internal LTE and modem design team members by doling out pink slips. Although several hundred Broadcom workers in the U.S. and overseas are getting layoff notices, the figure could go substantially higher because the company expects to cut roughly $45 million in operating expenses relating to the deal between now and the next 12 months."
Re:the shaft (Score:4, Insightful)
and yet the employers still expect some sort of company loyalty...
Re:the shaft (Score:5, Insightful)
Never, ever, ever expect loyalty from ANY company. They are for-profit business constructs and don't give a shit about you except with regards to how you make them money.
Give your loyalty to people instead.
Amoral? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm so sick of hearing "companies are amoral" as if that's some kind of excuse for psychopathic behavior. If Broadcom had to buy another company to produce a successful LTE product, it's because they (management) failed to produce one themselves. And not necessarily because the engineers in charge failed - more likely because some dopey manager with herd mentality stuck to the 'support Windows and the rest will follow' script.
But "amoral" companies used to provide their employees with a modicum of security, because they were expected too. The rules have been changed, by Ayn Rand fans too dense to see that "Atlas Shrugged" is the same kind of utopian claptrap as "Das Kapital". In John Galt's hidden mountain paradise, I'm sure there were people to clean the toilets - and I'll bet they were treated a lot better than Broadcom's employees...
Re:Renesas Mobile (Score:2, Insightful)
...it is possible Broadcom might have made the purchase just to get the Renesas IP and LTE chipset (which supposedly is ready to go), but that doesn't seem consistent with firing their own internal engineering staff.
Why isn't that consistent? Suppose your own staff has been working to try to get a new project out the door, but failing. The upper managment decides to buy some company that has a working version.
Do you keep both groups around?
I don't know about the engineers in your company, but many engineers tend to be very NIH (not invented here), and given some potentially difficulties that are inherent in merging staff from different companies, sometimes companies just cut the cord and can the internal engineering staff that didn't produce. It's probably factored in that some engineers will leave before/during/after a corporate buyout, but I'm sure they are doing their best to lock-in the key personnel (or they'd be idiots).
It ain't fair, but life is rarely fair... At least on the surface, it appears consistent, though...
Re:Smart Move (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, the poor fucks who can't afford to do anything BUT eat off the dollar menu. They're the ones who should be voting with their dollars and not buying off of the dollar menu. Pay them more, and they can fucking afford to go out for a steak or cook a decent meal at home once in a while. Thereby increasing the amount of steak chefs in demand, and the amount of beef cattle that we need, and the amount of well-paid butchers and truck drivers. The list goes on and on. When the workers get fucked, everyone gets fucked. Oh, except for the 8-9 figure a year executives, somehow they're still just fucking fine.
Re:time for a union!! (Score:4, Insightful)
The workers are the job creators. The owners hoard the means of production, meaning people who could work cannot work.
Capitalist zealots flip this round.