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Broadcom Laying Off LTE and Modem Design Employees
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 $45 million in operating expenses relating to the deal between now and the next 12 months."
In other words the management is telling them they suck so they had to buy a competitor to do their job. I thought Renesas was a Japanese company?
and yet the employers still expect some sort of company loyalty...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Workers need more rights as well basic healthcare
Why do you want to hurt the Job Creators?
This isn't people with MBAs being evil, this is good business. They are getting a ton of talented engineers from Renessas. So if you need 100 engineers and all the sudden you buy another company that has another 100 engineers, you keep the best 100 and let the rest go.
Don't ever expect a company to be loyal to you for a split second. If they can can your ass a day before your 40th year anniversary with the company to save a few bucks on the quarterly report they will. They legally have to. Corporations in America have to make the most money they can, and the officers of the company are bound to increase shareholder value.
It is completely amoral. McD and Walmart are not evil for not giving employees living wage, they are just doing their legal duty to increase shareholder value. To attribute the (mis)treatment of employees to anything besides American Corporate Capitalism is ignoring the reality of our economy.
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.
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...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
...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...
From what I hear through the grapevine, this goes beyond the LTE and modem design teams. Layoffs are happening in many more departments.
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.
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...
Right. They were treated more like the stuff swirling down in the Coriolis effect - flushing down the toilet.
Engineers may be Broadcom's bread and butter, but all lunch will find its way down the drain.
Corporations eat people like food. Its not personal, and the food source is irrelevant. The indifference to individual human beings stems from the fact that corporations are not people, they are an organization of hierarchical power...like the Donner Party.
Soylent Green is people. We should look twice before we chew and spit out other human beings, no matter how legitimate or profitable our sociopathic "corporate" behavior seems.
There are layoffs in the "remains of the Renesas" too, just now.
Broadcom had bought some other company whose name I cannot remember to do the LTE but found out that by buying Renesas Mobile they can get LTE faster. For example Renesas Mobile could demonstrate 300Mbit data link. Perhaps first in the world?
The layoffs mentioned in the article seems to be in the "old" LTE team.
TFA says "This is the original Nokia modem team, it started work on LTE, a better part of a decade ago. These are some of the guys who created the LTE standard and were involved in the original algorithm work of LTE long before other companies were developing LTE, so we believe we found some really good talent here."
Most of those ex-Nokia, ex-Renesas people are located in city of Oulu in Finland, and a few months ago all of them almost went unemployed because Renesas run out of money; right when this new modem tool was ready for the markets. And miraculously their jobs were saved by the bell... by the Broadcom's offer.
Broadcom now laying off its people is just an aftershock to Nokia's and Renesas' failures to utilize their former talent pools properly. These kind's of event, once again, hi-light the fact that Nokia was once doing all kinds of right gizmos. But unfortunately its leadership has been failing the company for a full decade now. In fact, those who have been leading Nokia during the last decade should never hired for any non-gargoyle jobs. The kind of waste of human creativity and stockholders' property they caused is just sad.