Days after the chip firm Broadcom announced a $61 billion deal to acquire the cloud-computing company VMware, recruiters could sense the malaise within VMware — and they pounced.
“There was blood in the water right away, immediately. I got hit up on LinkedIn by a lot of recruiters,” a VMware software engineer who recently left the company because of concerns about the Broadcom acquisition told Insider. The former employee estimated that over 20 recruiters swarmed their inbox in the weeks after the acquisition was made public.
The former employee said that while most recruiters didn’t explicitly mention the takeover, they could tell the outreach was related to the deal. They said one recruiter asked “how the acquisition was going” for them, catching them off guard.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware isn’t expected to close until sometime in the next year, leaving the cloud-computing giant and its employees in limbo and causing many to run for the door. Sources within the company told Insider that a lack of communication from leadership, impending culture clashes between VMware and Broadcom, and the looming threat of layoffs were pushing employees to hear recruiters out.
VMware’s peers in the cloud-computing industry have taken advantage of the uncertainty around the acquisition to step up their recruiting efforts and poach engineering talent from the firm. Seven current and recent VMware employees said they’d been approached by recruiters in large volumes following the announcement of the acquisition.
One engineer said that in the months following the Broadcom announcement, he received LinkedIn messages from interested recruiters at Google, Amazon, and Microsoft for the first time in his career.
“I think VMware’s very competitive salary-wise, but I don’t think we are as competitive as maybe major cloud vendors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are at this point in time,” that engineer told Insider. “They’ve all been very aggressively recruiting, and I must say they’ve been even more aggressive since Broadcom.”
Another engineer, who works closely with the sales team, said he was approached by Amazon Web Services, Google, and IBM recruiters right after the announcement.
“Usually, in years past, recruiter outreach has been very sporadic. Unless I’m actively looking and applying for positions, I haven’t been directly reached out to,” the engineer told Insider. “But for the first month and a half after that announcement was made, there was an onslaught of recruiters in my email, LinkedIn. I was getting contacted by multiple recruiters, often by the same company, within the same day.”
A recruiter from Amazon Web Services, who asked to remain anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to speak with the press, told Insider that AWS had had a lot of success recruiting employees from VMware and even more so after the acquisition was announced.
“There are high-caliber and talented people coming out of VMware, but unlike Google or Meta, you don’t have to compete with compensation,” the recruiter said.
The recruiter denied that there was a targeted approach to “swarm” VMware employees after the acquisition, saying that increased recruiter interest in a company after any acquisition or layoff is natural.
While many VMware employees have taken recruiters up on their offers, not everybody at the company feels the urgency to rush for the exits. Some engineers in VMware’s strategically important cloud and software units feel a little more secure, making at least some more willing to wait and see.
One cloud engineer said of Broadcom, “They don’t have any enterprise-software sales staff and don’t have the cloud capabilities we do.”
Whether or not Broadcom wants them isn’t the only issue on some employees’ minds. Many have raised concerns about losing VMware’s flexible “startup” culture to Broadcom’s more traditional workplace. For example, Broadcom has suggested it will want VMware employees in the office; another engineer told Insider that if Broadcom were to get rid of VMware’s flexible remote-work policy, it would be the last straw that pushes him to look elsewhere.
“If they forced me to go and work in an office, I would probably have to find work elsewhere,” the sales engineer said. “Because I would not be commuting five hours a day — that would be the final deal-breaker.”
The companies did not immediately respond to Insider’s requests for comment.
Do you work at VMware or Broadcom and have insight to share? Contact the reporter Jessica Xing via the encrypted messaging apps Signal or Telegram at +1 (551)-280-9140, encrypted email (jessica.xing@protonmail.com) or at jxing@insider.com.
Do you work at VMware or Broadcom and have insight to share? Contact the reporter Jacob E. Robbins via the encrypted messaging apps Signal or Telegram at +1 (413)-717-0171, encrypted email (jacoberobbins@proton.me), or Twitter DMs (@JacobERobbins).
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