[raesene4]

A very interesting post. To me this illustrates a couple of points very well.

1) VMWare likely have no idea what they lost when they cut this team. Once teams just look like just a number of people to be re-located to save costs, there tends not to be consideration of the value of a long-lived team with the experience and team spirit that this post talks about.

2) If you're an employee of a large corp, never ever stay out at a role out of "company loyalty", it's a mugs game. Not to say that that's true for all companies, but large ones seem to have a distressing tendency to treat people as numbers to be valued and shifted and cut, and loyalty shown by the person to the company means very little in these circumstances.

[toyg]

Company loyalty died in the '80s; however, loyalty to your team-mates is another thing. Not everyone can quit a reasonably-secure corporate job to live on ramen for $amazing_startup, nor are you guaranteed to bond as much with the next set of colleagues (in fact, chances are that you won't, since it usually gets harder as you age).

[pkaye]

I find that when a company grows beyond 150 people, there starts to be a disconnect between the CEO level and individual workers. That is when these sorts of problems come up and the culture changes.

[rogerbinns]

BTW 150 is a common value for Dunbar's Number - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

> Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.