Alternative headlines:
- Dell wants to contribute to global warming for no good reason.
- Dell wants to expose workers to death by automobile for no real reason.
Dell looking to cut workforce without layoffs.
We need an alternative headlines community
global warming
When WFH began, I stopped taking the subway into the city every day and instead spent a lot more time driving around the suburbs. My car’s mileage and my ecological footprint went way up. You can’t just make up a statement and have it be true.
I too have an anecdote. If only someone had done research on the topic and we had a way to search for it.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022AV000732
Interesting, for me it was the opposite.
When I had to go back to the office, I started burning cooking oil and truck tires in my backyard every weekend, so my ecological footprint increased significantly
For me, working from home meant eating endangered species for lunch seven days a week instead of just two. Checkmate, liberals.
You are so clearly the exception is should not even have to be made clear.
Lol, “my personal anecdotal story, means someone else is crazy and wrong, despite me having no other evidence either.”
- This person
What are you doing where you have to drive around aimlessly?
Did the people collating stats forget to take into account your hobbies? I feel like there was nothing forcing you to drive aimlessly around the burbs more than you would have normally outside of work, shopping and errands taking the same time as normal.
The world is not flat, stop spreading misinformation.
So Dell wants to do a layoff of sales staff, and is going to lose their best performers first.
Dell’s inside sales team probably has a much flatter bell curve, performance wise, then their outside (traveling) reps.
So yes, they are looking to do a layoff without the headlines, or severance, but probably aren’t as concerned where on the bell curve those employees rank.
Middle and lower management of those teams is absolutely sweating bullets about their teams getting wrecked, but big picture, whatever impact the C Suite is expecting, clearly isn’t enough to outweigh whatever net outcome they’re hoping for here.
Edit: also, I pretty much guarantee that any of their far high-end outliers on the inside sales team bell curve, will be given an exemption by whoever is 2 or 3 levels above their direct manager.
They already laid off a bunch.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/dell-cuts-workers-sales-team-170000115.html
I guess not enough.
i hate how this “best performers” rhetoric always comes out in WFH discussion. everyone should be able to work from home if it’s better for them regardless of if they’re The Best at their dunder-mifflin ass job
Sure, everyone that has a job that can be done from home should be permitted to do it from home if they want to.
What the best performers rhetoric is about is that these companies are harming their long term prospects by doing things like this, since the personnel that make the most money for the company are generally the ones that can easily leave for another company that will not treat them like a child that needs to be directly monitored.
That’s not the argument. The argument is rather that good employees can easily find new and better jobs. So the remaining people are on average worse.
It’s also called Dead Sea Effect. The good ones evaporate, only salt remains.
They are saying the return to office mandate will cause the best performers (who are likely more confident in securing another job) to quit first, not that everyone shouldn’t be WFH.
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Why the fuck would any office worker whose job is 100% on a computer need to be in an office? I don’t understand why companies want to pay for all of that electricity and real estate just to make people sit in cubicles.
To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.
Meh fuck the commercial real estate market. Turn all the buildings into micro apartments or tear them down and install fields of solar panels.
I’ve been screaming its just wage theft. My city provides tax breaks for occupancy (employees prop up the local economy buying lunch). They are making me pay for gas, time, and car maintenance (and lunch but fuck them, I’ll just not eat) for this tax break which goes to C-level bonuses/shareholders. Its just another way of skimming off the top of employee wages.
We worked fully remote for nearly 2 years and the hybrid policy just keeps getting worse and worse. Coupled with quarterly riffs, I also suspect this is to avoid severance pay/unemployment while accelerating the down sizing. Yet our CEO bonus keeps going up and up despite our stock plummeting since the end of COVID lock downs.
Tear them down and build houses. Flood the market of every major city with houses so it becomes unprofitable to buy thousands of houses just to rent.
Then home sales go up, and millenials can ACTUALLY buy houses in their lifetime!
That would piss off the voting base that actually votes though
Condos! Best of both worlds. Especially in a dense city, a standalone house isn’t really feasible when you can fit 8+ families into the same lot.
Missing the point. The office executives are in bed with the real estate execs.
They are the real estate owners themselves
Sometimes, sure. Somewhat different disciplines but, some folks high up enough certainly play both investments.
Why should they care though? It’s not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.
Because all these companies have a shit load of money in the market including real state…
So sell it
That’s the crux of the issue.
Who’s going to buy it for a high price, if there is no demand for office space, because workers are all remote?
So burn it!
Property damage is an extremely effective way to fight against money. We should be doing it a lot more.
Cloud infrastructure is great for this. You don’t need your own data center when you can just rent space on a farm. As a bonus, it’s less work for the IT team who no longer have to deal with server hardware upkeep.
This is what is so fascinating to me about most people, they don’t understand that companies hord their assets in my different kinds of investments when they are this large. Having real estate gives them an asset they can can store large sums of money in that generally appreciate in value over time. If a company is under finacial duress, they can fire a bunch of employees, then sale the land where those employees worked and and save themselves from much larger losses on revenue for a given time period.
Both major companies I’ve worked for sold their commercial real estate and leased it back as one of their very first measures when cost cuts were needed. What we have here is essentially the reverse where tech companies scare off their workforce and industry knowledge and drive up employee costs so they can impart some secondary effect on the commercial real estate market… so yes i remain confused about the priorities in play here.
Why would Dell care about the commercial office real estate market?
they bought instead of rented? iunno
You do understand that large corporations invest in many kinds of assets in order to diversify them right? Real estate is one of the oldest investments any entity can make, and is often considered a pretty strong investment. Everyone needs land right?
So for the past 4 years it didn’t matter, but now it suddenly does? I smell bs on that real estate reason
During the pandemic they had to choose between go remote or close up shop. They didn’t have much choice.
Seems that once Covid stabilized they’ve been trying to force everyone back.
But that still doesn’t matter if they posted profits during that time.
That’s because you don’t know about how CRE funding works.
Large chunk of CRE runs on short term fixed rate debt, which requires refis. Next big cycle is starting about now and will go through 2026.
So feds lowered interest rate sum, and corpos are pushing us into the office to soften the blow from CRE operators and their creditors.
With that being said, low quality class C office space is in default, no way around it.
Shiti suburban trash offices also will die along with the shiti malls.
However, the return to office policy is specifically to bail out class A and B office towers in the major cities, ie the VIP CRE owned by the real owners and not bagholders
Whether we’re in the office or not, they’re still paying for the same space.
So how does us going back justify anything?
office valued if it is used. if it is used ,it has value.
Who do you think owns the real estate?
Sociopathy, mostly.
Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.
Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.
I just have slack running on my phone. If I’m at IKEA instead of my computer and someone wants something, I’ll just tell them I’ll take a look at it after lunch. If I’m out biking in the afternoon, I just tell them I’ll take a look at it tomorrow morning.
If someone wants something really urgently, I’ll tell them to give me thirty minutes. Thirty minutes later I’ll tell them that the results are inconclusive and this will need more time, for which I have scheduled a block for tomorrow.
A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.
“I’m at the grocery, back in 20”
The policy around remote workers in my unionized heavy-privacy job is that when you’re away from the desk it’s fine; no one wanted to know your bathroom schedule when you were in the office, and no one wants to know now. Grabbing lunch, getting coffee, anything that can occur at the office without leaving, no one cares.
For fire safety and especially for the “bad things happen while you’re by yourself” policy that started after someone fainted in a small windowless basement office long ago, when you’re actually stepping out you must announce the punch-out and punch-in after. It’s a pain, because they do watch and bitch, but meh:
Meghan: grabbing lunch. back in 10 Dave: yeah, me too Meghan: back Roger: Off to the doc Millie: where's Dave? Robert: do we gotta start the Wellness Check? Allison: nah, but I'll call him in a sec. Policy. Dave: wait. I'm back. Don't call the cops. Allison: Dude. Dave: Sorry. I'll pay the doughnut penalty Allison: ha! Okay, going for a walk while the sun's out Millie: Enjoy! Millie: Grabbing the mail. 5 min Millie: back Allison: back. Beautiful out there. Roger: backEtc. our ‘social’ channel is a lot of that shit. And yeah, the policy says an escalating wellness check after a reasonable time.
Keep in mind, this is a Union job. It’s an IT job but the subject matter is heavy-privacy and heavy-policy. Think like a gov HMO or similar deal where we have a lot of accountability and massive protocols. The day before covid they were a “fuck no you’ll never work from home, come in if you have a patch run at 0500 Saturday, hippie” kind of place where they derived value from seeing your ass in a chair. On covid day one it was “run for the hills, go now, take what you can justify needing (keyboards, laptops, screens) and don’t come back onsite unless you have paperwork. Just fuck off, right now”, a complete about-face that’s now enshrined in the contract.
In short, we did it; and if that group of dysfunctional stuffyshirt managers can cope with remote workers - some couldn’t, and like a reverse Dead Sea Effect, the worst of the bunch bailed and the good managers stayed - then I hold out hope that a lot of our sector of desk-and-screen workers can migrate en-masse home and stay there. They came a long way from where they were, and they hammered out a union-compatible workflow for remote work that actually makes sense. Maybe it’s a unicorn, and I hope it’s got legs, as we’re generally happier. And while union shit always has lower pay for the same work - sorry but true - the perks of choosing your environment makes it better.
I will now accept questions.
I’m obviously exaggerating. I got some stupid “top slacker” award at the last company function. My wife told me that actually does not shine a good light on me.
“have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway)
For us at the current job it becomes “hey, I need help with the Pinske file; throw me a call or a meeting when you can, please? Thanks!” and soon enough they or their meeting-req will pop up. And yeah, we’ll set a 15-min meeting for 8 minutes from now because it’s easy.
So managers and other poor personality types have someone to torment. This is said flippantly but I’m quite serious.
probably because their cost is sunk in the real estate already and no one wants to buy it.
I’ll go out on a little limb, it might be sales specific. My company is 100% work from home. All the engineers and product and design work remote, maybe come into the office once a week just because.
The sales team however is strongly encouraged to come in as much as possible. I think it’s a morale thing. Sales teams become these weird cults, maybe necessarily. It’s really hard to pick up the phone and make a call when you’ve been rejected 5 times in a row. The teams little ceremonies are designed to help push through that.
Their sales team aregoing about this all wrong. Just buy the consumer lists from major dispenseries, and then call the stoners.
“Dude! You’re buying a dell!” Whats your credit card info?"
“Dude! No way! I was just looking for a way to masturbate!”
“Yeah man! That’s what this is.”
Boom. Easy sale.
You need to set your sights on enterprise sales.
Doing lines in the bathroom is also more fun at the office with your fellow salesmen compared to alone in your home.
Like I said, their little ceremonies.
Especially in sales and finance: every call is potentially on the record, and that’s a problem.
A lot of internal communication in these departments is, to put it mildly, legally not without interest. A quick chat after a meeting is completely off the record, an email is not.
Quick answer to that…you forget everything said off the record.
I know I’ll be downvoted, but I’ll answer your question.
“Need” is a strong word. Sure, it’s not needed. But that’s not what the business tends to care about. They care about productivity.
I work in software. In my previous job I was a one man show. For my day to day development, I didn’t need to interact with other people much. When I shifted to remote working it was a huge boost because I got protected time to work where I wasn’t distracted by other people in the office, either socially or incidentally. This case it worked very well.
After the pandemic I switched jobs into one with a hybrid schedule. Luckily for me my job is a 15 minute bike commute.
However, the suite of tools I’m now developing and working on require me to constantly interact with other people in the office. I also spend a lot of time mentoring jr devs.
This is, quite frankly, just better when we’re all in the office. The jr devs know, explicitly, that they can bother me whenever they need it. In the office this happens probably an average of 8 times a day. When either of us is remote, it’s probably once a day.
Now with the other senior devs, we hate meetings. However, all the time, spontaneously, we’ll end up chatting in our little section about the development of the system, someone will overhear (maybe even from an adjacent group) and chime in with useful knowledge. Next thing you know we have 4 or 5 devs whiteboarding and discussing things. Most of the fine tuning of our systems get hashed out in these impromptu meetings. This never happens when we’re remote.
Also the barrier to just turning around and asking someone something is so much lower. Often 30 seconds. Because at home I have to send them a message, maybe message back and forth a bit before determining that it would be easier on zoom, then we have to jump on zoom which takes a small amount of time. Now this is not some huge thing, but it is a barrier that makes it just hard enough that he happens way less frequently.
Working in the office is just better for productivity in this type of situation, which i imagine is true for most jobs that involve lots of collaboration. Almost all of my coworkers agree. We also all agree that remote is better because commuting sucks. It honestly even boggles my mind to hear other software devs argue that they are more productive at home. Believable if we are talking about my original situation, or if you’re just mindlessly closing tickets. But for collaborative development of large systems? No way.
So essentially you’re saying that communication falls apart and you don’t have the correct tools for remote work.
That’s fine, it’s a new issue to solve, no one has it perfectly done yet.
I completely sympathise with this, I have experienced it when I was a stonemason for 10 years (I say stonemason, I am a qualified banker mason but I have been programming machines to do the work for me). And I overhear and interject my experience with the new lads often. But now I’m at university 3 days a week and everything has fallen apart.
So we use discord, where we can all talk and ask advice about how to do X but not need to be in person. And in my experience it works exactly the same, I can read everyone’s input and offer my own.
So essentially you’re saying that communication falls apart and you don’t have the correct tools for remote work.
I worked remotely starting in 2002, as I relocated from the NYC area shortly after 9/11 to get out of the region. My doc said “breathing issues in the tri-state area? World Trade Center Syndrome. Can you just move?” and I was done. I was on an H1B anyway, so I had no established ties. I was the youngest of a small group of remote coders, and they reallocated my time so that I worked on the same work as an existing remote team. Work was work.
In 2002, our ‘correct tools’ was a pair of headphones and skype: we ran skype all day. It was on, it was connected in a conf call, but all mics were muted among the 7 of us who were in the work group. Have a question, you’d either type it out or just unmute, ask the group - yeah, nothing more granular - and discuss it, and then go back on mute.
(I actually had a TV running in the office for background noise, as I couldn’t do the silence; and even the w98se sound system mixed it well enough to hide the background slush of the call)
It worked well. The existing remotes had a good culture and allowed for a water cooler around a coffee time and lunch time so you could stay and be social, and everyone adapted to the equivalent of someone gophering periodically and chatting over the partition. The company had a strong policy against open pit environments, and they actually worried there’d be too many on the call, but the team was great.
We were working on AT&T Fucking Unix. Tell me again how you didn’t have the tools when Skype and a 2002 USA broadband connection was the only thing we added to our workflow and we coded a secure OS for secure workloads. When I abandoned my visa/PR efforts and moved back home, I did it over a couple days off and had a rudimentary office ready to go in my home country immediately after.
So essentially you’re saying that communication falls apart and you don’t have the correct tools for remote work.
The problem is that I don’t know of any tool or set of tools that fixes this. We have an extensive chat system that is open all the time with rooms for each group, we have zoom, we use all kinds of collaboration software. Everyone knows these are available, and uses them, but the hurdle inherent to it seems to be just enough to really put a damper on seeking help.
I think the best solution would be to have a zoom room where everyone is in it all the time. Which sounds even more miserable.
I don’t think it’s a system issue, it’s more of a people issue, a lot of people are still using things like teams and slack as if they’re email which bottlenecks everyone, but with the correct training and mindset switch it can be very efficient.
Switch to what exactly?
Mindset switch to not thinking of that communication as email. At least at my work place it took a while for people to not be overly formal and just go straight to the point, which slows things down. It’s meant to be an instant communication channel after all
someone will overhear (maybe even from an adjacent group) and chime in with useful knowledge
I saw some tips about this, they said to have a group chat and never use DMs so people can see and chime in.
have a group chat and never use DMs so people can see and chime in
Can confirm - the group chat sucked, especially for us (2002 skype) when it was voice chat, so we often kept non-crucial stuff to the tail end of work hour too, so there was 45 min out of an hour for work before a burst of chatter. That’s supposed to have jibed with some kind of workflow pattern, and it worked … well enough.
That, and you need some watercooler time. The current job has it only once a week, but we all come to meetings early and chat for 10 min while everyone else files in. Get some human time in.
Unironically how I live my life
Quite right too. The most important factor for me when buying a computer is that the sales droid is in an office. All those CPU, RAM and disk numbers are secondary to that.
I just buy whichever one is called “gamer computer” and has the prettiest LED lights on the case. Thats how you know it’s the good shit!
Pretty LEDs make it go faster. Everyone knows that.
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You want xenon lights, thats the heavy duty standard.
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On a serious note, why?
Because making calls and using a computer requires a specific lacale…
lmaoooo Murica is just 10 companies in a trenchcoat pretending to be a country
They would ask you to return to the ashes if the office burnt down.
I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.
It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.
And in an unlikely turn of fate, the backup office burned down too.
It just might
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I question those studies. It’s way easier to get someone’s attention in office than emailing them 3-4x. Additionally teamwork definitely increases when you work face to face at least sometimes.
Don’t email 3-4x. Just write a chat message and send ab VC invite. Works immediately in 90% of all cases and allows direct communication without disturbing all the coworkers around you in an office.
There has been enough study on the subject that for jobs that lend themselves to the work from home model, it absolutely does increase productivity.
I do think there should be an option to work in office for those who can’t work from home for personal reasons.
While that’s currently true, I’m extremely curious to see the trends after 10-20 years. Does it stay productive or do problems start cropping up. My current job is strongly requested to be in-person once per week, but otherwise WFH. The occasional in-office definitely helps new hires and such, and I would not be surprised if jobs start moving towards a “wfh except once per week (or two weeks)” ordeal.
I agree but only if your team is in the same office. Nowadays people are working with teams based around the world and if your entire team is working remotely then there’s not much point to being in the office.
I agree to an extent, but while I’m not going to speak for everyone as my situation is unique, my role is as an individual contributor, and my role requires absolutely 0 teamwork. I have a set of tasks that need to be done by EOD, and so does the rest of my team. We don’t collaborate at all. When we were in office, the only benefit was we all sat together, so you could ask a team member for assistance if you got stuck on a unique issue.
During Covid, they redid our office. There are no assigned seats anymore. So when they do ask us to come in, I work at a random desk by myself. It’s absolutely stupid. I’m wasting gas and time driving to the office just to make an appearance to stroke management’s ego so they can physically see me in person.
It’s way easier to get someone’s attention in office
Exactly. Most employees aren’t just sitting around waiting for someone to get their attention. They’re already actively working. And when that work is interrupted, it’s a distraction, and productivity goes down.
Even the mental context switching between the tasks is costly in terms of time lost. Most people can’t just instantly jump back to the original task at the same level of productivity.
E-mail is not, nor was it ever, something for immediate response. Don’t e-mail people if you want one, you’re doing it wrong.
Now they can play golf together instead of by themselves.
I quit answering my dell sales buy. His quotes have been above what I can get buying right off the website. Their premier login must tack on a 25% charge.
Lenovo produces what dell wishes it could.
We just test piloted a few for the first time since IBM stopped making them. I was really disappointed when one had a fan problem just outside of warranty, I went ahead and cracked it open. It was all Phillips screws which was kind of nice. They weren’t all the same which kind of sucks but not that bad. I went to pull the fan out to get a replacement, found out I had to replace the entire fan assembly heat pipes heat sinks everything. I was super pissed off until I found out I could buy the part off their website and it was 80 bucks. Dell won’t even sell me parts. 80 boxes a lot to pay for a fan, But when replacing it replaces both the CPU and the GPU fan and gives me fresh radiators, It could be worse.
From a corporate standpoint I’m a fan.
This is where I am coming from. I buy computers buy the hundreds and really suffered what Dell offered and really loved what Lenovo offered.
Working at a computer shop, Lenovo ThinkPads are usually pretty fine, but the main fault we’ve seen with them is lack or completely missing thermal compound. On one occasion I saw my colleague’s machine not post, and IIRC we had to reset the CMOS to get it back up.
Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.
Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.
That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂
I’ll be looking for work in about 3 months and my hard line is wfh.
I will never work in an office with people again.
I totally get it. Good luck though, make sure you find a landing space first. WFH jobs are decreasing and are getting much more competitive. They’re also, unfortunately, prone to be suddenly or slowly shifted to in-office positions. Trying to work a mandatory period of WFH into your contract might be useful, but that’ll be pretty difficult.
As long as you are very employable and in the right field you should be fine. Using “transitional WFH” as a way to entice workers is becoming more commonplace and employers are often not transparent about it.
A friend works in HR at a place that hires as “WFH” and doesn’t mention at any point that there is already a timeline in place for two days in office after six weeks and then full time in office after three months. It’s not stipulated anywhere, it’s a “new policy” that comes down… on the same timeline… for every new employee. Lol
thanks for the heads up and I’ll definitely will keep that in mind when I’m looking.
If I can’t find wfh work, I’ll focus my efforts on building/supporting software developer unions while working construction. rather be outside and be miserable than inside and miserable.
Preach!
How about crustaceans?
only Mr Krabs, and as long as that damned sponge isn’t around.
well I’m unemployed and fucked
I’m beginning to think companies are doing this to get people to leave by themselves
The most important lesson I have learned throughout my career is that large corporations are not worth working for. Too much “HR” interference.
The best work environments I have ever been a part of is when I worked for smaller businesses that were still made up of actual people and not nameless/faceless/soulless “corporate HR departments”, who’s sole purpose is to “make corpo more money no matter the means”.
I’d say it depends on what you want from a job. I’ve mostly been able to do nothing 90% of the time and still make good money. That 10% earns my share because it’s often brutally stressful. But I can hide amongst the bureaucracy.
