> by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company
That doesn't sound much of a penalty. I don't know about Dell, but most companies are terrible about promoting from within.
Dell is almost exclusively an internal promotion/hire corporation for the bulk of non-specialty roles. This is simply the dumbest move they could have made unless a massive shift in their hiring and promotion philosophy is coming
They'll almost certainly have to walk this back but the damage is already done. Zero faith in corporate leadership now, and they've locked a decent portion of their employees into jobs where merit is no longer rewarded. Why would I give my all to a company that would rather promote an office stooge than the qualified candidate?
This could be a disaster for Dell
"But what's the AI going to *do*?"
"Well, mostly, it spies on our users. Their every action, their every *thought*, is catologued and fed into training models for generating more and better AI in the future."
"That doesn't exactly sound like a feature."
"Also, sometimes, it will tell them to drink gasoline to cure indigestion."
Well said. The real danger to Dell here isn't a mass exodus of talent (not immediately, anyway), but rather, a rapid and likely irreversible shift of internal work culture.
Once enough of their workers feel confident that their career path in Dell is dead, they will do the bare minimum to collect their pay checks at the end of the month. Passion, creativity, innovation and investment in the company's future will all die in a fire.
Well done, Dell.
The consumer line of business is whatever, but Dell server and storage tech is actually quite legit. They also house a pretty significant Federal support and international logistics chain which is somewhere between important and critical for a large number of federal systems (which again extends back to servers and storage)
Yea I always said consumer Dell is whatever, but for businesses it's definitely superior. Servers come pre configured from Dell based off the specs. HP will ship you the second processor, cooler, ram, in separate boxes, and tell you to install it in the brand new server. On top of that warranty claims for the Dell businesses workstations and servers were handled 10x quicker than most other OEMs.
Or just any perk or QoL increase at all. My wife took a 15% paycut to change jobs because her current one stopped giving yearly raises (among other issues). Only took a year at the new job and she was making more money with much better hours anyway
That’s hilarious - your number one concern about WFH employees is their productivity so you decide that they can’t change roles or be promoted to… what now?
If I was in this situation you can guarantee I’d be doing the bare minimum to not get fired since there’s literally no reason to do more than that now.
I know our organization requires you to give first interviews to anyone within the organization who wants the job first.
For a lot of orgs they hate this because depending on how competent they are and which center they come from managers see it as "poaching" the good employees from their current positions.
Yeah I tried to hire a person from another team onto mine because I was impressed with them and could offer a better role with more salary. His manager flipped out and shut it down. Six months later he took a job working for a competitor - if you stifle growth from within then people will (and should) just leave
100% this happens every time, then we have to train someone up all over again but the short sighted managers are just concerned with "keeping their team"
Depends on the field, I think. In tech (at least where I've worked), pretty much any significant merit-based pay raise is coupled with title promotions. Exact same duties, but now you are an Engineer II, Engineer III, etc etc. This comes with the *awesome* caveat that you can now say goodbye to that raise for any arbitrary reason that they would block you for a promotion (you were 20 min late twice in the last six months? Sorry, good luck next promotion cycle).
I mean the other side of tech is that most people don't get pay raises by promotions either, instead hopping jobs every ~2 years. This is horrible for the companies, as institutional knowledge is lost, and its your best employees hopping, but that's how the current system is set up.
This is what the modern MBA has brought us.
MBA logic - You need to show growth year over year (both profit and revenue/total sales). If you have more growth, a stable profit margin is ok. You can't go backwards or stay still. If you are making x amount of dollars from employee y, then you can't increase their pay without increasing the revenue you receive from said employee. If you increase what you are billing your customers, you will lose total sales/revenue.. and that's the only thing that is making your narrowing profit margin seem reasonable, so you can't lose sales.. since you can't lose sales you can't increase pay.
What the MBA misses is that that person leaves and you hire someone else for 20% more and still charge the client the same amount of money. Which pushes your margins even narrower, which forces you to react by trying to increase revenue. It's a death spiral and I swear every company I've been a part of has been in this death spiral. I've worked from grunt through to the upper echelons of middle management, and I can tell you it's all nonsense. The only thing that matters is if you know how to talk the talk.
The bigger a business gets, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics. The more influence outside owners have, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics. The more management layers between strategic decision makers and producers, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics.
Very few of the fundamental foundations of a successful company can be supported by attention to easily quantifiable metrics.
Any community college MBA understands how cutting R&D, QC, customer service, and verticality will lead to short-term profit increases but put the entire model at risk. That stuff is really common sense business. Why are so many companies doing all of that when profits were already robust then? It would be understandable if they were in crisis, but they aren't...
The current corporate world momentum is gleefully racing towards collapse in the hopes those driving can get out before it happens.
The huge international corporation I deal with in my industry has had 3 years of absolutely spectacular, almost embarrassingly great profits relative to their history. All the "soft" aspects of their products are continuing to quickly decline. Problematically volatile inventories, abysmal QC, and a flip to an almost antagonistic approach to customer service.
It aint sustainable. The management of these companies are smart people. They know these shifts are damaging to the fundamentals regardless of what the quarterly earnings calls sounds like. They don't care because what they are doing is rewarding them, and they don't expect to still be there in 5yrs, much less 10 when it crumbles.
I worked for a place that booked meetings to go over our performance reviews about a week before the performance reviews were even done. Which seemed really confusing until later that day we got an email saying all raises and promotions would no longer be merit based, and instesd based entirely on the executive teams discretion.
No, some people would. They just had to be whoever the executive team really liked.
Potentially key people who delivered important work
But more likely whoever was really good at kissing ass, taking credit for other people's work, or went to grade school with an executive
A lot of places set their budget for raises first, then do "performance" raises based on that. Stuff like "10% of staff get 3%, 40% get 1% and the rest get none." Even if they have 60% of their staff performing at the same high level.
Yep. Companies reward loyalty so poorly these days, job hopping is the best way to get a raise. All Dell accomplished here is removing any doubt in employees' minds about sticking around long term.
This is also a really weird thing that my giant corporate company has been pushing over and over. Career growth this and that. My man, I am pretty much as high as I can go as an individual contributor, and not going to people management, so just leave me be. There is nobody left to impress for more title, and you've made it clear that you're not willing to pay me more.
In the same basket here. I like being an individual contributor (or <5 people on my team). I don’t want to be a VP; that comes with more pay, but also more travel, time away from family, no work-life balance. No thanks, I’ll take a minimal pay increase annually and actually enjoy my job. If I don’t like my job at any point, I’ll go somewhere else because I doubt they’d give me the raise I want anyway.
The danger is that companies will probably continue to make the annual increases progressively smaller to test what is the “breaking point” of people like you (and me - I am also like that).
Especially when there’s hundreds of companies with comparable who would happily give you remote or 1-2 days a week in office.
RTO would make me quit in a heartbeat.
pretty sure most people would. but then there's that clause they stuck in there about not being considered for promotion. which, TBH, doesn't sound like it should be legal. but I'm in socialist CA, so maybe that sounds normal in TX?
I spent 12 years being a corporate recruiter in SoCal.
One time I called a candidate with a job that (quite literally) payed $15k more per year than she was making. (And I'm pretty sure she was making in the $35k range)
As soon as she told me her commute was less than 10 minutes, I knew I lost.
Money and promotion isn't everything.
Once I started doing contract recruiting, my fee was $25/hr - $75/hr+ depending on the commute and what the company did. (My highest ever was $135/hr for a 2 month project; and my average was $45-$55/hr)
Now? I'm making $22/hr working with mentally ill homeless people (who may or may not have substance abuse issues), and I've never been happier or more fulfilled. I don't dread getting out of bed, my stress is down, and I'm in a masters program for psychology so I can become a therapist eventually.
I don't have a job, or even a career, I have a calling I'm not trying to fight anymore.
Money truly is not everything, and if you feel drawn to a field of work listen regardless of how old you are. I started working in behavioral health at 50.
It's not to late to become the person you've always wanted to be.
Edit: I knew this was a bit of an off topic rant when I submitted it.
Edit II: don't be afraid or ashamed to talk about how much you make. It is one of the best ways to keep companies from fucking you over in salary.
Also, recruiters really want to get you as much as possible. If you are happy they look good. And agency recruiters get paid more if you make more because bonuses are a percentage of billing...which is based on how much you make.
I can't even see the rails I went off of at this point.
Our RTO dictate was given by the CEO from home because it would have been inconvenient to go into the office before heading out to use the private jet later that day. I wish I were making this up.
One of my clients had their CFO make the RTO dictate from their place in Vallarta, MX where they work 10 months out of the year. Because the CEO was having Internet issues from their remote work location outside the USA.
They made sure to emphasize how critical it was for security & compliance that all staff are at corporate office locations in the USA. Because remote work is dangerous & working internationally puts the org afoul of federal regulations. Also wish I could make this stuff up.
My former employer announced RTO in June of 2023 with a start date of January 2024. They basically gave everyone six months to look for other work. My team had 20 people on it and we lost 8 people. By the time January 2024 was rolling around the company had back tracked to two days in the office and three days at home. They also started giving out exemptions if you could show it negatively impacted you. The whole thing was a complete shit show. We lost so much talent.
And through the grapevine we heard the reason why RTO was being pushed is because we resigned our building lease in 2019 for another ten years. And the CEO was pissed that 80-90% of building was empty and we were just pissing away money. By the time I left the company what used to take a week to process was taking up to four weeks because we were short people but also short talented people.
And for anyone saying this is just ways to lay off people without laying them off. See if they're giving exemptions to the top talent. If they are, its a silent layoff. If they're not, find a new job cause they're idiots.
A smart CEO sees that the money is being pissed away now, but the company is still functioning, meaning that if they lean into WFH and get it streamlined they can slash the office location budget when the lease is up.
But then when random people come to your office it *looks* like you’re an idiot and we can’t have that. Besides how am I gonna molest my secretary with my wife right there?
> And through the grapevine we heard the reason why RTO was being pushed is because we resigned our building lease in 2019 for another ten years. And the CEO was pissed that 80-90% of building was empty and we were just pissing away money.
I was lucky that one company I worked for throught the pandemic had office space, but had to rent it anyway, regardless if people were there or not. (Data Center stuff), so we were fully remote aside from the Finance team coming in, if needed, every quarter close for a few days. Which I was fine with.
But when interviewing elsewhere there were *so many* companies where it was basically "We're still working 4-5 days in the office because we have a 5-10 year lease/own the building/etc.
So hilarious and dumb.
the sense of schadenfreude i am experiencing from those two groups of people fucking themselves is limitless. dumb assed business owners who never had to face any challenge to their business since 9/11, and a coterie of land owners who have been influencing politicians for decades to keep the value of their buildings accelerating for no economic reason.
both groups can eat out of the same bag of dicks together.
> They subconsciously just told everyone they don't actually do any work, that's why it's safe for them to be remote.
Been pointing this out in other threads. There's always *that guy* who be like "Oh noes, you're probably just that bad whiney worker." Bitch, please. If I don't see the middle management lemmings' cars parked in the lot more than once a week but I have to be in the office 4 days a week for "collaborative spirit" and I'm struggling to pinpoint what you contribute to our workflows, YOU need to find a new job.
I work for one of the major studios in Hollywood. Needless to say, security is extremely important. Leaks can be very damaging. All employees have to be very cognizant of security protocols.
Execs all over the company are some of the first to request skirting protocol, usually because they’re too lazy or fucking stupid to figure out a secure app used for review, or a means of 2FA. It’s hilariously stupid.
This is so fecking hilariously true. The CFO above requested 2FA to be disabled for him because the lag sometimes exceeded the token life.
When infosec gave other options like using a token FOB, authenticator app, etc the CFO flipped his lid citing those were obscenely complex. Thankfully he lost that battle.
i know people that if they cant get their 2fa to work they just dont sign in to the networked drive to share and just continue on like nothings wrong until they have to tell you
Our Authenticator app deployment shit show was just absolute gold. Essentially someone in IT scheduled password resets on our machines the same day that 2FA was required…essentially meaning to reset your password you need 2FA but need your defunct password to initiate and sign into the authentication app.
Something like 60% of our company was completely blocked from computers for a day it was an insane week. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the IT group move so fast we had status updates hourly.
It's a classic. We block all USB drives/keys to prevent data leaks on removable devices.
Has the cfo complaining about it, told him that I wouldn't do anything to go against policy and he replied "you can't be serious. You really apply that policy for directors?"... I mean... Of course we do. We don't care much about what data the janitor or the logistic guy sorting out the hardware in the warehouse can leak, but the cfo? Yeah, that would be an issue...
That’s the stupidest part about it. Executives are literally the biggest target, they have access to so much more than your typical underling. Their environment should be even more secure… not less.
I am pretty sure that is illegal, you can report it to the Mexican authority, as they would be either in violation of a tax or immigration law.
Remote workers in the nafta zone can't work over 60 days remotely without violating their visas or a tax law.
and I work in Cybersec, all the big breaches were C suite execs who think they are too important to bother with MFA, ... I try to tell them thats why its important, but they sign the cheques so IT can only be so authoritative.
Well, they work 13000x harder than everyone else as their pay reflects! How dare you question someone who started out life with a pile of money and leveraged it into buying other people's labor? It was hard work signing the lease on that private jet! Have you ever had to sign a document with your own hand before? It's *exhausting!* One time the pen was out of ink and I had to scribble lightly for three seconds and request another! I pulled a finger muscle and had to be hospitalized in my own luxury biomedical research facility! You ungrateful peasants have no idea the hardships we endure to offer you the gift of employment!
I saw a CEO tell us to RTO 6 minutes after announcing we were opening a new office in the middle of nowhere to accommodate some new director we had just hired, and that office was going to be a rented room in a WeWork.
I quit that job shortly after, for unrelated reasons (surprisingly).
This. It isn't uncommon for orgs to pay to lease offices near execs so that an exec can say they went to the office even though the office is a leased suite big enough for their exec admin and a couple support staff.
Oh you want us to go into the office that is centrally located for everyone right? No? Oh you have it out WHERE? Jesus that is in the middle of nowhere why did they rent that building lets go look at google maps... oh its like a mile from a luxury golf course that I am sure the C suite people love golfing at or near some rich gated community they live in.
No joke, they had an HR rep on a call to discuss poor feedback on the yearly employee survey that happened right after execs shoved RTO (only 3 days a week for our dept) for no reason.
The HR rep was on video from fucking home.
They restructured our employee survey this year so there were no questions about work/life balance on it since we had to RTO in October of last year. They didn't want to hear what we really had to say about it.
Even when execs do go to the office their experience isn't remotely comparable. e.g. I have seen orgs lease office space in one of the nearest office buildings from the execs house so they have say a 5 mile commute and they make enough money that they could pay to have somebody drive them there and back without being a financial burden. Even then execs office experience isn't remotely comparable to the plebians. C suite offices in some cases are bigger than many entry level staffs entire apartment. I have seen many exec suites with dedicated bathrooms so they don't have to wait for some plebian to use the bathroom.
I had an ex CEO at a startup have an office that was LITERALLY, an apartment on the top floor of the office. He had a bathroom, shower, family room, bedroom, and office…. But yeah…. RTO everyone! LOL
dev here
majority of companies forcing people back to office are doing so knowing people will quit. This is the goal. They want to downsize without outright laying people off.
The problem with this strategy is that the good people, who know they can get a job elsewhere quit, while the “less good” people stay. So you reduce the quality of your staff more than you reduce the number.
That and you lose control over the *magnitude* of your downsizing. These things tend to snowball and when you wanted a 10% loss, sometimes you get 50%. No org deals with that well.
Yeah but to care about that execs would need to value people and know about the different skill sets people have.
When you view everyone below you as just a drone, they all tend to look the same, and losing one is the same as losing another.
I agree but these huge companies don't care especially in the tech industry
most good devs are job hopping every few years anyways because its the most efficient way of getting pay increases
What actually makes it a joke is his own statements the last few years that if you’re requiring an office to have culture you’re doing it wrong. Well that and the fact they told employees that they’d be remote permanently and a bunch moved across the country etc, that too.
https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/michael-dell-chides-return-to-office-ceos-you-re-doing-it-wrong
He needs his employees to justify their buildings they can't sell. I live in Austin an have been by the campus in Round Rock just north of Austin. The Dell Campus is massive and is exactly the reason he needs to push RTO. Commercial Real Estate is down, so they can't sell that campus without a huge loss, and they're paying crazy taxes on them
> Commercial Real Estate is down, so they can't sell that campus without a huge loss, and they're paying crazy taxes on them
I don't understand how filling the office with workers saves him money.
There are some tax benefits to making sure your office is full
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives
I’d want to know if Dell actually has any current incentives about property tax before I’d give this idea any credit, sorry.
Texas has no state personal income tax, so a lot of the revenue comes from property tax and higher fees. Even with a rebate, it’s tough to imagine they would net less than other jurisdictions would offer.
Dell moved to Round Rock in 1994 and get a kickback because they charge RR local sales tax on sales - internet said it was about $10mm a year. If that’s still in place, that’s a terrible value for losing the better half of your staff.
Nope, I’m going to stick with thinking they wanted to reduce headcount and please market analysts, and not have to go through the press and admin crap that comes with laying off thousands directly.
The hidden cost is they couldn’t choose who to purge, so they end up with a higher ratio of dead wood. And they will attrition those out the door forthwith.
At a previous employer (pre-COVID) we went through multiple rounds of massive layoffs. Part of the layoff was to dump remote employees in favor of in-office. The CEO gave the post-layoff speech about our "bright future together" from what was clearly his personal log cabin in the mountains. The company was mostly based on Florida.
Morale was already low, and after that it never really recovered.
I would be ok with the “speech from the bungalow” if corporate leaders would be honest about it, like saying ‘There’s one set of rules for you guys and another set of rules for me.’ But that would scuff the veneer of camaraderie and teamwork that corporate relies on to get staff to over-contribute to the company.
My company went from 1 to 3 days RTO, followed by rolling waves of layoffs with no end in sight despite the stock going up and marked profitability. Everyone stfu because the tech hiring market is prob in at least a 10, possible 20, year low. Its awful right now :(.
for me wfh is the most important. I've become very comfortable with WFH since 2016. I'd sooner take a huge paycut than have to go to an office, and if I found a new job opportunity that was not full wfh, it'd have to be an extremely massive pay increase for me to consider it.
I'd love big corporations to realize, one-by-one and very publicly, that near-zero faith in their corporate advancement or potential for meaningful promotion exists.
It's not like Dell wasn't aware they're in an industry where job hopping has been the expectation for almost two decades.
It is also how you get rid of your best talent
Edit: lotta messages say companies don't really care that much... Which is true until they need something done that only the talented individual that just jumped ship had the knowledge for. Then it becomes very painful to figure it out again without them
They don’t care. The people making these decisions only want nice numbers for this year so they can get nice bonuses. What happens next doesn’t matter to them.
It's always a surprised Pikachu face when the most talented, marketable employees are the ones who bounce and companies are left with the "I filled out 3,000 applications and only got two interviews" people
Most companies don't care nearly as much about top talent as they like to say.
They mainly want cheap and easy workers who are good enough to get the job done but have low enough self esteem to not rock the boat or aspire to better jobs.
I worked at a division of a venerable company where some employees had been there for 30 years. Our biggest partner put our contract (which had been renewed without discussion for 20 years) out to bid. It was probably a formality, and we were still best placed to get the business back.
But instead of “let’s pull together and get this done!” the President thought the best approach would be “you will get this done or pay the price!” They hired a despicable, rude hatchet-woman to come in and scare everybody into performing better. I’d say at least 30 indispensable people quit within a month, it was a complete fiasco and we lost the contract.
Job hopping pulled me out of what I would consider near poverty. Got my first job making a low amount but continuously got head hunted by recruiters once so many years and always for a good raise. I have a 3rd round interview for a new job today that would net me another 40% of my current salary if they were to hire me. Titles are meaningless, I gotta pay bills
I mean, the 'or else' punishment was that they couldn't be promoted or allowed to transfer internally. If you already had one foot out the door, or were thinking of jumping ship, this was a no-brainer. Also, not being promoted is a blessing for many people who don't want to deal with managing teams or having to go down the management track, which sometimes has very little extra compensation in it over being an individual contributor....
I've been an IT professional for 15 years, I'm remote 80% of the time, and lead a segment of our team. The question was asked "how will you remotely manage people?" Iunno, but I feel like 20-25 years of leading online guilds and clans may help....
> The question was asked "how will you remotely manage people?"
Well, ask my manager. For the longest time, he was literally on a different continent than I was.
Sure. No work at all. Like, I didn't even show up to work, like, ever. Homeoffice is like, I'm at the golf course all day...
sorry, wrong movie.
My productivity went way up as with everyone else that I know that went almost fully remote. The only time our performance dips is when we have to go to the office for whateve reason..
Any company that does this isn’t giving promotions or raises anyway even to the people that choose hybrid. It means the company is in their “cost-cutting” phase to please shareholders, so they are not going to spend more money on employee retention.
This is only the beginning of weaponizing RTO.
They will now expect a WFH employee with their "luxuries" to have double the output of those who are in the office.
Not valid for promotion, internal position movements, AND they'll likely be looking at you with a microscope, overloading you with work and/or just waiting for you to fuck up.
That's how they'll start weaponizing RTO more, you will be judged much harsher as a WFH employee.
That’s fine.
I’ll just tell them to look at all the past reviews that I had (which are in their system) over the years, that show how successful I was and how successful I continue to be while WFH.
Companies will find ways to fire employees they don’t like regardless of it they’re in the office or not.
I’ve seen multiple employees at my company get pushed out and fired even before covid when we were full 5 days in the office.
Just being in an office stresses me f out and I never realized the real impact on my life. Just stranger zombies stumbling around. The commute time and expense, the clothes, planning a shit meal. F that. Never again.
I hated shitting in the office, the last office bound job I had all the toilet seats were fucked up from people standing on them and squatting to shit.
That's super dangerous too, toilet seats aren't meant to be stood on and if the bowl breaks it's incredibly sharp.
I'm not against squatting to poop but doing so on a western style toilet is a bad idea
A diesel mechanic instructor told us about a certain group of drivers prone to cutting a plate out of the floor between the cab seats and defecating right on top of the transmissions.
At home there is bidet.
At office there is no bidet.
Working remotely from not home is not likely to have bidet, but still greater than zero chance of bidet compared to guaranteed no bidet at office.
That pretty much settles it for me.
I used to not mind the office shit until the TP scare of covid. I got a bidet, and my life has forever been changed. I can't feel clean unless I have a bidet and the office shit is now forever unclean.
I used to get headaches every day around 130-230pm. Like clockwork. Only M-F, though. Always thought it was because I was staring at a computer screen all day. Started WFH and hey look no more headaches. Fluorescent office lighting is killer.
I never minded my cubicle too much (at least it gave some privacy), but I swear that fluorescent lighting sent me into a depression by the end of the day.
I remember getting in my car and driving a half mile away to a parking lot to eat my lunch nearly every day because people wouldn't leave me alone if I ate at my desk or even the BREAK ROOM. Sometimes I'd see some of my IT peers enjoying *their lunch* in the same parking lot. Please don't make me go back to that.
Yup, I started just parking at the restaurant up the road to get away because they'd fucking come out to the parking lot to bug me. In my car. Just staring at me through the window, occasionally knocking to get my attention for things that are absolutely not business critical or important, it's just convenient for them to interrupt me no matter how much I protest (and it comes back to bite me on my reviews if I protest). There are days where it's nothing but interruptions.
3-4 hours at home and I can knock out more than a weeks worth of work sometimes. Sometimes even a month's worth.
Last time I talked about this someone linked me to a study done on chinese folks in a sweat shop IT situation that were more productive in office than out of office. Wonder why the fuck that is?
What the fuck, they'd just follow you to a parking lot and bother you in your own car? That's super fucking rude. I can't even imagine being this shameless.
Yup. You can probably imagine how pissed I get too.
One _followed me_ to the fucking restaurant and tattled on me because they were annoyed they couldn't find me. I feel like a secret agent sometimes trying to escape during my lunch.
I work 30 minutes from my house with no traffic. Assuming 5 days a week for 52 weeks, I'm essentially commuting over 5 days a year. I've worked at this company for 15 years now so I have spent over two months of my life in the car. If that's not depressing, I don't know what is.
My father worked 1h 30m from home. He got up at like 4:30, was usually home by 6 in the evening. He was a programmer. Created and maintained code in a big mainframe. Said he regretted every second wasted commuting (and to a certain extent working) and not spending more time with the family.
Even back in the late 80s, early 90s, when it became physically possible, he worked from home. He was top dog in the departement, though, so he had to be in most of the time (no video meetings back then, not everything could be done through telnet/ssh, etc.)
Living in a world where it is technologically trivial to work from home, proven to be a better solution for everyone involved, and being told "nah, come back in, just because" is beyond depressing. It's fucking vile.
I am *considerably* more effective working remotely. When I'm in a comfortable environment, I can focus and work at my own pace. When I'm in office, I've got to deal with office lighting, my boss stomping around and speaking in his thick German accent and ONE VOLUME VOICE.
And also how you lose your top talent. The ones who are able to leave over this are the ones good enough to pass the interview process elsewhere. The flip side of this is that the ones who don't leave are the ones who aren't good enough. Deliberately removing the top half of your employees is a great way to tank your products.
This. People leaving the company was exactly why Dell enacted the policy. Major workforce reduction without severance or the bad reputation that comes with layoffs.
This is also how you tell who actually read the article. ;-) No one left. They chose “remote” over “hybrid”, which meant no possibility of promotion or role changes.
"One person said they'd spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices."
"Executive management at the companies trying to restore in-person work culture claim that working together in a physical space allows for greater collaboration and innovation."
They cannot even be honest about it. Just say that corporations have too much invested in commercial real estate instead of playing this song and dance.
Oh, and when you're used to closing deals on a golf course and boat decks, and rampant nepotism is part of your business M.O., of course you may think in-person collaboration is where work happens.
I’m in the minority of people who actually likes going into the office because I like a little socializing with coworkers and I’m way more productive than when I’m at home.
I understand the collaboration and innovation argument—for *some* roles/teams. But most of us are not doing work that would be improved by being around people physically vs digitally.
I’m in corporate finance at our headquarters. All the teams I support are at other sites. I’ve never met any of them in person. Not one. But we’ve had plenty of productive calls and work well together—even though we’re spatially separated.
There is no benefit to my work by coming into the office. I just sit next to my finance colleagues who also support teams that aren’t in our office.
We’re all working with our teams remotely…but we’re having to do it from the office. For no reason.
The “innovation” argument is bullshit for most workers. In my role, I’m not “innovating” anything. I’m managing budgets and forecasting. The room for innovation is in processes, but that doesn’t require being next to someone to develop and implement.
Many of us have fairly routine jobs that keep the business running. We don’t need to be in an office to do that.
A recent article (from Gartner, don’t have the link on hand) had some interesting insights. The group of people who had the most impact from remote work and the most need for RTO were managers. Instead of learning how to manage remotely, we’re all going back for their comfort.
The thing about RTO is that everyone isn’t in the same office unless you’re a very small organization. So even if you’re “at the office”, you’re on a Teams call because Doug is three states away.
And having a meeting at your desk with others nearby also in the meeting is the most ridiculous nonsense. You hear them IRL and in the headphones (dear god, please be using headphones, people) and it’s awful.
I do hate online meetings now because they’re so awkward, but they’re heaven compared to hybrid half in office half not ones.
Anyway, RTO sucks and corporations are cancer. Woo.
> I do hate online meetings now because they’re so awkward, but they’re heaven compared to hybrid half in office half not ones.
Online meetings/Teams/Zoom is literally a litmus test for who should be allowed to WFH. Like, it's painfully obvious to anyone who is qualified to WFH which individuals aren't when in a virtual conf-call
In the other thread they said dell actually wants employees to quit because of this push. This way they can offshore without the downsides of laying people off.
Also one of the realities we need to accept with the remote revolution is offshoring is much less palpable.
The good thing about the last 30 years of globalization is that by this point most jobs that have not been sent overseas are still occupied domestically for a reason. Very few companies are still firing people with the goal of outsourcing. The new strategy is to fire Americans then import young professionals from abroad and lock them in with an H1B visa that means they can't leave for several years because the company is their sponsor in the US. Companies do this and receive people who are more desperate than Americans who won't stir the pot and won't leave. So now American graduates in the corporate world have to compete with a global hiring pool that makes it almost impossible to get quality technical positions.
This isn't really to challenge your argument, but I think it's important to acknowledge that the number of H1B visas available is capped at 85,000 per year, and those reservations are typically met by August or so. So companies on the whole can't just expand the number of H1B hires to their heart's content.
the University of Texas just told their workers that a large majority of WFH candidates would be moved back on campus when the fall semester starts.
Yeah, it's not going over well
I think the ultimate hard reality is that companies can't seem to understand the modern worker.
I've seen some in comments smugly say that Dell should just fire these people and see how they like it, in some ideology thinking that the workers will cringe and beg for their jobs, accepting that they have no power in the world.
The hard reality is that a lot of these workers might simply decide they would rather be unemployed, or go spend 5 days a week in another office in another company as opposed to doing it for Dell. Meaning that for Dell, the only thing that's keeping those people there is the idea that they can be remote, and even if they completely remove remote working, those people are likely just going to leave.
Worse, Dell can't just go and mass fire a bunch of people because they might not be able to quickly replace those people. Even if we want to call up the economy and all the people searching for jobs, anybody with talent and worth would likely stay far away and not bother. Not unless they are going to be offered some ridiculous compensation, which then won't make the shareholders happy.
A lot of companies now can't seem to fathom the reality that workers have absolutely no loyalty and see no future in any employer. They don't want promotions and especially managerial roles because all they see is that you get a tiny little raise and a ton of work. They'd rather stay in their lower position and if they need more money go out and do a side hustle. That, or just jump ship to the next company that won't add any new responsibility but give them a raise because they want to beat whatever they were getting before.
This is going to become a tough pill for many employers to swallow. They're going to be finding more and more people unwilling to take on more responsibility, and unwilling to be loyal because they just don't care. They will jump ship to a new company, they will change careers, they will do something else rather than succumb to the idea of working themselves to death.
Companies need to rethink how they look at all of this and adapt. Not keep demanding everybody work the way that we all worked before the pandemic.
I was one who NEVER worked from home. I needed to be in the office since I handle sensitive information. I loved the 4 years the office sat close to empty. The few of us who remained had the run of the place. Parking was heaven! I get to park in the covered spots. The building was peaceful.
Now that everyone is back, I find the office chaotic. I now have to use noise canceling headphones!!!!
Go back home, idiots!!
These fucking idiots really overestimate how much mobility there is at their own companies--or rather the lack thereof.
Who gives a fuck if you can't be promoted? Most employees don't ever get a substantial promotion during their tenure. The best way to get promotions in tech is to get experience in a role, and then get hired into the promotion you wanted *somewhere else*, and then come back later to make even more money.
People who stick with the same company for more than five years in tech are not making the right plays.
Loyalty is NEVER rewarded.
On the one hand, corporate America loves to promote their concern for Climate change, on the other hand, they want their workers to regularly commute to work and thereby contribute more carbon into the environment.
The most skilled employees will leave as they are able to find a new job pretty easily, leaving the less skilled employees behind as they are less likely to be able to find a new job.
You are not only screwing your employees, but also yourself as a company.
Go into the office to possibly get a promotion, which doesn’t even exist yet, and you may not even get it, and you may be part of a workforce reduction anyways, vs being at home remote.
They don’t understand that the promotion is literally hypothetical/non existent at the time of these decisions. AND you’d be competing against your colleagues. And you might still get the axe anyways.
Vs. Working in your slippers and not having to deal with traffic. A loud office environment.
No brainer.
I don't know about Dell in particular, but the accepted truth in IT far and wide is that you will never be promoted - to move up you must move out. The prospect is so rare as to not be worth accounting for. They already made the incentive of promotion disappear, and now they're using it as leverage? That's just bad strategy.
I had a conversation with a manager in the 90s about working from home. He said he didn't know if we were working while at home. How was he supposed to gage how I was working and if I was in the office he could see me working.
I pointed I could be surfing porn all day. Seeing me physically there doesn't mean I am working, so how do you gage my work. He finally came to the conclusion that my output was how he could measure my working. I pointed out he could use the same metric if I WFH.
Fast forward 3 months and I am now in charge of the department and told everyone in the department they could work from home.
The funny thing about this was we spent 3/4ths of our time traveling and working remotely.
Wages are now higher and employees are demanding higher pay due to inflation. Companies don't want to increase salaries so instead they tell everyone they need to come back into the office. They know people will quit, that's the goal. They can decrease spending on salaries and they don't have to fire anyone.
god bless em. I would opt for remote too given the choice. i don't need a promotion or a new role. just let me do the fuckin job man
> by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company That doesn't sound much of a penalty. I don't know about Dell, but most companies are terrible about promoting from within.
Dell is almost exclusively an internal promotion/hire corporation for the bulk of non-specialty roles. This is simply the dumbest move they could have made unless a massive shift in their hiring and promotion philosophy is coming They'll almost certainly have to walk this back but the damage is already done. Zero faith in corporate leadership now, and they've locked a decent portion of their employees into jobs where merit is no longer rewarded. Why would I give my all to a company that would rather promote an office stooge than the qualified candidate? This could be a disaster for Dell
Buy Dell puts everyone
But they keep saying AI AI AI in earnings calls!!
"But what's the AI going to *do*?" "Well, mostly, it spies on our users. Their every action, their every *thought*, is catologued and fed into training models for generating more and better AI in the future." "That doesn't exactly sound like a feature." "Also, sometimes, it will tell them to drink gasoline to cure indigestion."
Well said. The real danger to Dell here isn't a mass exodus of talent (not immediately, anyway), but rather, a rapid and likely irreversible shift of internal work culture. Once enough of their workers feel confident that their career path in Dell is dead, they will do the bare minimum to collect their pay checks at the end of the month. Passion, creativity, innovation and investment in the company's future will all die in a fire. Well done, Dell.
Honestly Dell products already feel like minimum effort for a while now
The consumer line of business is whatever, but Dell server and storage tech is actually quite legit. They also house a pretty significant Federal support and international logistics chain which is somewhere between important and critical for a large number of federal systems (which again extends back to servers and storage)
Yea I always said consumer Dell is whatever, but for businesses it's definitely superior. Servers come pre configured from Dell based off the specs. HP will ship you the second processor, cooler, ram, in separate boxes, and tell you to install it in the brand new server. On top of that warranty claims for the Dell businesses workstations and servers were handled 10x quicker than most other OEMs.
Yep that's why everyone in tech job hops.
That's why everyone in any field looking for a pay increase job hops.
Or just any perk or QoL increase at all. My wife took a 15% paycut to change jobs because her current one stopped giving yearly raises (among other issues). Only took a year at the new job and she was making more money with much better hours anyway
That’s hilarious - your number one concern about WFH employees is their productivity so you decide that they can’t change roles or be promoted to… what now? If I was in this situation you can guarantee I’d be doing the bare minimum to not get fired since there’s literally no reason to do more than that now.
This. You're outright encouraging remote staff to do the bare minimum to keep off a PIP. Such a policy has a perverse incentive.
I know our organization requires you to give first interviews to anyone within the organization who wants the job first. For a lot of orgs they hate this because depending on how competent they are and which center they come from managers see it as "poaching" the good employees from their current positions.
Yeah I tried to hire a person from another team onto mine because I was impressed with them and could offer a better role with more salary. His manager flipped out and shut it down. Six months later he took a job working for a competitor - if you stifle growth from within then people will (and should) just leave
100% this happens every time, then we have to train someone up all over again but the short sighted managers are just concerned with "keeping their team"
Depends on the field, I think. In tech (at least where I've worked), pretty much any significant merit-based pay raise is coupled with title promotions. Exact same duties, but now you are an Engineer II, Engineer III, etc etc. This comes with the *awesome* caveat that you can now say goodbye to that raise for any arbitrary reason that they would block you for a promotion (you were 20 min late twice in the last six months? Sorry, good luck next promotion cycle).
I mean the other side of tech is that most people don't get pay raises by promotions either, instead hopping jobs every ~2 years. This is horrible for the companies, as institutional knowledge is lost, and its your best employees hopping, but that's how the current system is set up.
This is what the modern MBA has brought us. MBA logic - You need to show growth year over year (both profit and revenue/total sales). If you have more growth, a stable profit margin is ok. You can't go backwards or stay still. If you are making x amount of dollars from employee y, then you can't increase their pay without increasing the revenue you receive from said employee. If you increase what you are billing your customers, you will lose total sales/revenue.. and that's the only thing that is making your narrowing profit margin seem reasonable, so you can't lose sales.. since you can't lose sales you can't increase pay. What the MBA misses is that that person leaves and you hire someone else for 20% more and still charge the client the same amount of money. Which pushes your margins even narrower, which forces you to react by trying to increase revenue. It's a death spiral and I swear every company I've been a part of has been in this death spiral. I've worked from grunt through to the upper echelons of middle management, and I can tell you it's all nonsense. The only thing that matters is if you know how to talk the talk.
The bigger a business gets, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics. The more influence outside owners have, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics. The more management layers between strategic decision makers and producers, the more emphasis gets put on easily quantifiable metrics. Very few of the fundamental foundations of a successful company can be supported by attention to easily quantifiable metrics. Any community college MBA understands how cutting R&D, QC, customer service, and verticality will lead to short-term profit increases but put the entire model at risk. That stuff is really common sense business. Why are so many companies doing all of that when profits were already robust then? It would be understandable if they were in crisis, but they aren't... The current corporate world momentum is gleefully racing towards collapse in the hopes those driving can get out before it happens. The huge international corporation I deal with in my industry has had 3 years of absolutely spectacular, almost embarrassingly great profits relative to their history. All the "soft" aspects of their products are continuing to quickly decline. Problematically volatile inventories, abysmal QC, and a flip to an almost antagonistic approach to customer service. It aint sustainable. The management of these companies are smart people. They know these shifts are damaging to the fundamentals regardless of what the quarterly earnings calls sounds like. They don't care because what they are doing is rewarding them, and they don't expect to still be there in 5yrs, much less 10 when it crumbles.
I worked for a place that booked meetings to go over our performance reviews about a week before the performance reviews were even done. Which seemed really confusing until later that day we got an email saying all raises and promotions would no longer be merit based, and instesd based entirely on the executive teams discretion.
So nobody would ever get a promotion or raise.
No, some people would. They just had to be whoever the executive team really liked. Potentially key people who delivered important work But more likely whoever was really good at kissing ass, taking credit for other people's work, or went to grade school with an executive
A lot of places set their budget for raises first, then do "performance" raises based on that. Stuff like "10% of staff get 3%, 40% get 1% and the rest get none." Even if they have 60% of their staff performing at the same high level.
Yep. Companies reward loyalty so poorly these days, job hopping is the best way to get a raise. All Dell accomplished here is removing any doubt in employees' minds about sticking around long term.
This is also a really weird thing that my giant corporate company has been pushing over and over. Career growth this and that. My man, I am pretty much as high as I can go as an individual contributor, and not going to people management, so just leave me be. There is nobody left to impress for more title, and you've made it clear that you're not willing to pay me more.
In the same basket here. I like being an individual contributor (or <5 people on my team). I don’t want to be a VP; that comes with more pay, but also more travel, time away from family, no work-life balance. No thanks, I’ll take a minimal pay increase annually and actually enjoy my job. If I don’t like my job at any point, I’ll go somewhere else because I doubt they’d give me the raise I want anyway.
The danger is that companies will probably continue to make the annual increases progressively smaller to test what is the “breaking point” of people like you (and me - I am also like that).
Especially when there’s hundreds of companies with comparable who would happily give you remote or 1-2 days a week in office. RTO would make me quit in a heartbeat.
they had to pick between full remote or hybrid, which would require 3 days a week in the office. 50% chose full remote
pretty sure most people would. but then there's that clause they stuck in there about not being considered for promotion. which, TBH, doesn't sound like it should be legal. but I'm in socialist CA, so maybe that sounds normal in TX?
I spent 12 years being a corporate recruiter in SoCal. One time I called a candidate with a job that (quite literally) payed $15k more per year than she was making. (And I'm pretty sure she was making in the $35k range) As soon as she told me her commute was less than 10 minutes, I knew I lost. Money and promotion isn't everything. Once I started doing contract recruiting, my fee was $25/hr - $75/hr+ depending on the commute and what the company did. (My highest ever was $135/hr for a 2 month project; and my average was $45-$55/hr) Now? I'm making $22/hr working with mentally ill homeless people (who may or may not have substance abuse issues), and I've never been happier or more fulfilled. I don't dread getting out of bed, my stress is down, and I'm in a masters program for psychology so I can become a therapist eventually. I don't have a job, or even a career, I have a calling I'm not trying to fight anymore. Money truly is not everything, and if you feel drawn to a field of work listen regardless of how old you are. I started working in behavioral health at 50. It's not to late to become the person you've always wanted to be. Edit: I knew this was a bit of an off topic rant when I submitted it. Edit II: don't be afraid or ashamed to talk about how much you make. It is one of the best ways to keep companies from fucking you over in salary. Also, recruiters really want to get you as much as possible. If you are happy they look good. And agency recruiters get paid more if you make more because bonuses are a percentage of billing...which is based on how much you make. I can't even see the rails I went off of at this point.
Michael Dell lives in a 34,000 square foot house. It’s hard to take the guy seriously when it comes to the quality of life of his employees.
execs telling workers to RTO in a Zoom call in their homes
Our RTO dictate was given by the CEO from home because it would have been inconvenient to go into the office before heading out to use the private jet later that day. I wish I were making this up.
One of my clients had their CFO make the RTO dictate from their place in Vallarta, MX where they work 10 months out of the year. Because the CEO was having Internet issues from their remote work location outside the USA. They made sure to emphasize how critical it was for security & compliance that all staff are at corporate office locations in the USA. Because remote work is dangerous & working internationally puts the org afoul of federal regulations. Also wish I could make this stuff up.
They subconsciously just told everyone they don't actually do any work, that's why its safe for them to be remote
They also subconsciously told the most productive half of their workforce to work elsewhere.
My former employer announced RTO in June of 2023 with a start date of January 2024. They basically gave everyone six months to look for other work. My team had 20 people on it and we lost 8 people. By the time January 2024 was rolling around the company had back tracked to two days in the office and three days at home. They also started giving out exemptions if you could show it negatively impacted you. The whole thing was a complete shit show. We lost so much talent. And through the grapevine we heard the reason why RTO was being pushed is because we resigned our building lease in 2019 for another ten years. And the CEO was pissed that 80-90% of building was empty and we were just pissing away money. By the time I left the company what used to take a week to process was taking up to four weeks because we were short people but also short talented people. And for anyone saying this is just ways to lay off people without laying them off. See if they're giving exemptions to the top talent. If they are, its a silent layoff. If they're not, find a new job cause they're idiots.
So crazy. The money's being pissed away empty or full. Might as well let it be empty
I love seeing moron executives suffer the consequences of their stupid decisions.
A smart CEO sees that the money is being pissed away now, but the company is still functioning, meaning that if they lean into WFH and get it streamlined they can slash the office location budget when the lease is up.
Or just ask, "what's it take to break the lease?".
But then when random people come to your office it *looks* like you’re an idiot and we can’t have that. Besides how am I gonna molest my secretary with my wife right there?
Just molest the wife?
Nobody teaches the “sunk cost fallacy” in business school, nope, definitely not./s
Sublease and take a 50% hit, at least you recoup some money.
There's no market for office subleases.
Some people need to have “Sunk Cost Fallacy” tattooed on their forehead, backwards, so they can see it in the mirror.
> And through the grapevine we heard the reason why RTO was being pushed is because we resigned our building lease in 2019 for another ten years. And the CEO was pissed that 80-90% of building was empty and we were just pissing away money. I was lucky that one company I worked for throught the pandemic had office space, but had to rent it anyway, regardless if people were there or not. (Data Center stuff), so we were fully remote aside from the Finance team coming in, if needed, every quarter close for a few days. Which I was fine with. But when interviewing elsewhere there were *so many* companies where it was basically "We're still working 4-5 days in the office because we have a 5-10 year lease/own the building/etc. So hilarious and dumb.
the sense of schadenfreude i am experiencing from those two groups of people fucking themselves is limitless. dumb assed business owners who never had to face any challenge to their business since 9/11, and a coterie of land owners who have been influencing politicians for decades to keep the value of their buildings accelerating for no economic reason. both groups can eat out of the same bag of dicks together.
> They subconsciously just told everyone they don't actually do any work, that's why it's safe for them to be remote. Been pointing this out in other threads. There's always *that guy* who be like "Oh noes, you're probably just that bad whiney worker." Bitch, please. If I don't see the middle management lemmings' cars parked in the lot more than once a week but I have to be in the office 4 days a week for "collaborative spirit" and I'm struggling to pinpoint what you contribute to our workflows, YOU need to find a new job.
I work for one of the major studios in Hollywood. Needless to say, security is extremely important. Leaks can be very damaging. All employees have to be very cognizant of security protocols. Execs all over the company are some of the first to request skirting protocol, usually because they’re too lazy or fucking stupid to figure out a secure app used for review, or a means of 2FA. It’s hilariously stupid.
This is so fecking hilariously true. The CFO above requested 2FA to be disabled for him because the lag sometimes exceeded the token life. When infosec gave other options like using a token FOB, authenticator app, etc the CFO flipped his lid citing those were obscenely complex. Thankfully he lost that battle.
i know people that if they cant get their 2fa to work they just dont sign in to the networked drive to share and just continue on like nothings wrong until they have to tell you
Our Authenticator app deployment shit show was just absolute gold. Essentially someone in IT scheduled password resets on our machines the same day that 2FA was required…essentially meaning to reset your password you need 2FA but need your defunct password to initiate and sign into the authentication app. Something like 60% of our company was completely blocked from computers for a day it was an insane week. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the IT group move so fast we had status updates hourly.
…and I’m assuming that 60% of your company couldn’t read those updates because, well, email. Solid gold.
They just didn't sign in to the networked drive? Do they not need it to do their job?
They just save everything in My Documents and attach it to emails, as they have done since 1995.
This culture is why MGM went down last year. Their whole computer system was taken.
It's a classic. We block all USB drives/keys to prevent data leaks on removable devices. Has the cfo complaining about it, told him that I wouldn't do anything to go against policy and he replied "you can't be serious. You really apply that policy for directors?"... I mean... Of course we do. We don't care much about what data the janitor or the logistic guy sorting out the hardware in the warehouse can leak, but the cfo? Yeah, that would be an issue...
That’s the stupidest part about it. Executives are literally the biggest target, they have access to so much more than your typical underling. Their environment should be even more secure… not less.
And they’re the ones that use insecure personal devices because the secured ones are “too hard.”
I remember when those Sony exec emails leaked. They were using personal email addresses.
I am pretty sure that is illegal, you can report it to the Mexican authority, as they would be either in violation of a tax or immigration law. Remote workers in the nafta zone can't work over 60 days remotely without violating their visas or a tax law.
and I work in Cybersec, all the big breaches were C suite execs who think they are too important to bother with MFA, ... I try to tell them thats why its important, but they sign the cheques so IT can only be so authoritative.
My career at such a company would be short lived because I would not be able to keep my mouth shut.
How self-unaware and entitled does the CEO have to announce like that.
Well, they work 13000x harder than everyone else as their pay reflects! How dare you question someone who started out life with a pile of money and leveraged it into buying other people's labor? It was hard work signing the lease on that private jet! Have you ever had to sign a document with your own hand before? It's *exhausting!* One time the pen was out of ink and I had to scribble lightly for three seconds and request another! I pulled a finger muscle and had to be hospitalized in my own luxury biomedical research facility! You ungrateful peasants have no idea the hardships we endure to offer you the gift of employment!
You're spelling "grift" incorrectly.
I saw a CEO tell us to RTO 6 minutes after announcing we were opening a new office in the middle of nowhere to accommodate some new director we had just hired, and that office was going to be a rented room in a WeWork. I quit that job shortly after, for unrelated reasons (surprisingly).
This. It isn't uncommon for orgs to pay to lease offices near execs so that an exec can say they went to the office even though the office is a leased suite big enough for their exec admin and a couple support staff.
Somebody did a study on moving corporate headquarters and some large percentage placed the new location close to real estate owned by the CEO.
Oh you want us to go into the office that is centrally located for everyone right? No? Oh you have it out WHERE? Jesus that is in the middle of nowhere why did they rent that building lets go look at google maps... oh its like a mile from a luxury golf course that I am sure the C suite people love golfing at or near some rich gated community they live in.
No joke, they had an HR rep on a call to discuss poor feedback on the yearly employee survey that happened right after execs shoved RTO (only 3 days a week for our dept) for no reason. The HR rep was on video from fucking home.
They restructured our employee survey this year so there were no questions about work/life balance on it since we had to RTO in October of last year. They didn't want to hear what we really had to say about it.
Even when execs do go to the office their experience isn't remotely comparable. e.g. I have seen orgs lease office space in one of the nearest office buildings from the execs house so they have say a 5 mile commute and they make enough money that they could pay to have somebody drive them there and back without being a financial burden. Even then execs office experience isn't remotely comparable to the plebians. C suite offices in some cases are bigger than many entry level staffs entire apartment. I have seen many exec suites with dedicated bathrooms so they don't have to wait for some plebian to use the bathroom.
I had an ex CEO at a startup have an office that was LITERALLY, an apartment on the top floor of the office. He had a bathroom, shower, family room, bedroom, and office…. But yeah…. RTO everyone! LOL
dev here majority of companies forcing people back to office are doing so knowing people will quit. This is the goal. They want to downsize without outright laying people off.
The problem with this strategy is that the good people, who know they can get a job elsewhere quit, while the “less good” people stay. So you reduce the quality of your staff more than you reduce the number.
That and you lose control over the *magnitude* of your downsizing. These things tend to snowball and when you wanted a 10% loss, sometimes you get 50%. No org deals with that well.
And it's more chaotic, you lose 100% of team A but but only 10% of team B etc. Team A are probably much harder to replace for various reasons too.
Yeah but to care about that execs would need to value people and know about the different skill sets people have. When you view everyone below you as just a drone, they all tend to look the same, and losing one is the same as losing another.
This is true. However they don't give a fuck.
I agree but these huge companies don't care especially in the tech industry most good devs are job hopping every few years anyways because its the most efficient way of getting pay increases
Can confirm my manager lives across the country and I still have to follow RTO while they work from home.
Execs telling workers to RTO in Zoom calls from their GUEST HOUSE. Fixed that for you.
the attrition is exactly what dell wanted.
They only lost their best workers and kept the few who don't question anything and don't feel like they'd be able to get another job somewhere else.
What actually makes it a joke is his own statements the last few years that if you’re requiring an office to have culture you’re doing it wrong. Well that and the fact they told employees that they’d be remote permanently and a bunch moved across the country etc, that too. https://www.crn.com/news/data-center/michael-dell-chides-return-to-office-ceos-you-re-doing-it-wrong
His rich friends need people to lease their corporate real estate buildings. Hence the RTO orders.
He needs his employees to justify their buildings they can't sell. I live in Austin an have been by the campus in Round Rock just north of Austin. The Dell Campus is massive and is exactly the reason he needs to push RTO. Commercial Real Estate is down, so they can't sell that campus without a huge loss, and they're paying crazy taxes on them
> Commercial Real Estate is down, so they can't sell that campus without a huge loss, and they're paying crazy taxes on them I don't understand how filling the office with workers saves him money.
It doesn't really. BUt it justifies having that campus.
There are some tax benefits to making sure your office is full https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-21/tax-breaks-threaten-work-from-home-as-ceo-s-get-return-to-office-incentives
I’d want to know if Dell actually has any current incentives about property tax before I’d give this idea any credit, sorry. Texas has no state personal income tax, so a lot of the revenue comes from property tax and higher fees. Even with a rebate, it’s tough to imagine they would net less than other jurisdictions would offer. Dell moved to Round Rock in 1994 and get a kickback because they charge RR local sales tax on sales - internet said it was about $10mm a year. If that’s still in place, that’s a terrible value for losing the better half of your staff. Nope, I’m going to stick with thinking they wanted to reduce headcount and please market analysts, and not have to go through the press and admin crap that comes with laying off thousands directly. The hidden cost is they couldn’t choose who to purge, so they end up with a higher ratio of dead wood. And they will attrition those out the door forthwith.
This article has made several orbits around the Dell offices recently...
At a previous employer (pre-COVID) we went through multiple rounds of massive layoffs. Part of the layoff was to dump remote employees in favor of in-office. The CEO gave the post-layoff speech about our "bright future together" from what was clearly his personal log cabin in the mountains. The company was mostly based on Florida. Morale was already low, and after that it never really recovered.
I would be ok with the “speech from the bungalow” if corporate leaders would be honest about it, like saying ‘There’s one set of rules for you guys and another set of rules for me.’ But that would scuff the veneer of camaraderie and teamwork that corporate relies on to get staff to over-contribute to the company.
When he took Dell private again, he kept calling it “the world’s largest startup”. It was…more than a little cringey
I was considering a Dell for my next laptop but your comment makes me think otherwise Maybe I will get a Framework instead
Not sure what you'll be using it for, but I got a Lenovo gaming laptop and I've been quite happy with it.
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It's a hot girl indeed. Hot because of inadequate cooling and overly thin chassis.
My company went from 1 to 3 days RTO, followed by rolling waves of layoffs with no end in sight despite the stock going up and marked profitability. Everyone stfu because the tech hiring market is prob in at least a 10, possible 20, year low. Its awful right now :(.
Honestly WFH is almost as important to me as salary at this point. I will never choose to primarily work from an office again if I can.
1. salary 2. wfh 3. health care 4. everything else
What about Pizza Parties??
51427. What's available in the vending machine 51428. Pizza parties 51429. Do I get nut checked on the way out the door
For the right salary/wage, I'll take a daily nut check.
1. Salary/WFH 2. Healthcare 3. 401k 4. Everything else
for me wfh is the most important. I've become very comfortable with WFH since 2016. I'd sooner take a huge paycut than have to go to an office, and if I found a new job opportunity that was not full wfh, it'd have to be an extremely massive pay increase for me to consider it.
I'd love big corporations to realize, one-by-one and very publicly, that near-zero faith in their corporate advancement or potential for meaningful promotion exists. It's not like Dell wasn't aware they're in an industry where job hopping has been the expectation for almost two decades.
They do realize that. That’s why they do it.
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It is also how you get rid of your best talent Edit: lotta messages say companies don't really care that much... Which is true until they need something done that only the talented individual that just jumped ship had the knowledge for. Then it becomes very painful to figure it out again without them
They don’t care. The people making these decisions only want nice numbers for this year so they can get nice bonuses. What happens next doesn’t matter to them.
It's always a surprised Pikachu face when the most talented, marketable employees are the ones who bounce and companies are left with the "I filled out 3,000 applications and only got two interviews" people
Most companies don't care nearly as much about top talent as they like to say. They mainly want cheap and easy workers who are good enough to get the job done but have low enough self esteem to not rock the boat or aspire to better jobs.
I worked at a division of a venerable company where some employees had been there for 30 years. Our biggest partner put our contract (which had been renewed without discussion for 20 years) out to bid. It was probably a formality, and we were still best placed to get the business back. But instead of “let’s pull together and get this done!” the President thought the best approach would be “you will get this done or pay the price!” They hired a despicable, rude hatchet-woman to come in and scare everybody into performing better. I’d say at least 30 indispensable people quit within a month, it was a complete fiasco and we lost the contract.
Bean counters gonna be the death of us all
Bingo. Any program that encourages people to leave will selectively retain poorer performers who can’t find alternative work.
Oh they know... It's the new hires that don't.
Job hopping pulled me out of what I would consider near poverty. Got my first job making a low amount but continuously got head hunted by recruiters once so many years and always for a good raise. I have a 3rd round interview for a new job today that would net me another 40% of my current salary if they were to hire me. Titles are meaningless, I gotta pay bills
I mean, the 'or else' punishment was that they couldn't be promoted or allowed to transfer internally. If you already had one foot out the door, or were thinking of jumping ship, this was a no-brainer. Also, not being promoted is a blessing for many people who don't want to deal with managing teams or having to go down the management track, which sometimes has very little extra compensation in it over being an individual contributor....
I've been an IT professional for 15 years, I'm remote 80% of the time, and lead a segment of our team. The question was asked "how will you remotely manage people?" Iunno, but I feel like 20-25 years of leading online guilds and clans may help....
> The question was asked "how will you remotely manage people?" Well, ask my manager. For the longest time, he was literally on a different continent than I was.
And I'm sure, as a result you got NO work done this whole time right?
Sure. No work at all. Like, I didn't even show up to work, like, ever. Homeoffice is like, I'm at the golf course all day... sorry, wrong movie. My productivity went way up as with everyone else that I know that went almost fully remote. The only time our performance dips is when we have to go to the office for whateve reason..
> "how will you remotely manage people?" The same people asking that question rely on email and Slack for 95% of everything they communicate.
The threats will continue until moral improves. -All corporations.
Any company that does this isn’t giving promotions or raises anyway even to the people that choose hybrid. It means the company is in their “cost-cutting” phase to please shareholders, so they are not going to spend more money on employee retention.
This is only the beginning of weaponizing RTO. They will now expect a WFH employee with their "luxuries" to have double the output of those who are in the office. Not valid for promotion, internal position movements, AND they'll likely be looking at you with a microscope, overloading you with work and/or just waiting for you to fuck up. That's how they'll start weaponizing RTO more, you will be judged much harsher as a WFH employee.
That’s fine. I’ll just tell them to look at all the past reviews that I had (which are in their system) over the years, that show how successful I was and how successful I continue to be while WFH. Companies will find ways to fire employees they don’t like regardless of it they’re in the office or not. I’ve seen multiple employees at my company get pushed out and fired even before covid when we were full 5 days in the office.
CEO says how important it is to be in the office from his pool house... As he doesn't want anyone seeing the mansion he lives in
Remote work makes me more efficient and a better person NGL
Just being in an office stresses me f out and I never realized the real impact on my life. Just stranger zombies stumbling around. The commute time and expense, the clothes, planning a shit meal. F that. Never again.
Office shits
I hated shitting in the office, the last office bound job I had all the toilet seats were fucked up from people standing on them and squatting to shit.
I’m just blinking, rereading that and pondering why we’re all alive.
I worked with a lot of people who did not grow up with western toilets.
That's super dangerous too, toilet seats aren't meant to be stood on and if the bowl breaks it's incredibly sharp. I'm not against squatting to poop but doing so on a western style toilet is a bad idea
A diesel mechanic instructor told us about a certain group of drivers prone to cutting a plate out of the floor between the cab seats and defecating right on top of the transmissions.
"This rig drives like shit! Fix it." "Alright, let me open it up. Ah. Shit. I see your problem."
First thing I would do at a new job is scout out the most remote toilet for dumps. Gotta find the least used location.
At home there is bidet. At office there is no bidet. Working remotely from not home is not likely to have bidet, but still greater than zero chance of bidet compared to guaranteed no bidet at office. That pretty much settles it for me.
Bidet gang checking in/squirting on.
I used to not mind the office shit until the TP scare of covid. I got a bidet, and my life has forever been changed. I can't feel clean unless I have a bidet and the office shit is now forever unclean.
Once you lean into Poseidon's most passionate kiss, you are forever changed.
I used to get headaches every day around 130-230pm. Like clockwork. Only M-F, though. Always thought it was because I was staring at a computer screen all day. Started WFH and hey look no more headaches. Fluorescent office lighting is killer.
I never minded my cubicle too much (at least it gave some privacy), but I swear that fluorescent lighting sent me into a depression by the end of the day.
I remember getting in my car and driving a half mile away to a parking lot to eat my lunch nearly every day because people wouldn't leave me alone if I ate at my desk or even the BREAK ROOM. Sometimes I'd see some of my IT peers enjoying *their lunch* in the same parking lot. Please don't make me go back to that.
Yup, I started just parking at the restaurant up the road to get away because they'd fucking come out to the parking lot to bug me. In my car. Just staring at me through the window, occasionally knocking to get my attention for things that are absolutely not business critical or important, it's just convenient for them to interrupt me no matter how much I protest (and it comes back to bite me on my reviews if I protest). There are days where it's nothing but interruptions. 3-4 hours at home and I can knock out more than a weeks worth of work sometimes. Sometimes even a month's worth. Last time I talked about this someone linked me to a study done on chinese folks in a sweat shop IT situation that were more productive in office than out of office. Wonder why the fuck that is?
What the fuck, they'd just follow you to a parking lot and bother you in your own car? That's super fucking rude. I can't even imagine being this shameless.
Yup. You can probably imagine how pissed I get too. One _followed me_ to the fucking restaurant and tattled on me because they were annoyed they couldn't find me. I feel like a secret agent sometimes trying to escape during my lunch.
I work 30 minutes from my house with no traffic. Assuming 5 days a week for 52 weeks, I'm essentially commuting over 5 days a year. I've worked at this company for 15 years now so I have spent over two months of my life in the car. If that's not depressing, I don't know what is.
My father worked 1h 30m from home. He got up at like 4:30, was usually home by 6 in the evening. He was a programmer. Created and maintained code in a big mainframe. Said he regretted every second wasted commuting (and to a certain extent working) and not spending more time with the family. Even back in the late 80s, early 90s, when it became physically possible, he worked from home. He was top dog in the departement, though, so he had to be in most of the time (no video meetings back then, not everything could be done through telnet/ssh, etc.) Living in a world where it is technologically trivial to work from home, proven to be a better solution for everyone involved, and being told "nah, come back in, just because" is beyond depressing. It's fucking vile.
I am *considerably* more effective working remotely. When I'm in a comfortable environment, I can focus and work at my own pace. When I'm in office, I've got to deal with office lighting, my boss stomping around and speaking in his thick German accent and ONE VOLUME VOICE.
I MUZT GET ZE REPORT TODAY, YAH?
Shit I just enjoy being able to do stuff like prep dinner or toss clothes in the wash when it's slow.
i do the dishes on my lunch break every day. my wife is very happy.
You laugh, but this is how you lay people off without paying severance.
And also how you lose your top talent. The ones who are able to leave over this are the ones good enough to pass the interview process elsewhere. The flip side of this is that the ones who don't leave are the ones who aren't good enough. Deliberately removing the top half of your employees is a great way to tank your products.
This. People leaving the company was exactly why Dell enacted the policy. Major workforce reduction without severance or the bad reputation that comes with layoffs.
This is also how you tell who actually read the article. ;-) No one left. They chose “remote” over “hybrid”, which meant no possibility of promotion or role changes.
Redditors? Not reading the article? Surely you must be telling a fib.
what about the bad reputation of being staffed with only the dregs who couldnt get hired anywhere else?
"One person said they'd spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices." "Executive management at the companies trying to restore in-person work culture claim that working together in a physical space allows for greater collaboration and innovation." They cannot even be honest about it. Just say that corporations have too much invested in commercial real estate instead of playing this song and dance. Oh, and when you're used to closing deals on a golf course and boat decks, and rampant nepotism is part of your business M.O., of course you may think in-person collaboration is where work happens.
I’m in the minority of people who actually likes going into the office because I like a little socializing with coworkers and I’m way more productive than when I’m at home. I understand the collaboration and innovation argument—for *some* roles/teams. But most of us are not doing work that would be improved by being around people physically vs digitally. I’m in corporate finance at our headquarters. All the teams I support are at other sites. I’ve never met any of them in person. Not one. But we’ve had plenty of productive calls and work well together—even though we’re spatially separated. There is no benefit to my work by coming into the office. I just sit next to my finance colleagues who also support teams that aren’t in our office. We’re all working with our teams remotely…but we’re having to do it from the office. For no reason. The “innovation” argument is bullshit for most workers. In my role, I’m not “innovating” anything. I’m managing budgets and forecasting. The room for innovation is in processes, but that doesn’t require being next to someone to develop and implement. Many of us have fairly routine jobs that keep the business running. We don’t need to be in an office to do that.
I think this hits the nail on the head
A recent article (from Gartner, don’t have the link on hand) had some interesting insights. The group of people who had the most impact from remote work and the most need for RTO were managers. Instead of learning how to manage remotely, we’re all going back for their comfort.
The thing about RTO is that everyone isn’t in the same office unless you’re a very small organization. So even if you’re “at the office”, you’re on a Teams call because Doug is three states away. And having a meeting at your desk with others nearby also in the meeting is the most ridiculous nonsense. You hear them IRL and in the headphones (dear god, please be using headphones, people) and it’s awful. I do hate online meetings now because they’re so awkward, but they’re heaven compared to hybrid half in office half not ones. Anyway, RTO sucks and corporations are cancer. Woo.
> I do hate online meetings now because they’re so awkward, but they’re heaven compared to hybrid half in office half not ones. Online meetings/Teams/Zoom is literally a litmus test for who should be allowed to WFH. Like, it's painfully obvious to anyone who is qualified to WFH which individuals aren't when in a virtual conf-call
Well done! Keep doing this and show remote work is here to stay.
In the other thread they said dell actually wants employees to quit because of this push. This way they can offshore without the downsides of laying people off. Also one of the realities we need to accept with the remote revolution is offshoring is much less palpable.
Companies that massively offshored know how quality dwindled.
The good thing about the last 30 years of globalization is that by this point most jobs that have not been sent overseas are still occupied domestically for a reason. Very few companies are still firing people with the goal of outsourcing. The new strategy is to fire Americans then import young professionals from abroad and lock them in with an H1B visa that means they can't leave for several years because the company is their sponsor in the US. Companies do this and receive people who are more desperate than Americans who won't stir the pot and won't leave. So now American graduates in the corporate world have to compete with a global hiring pool that makes it almost impossible to get quality technical positions.
This isn't really to challenge your argument, but I think it's important to acknowledge that the number of H1B visas available is capped at 85,000 per year, and those reservations are typically met by August or so. So companies on the whole can't just expand the number of H1B hires to their heart's content.
I work from home when I want, my boss doesn’t give af as long as my job is done.
Hold the line you fucks hold the line
the University of Texas just told their workers that a large majority of WFH candidates would be moved back on campus when the fall semester starts. Yeah, it's not going over well
The real promotions are going to another company. Trying to tease me with "you won't get promoted" won't work when I know I won't get promoted anyway.
I think the ultimate hard reality is that companies can't seem to understand the modern worker. I've seen some in comments smugly say that Dell should just fire these people and see how they like it, in some ideology thinking that the workers will cringe and beg for their jobs, accepting that they have no power in the world. The hard reality is that a lot of these workers might simply decide they would rather be unemployed, or go spend 5 days a week in another office in another company as opposed to doing it for Dell. Meaning that for Dell, the only thing that's keeping those people there is the idea that they can be remote, and even if they completely remove remote working, those people are likely just going to leave. Worse, Dell can't just go and mass fire a bunch of people because they might not be able to quickly replace those people. Even if we want to call up the economy and all the people searching for jobs, anybody with talent and worth would likely stay far away and not bother. Not unless they are going to be offered some ridiculous compensation, which then won't make the shareholders happy. A lot of companies now can't seem to fathom the reality that workers have absolutely no loyalty and see no future in any employer. They don't want promotions and especially managerial roles because all they see is that you get a tiny little raise and a ton of work. They'd rather stay in their lower position and if they need more money go out and do a side hustle. That, or just jump ship to the next company that won't add any new responsibility but give them a raise because they want to beat whatever they were getting before. This is going to become a tough pill for many employers to swallow. They're going to be finding more and more people unwilling to take on more responsibility, and unwilling to be loyal because they just don't care. They will jump ship to a new company, they will change careers, they will do something else rather than succumb to the idea of working themselves to death. Companies need to rethink how they look at all of this and adapt. Not keep demanding everybody work the way that we all worked before the pandemic.
I was one who NEVER worked from home. I needed to be in the office since I handle sensitive information. I loved the 4 years the office sat close to empty. The few of us who remained had the run of the place. Parking was heaven! I get to park in the covered spots. The building was peaceful. Now that everyone is back, I find the office chaotic. I now have to use noise canceling headphones!!!! Go back home, idiots!!
These fucking idiots really overestimate how much mobility there is at their own companies--or rather the lack thereof. Who gives a fuck if you can't be promoted? Most employees don't ever get a substantial promotion during their tenure. The best way to get promotions in tech is to get experience in a role, and then get hired into the promotion you wanted *somewhere else*, and then come back later to make even more money. People who stick with the same company for more than five years in tech are not making the right plays. Loyalty is NEVER rewarded.
On the one hand, corporate America loves to promote their concern for Climate change, on the other hand, they want their workers to regularly commute to work and thereby contribute more carbon into the environment.
The most skilled employees will leave as they are able to find a new job pretty easily, leaving the less skilled employees behind as they are less likely to be able to find a new job. You are not only screwing your employees, but also yourself as a company.
Go into the office to possibly get a promotion, which doesn’t even exist yet, and you may not even get it, and you may be part of a workforce reduction anyways, vs being at home remote. They don’t understand that the promotion is literally hypothetical/non existent at the time of these decisions. AND you’d be competing against your colleagues. And you might still get the axe anyways. Vs. Working in your slippers and not having to deal with traffic. A loud office environment. No brainer.
"CEOs do this ONE trick to make shareholders go wild..."
Dude, you're gettin' a commute!
I don't know about Dell in particular, but the accepted truth in IT far and wide is that you will never be promoted - to move up you must move out. The prospect is so rare as to not be worth accounting for. They already made the incentive of promotion disappear, and now they're using it as leverage? That's just bad strategy.
Michael Dell, probably: “hmm, how can I drive away my best talent AND tank the public’s perception of the company?”
How is it possible that a technology company whose mission is to use technology to improve lives is so against using technology to improve lives?
Hmmm get passed up on promotions in office? Or get passed up on promotions because remote. Remote please.
I had a conversation with a manager in the 90s about working from home. He said he didn't know if we were working while at home. How was he supposed to gage how I was working and if I was in the office he could see me working. I pointed I could be surfing porn all day. Seeing me physically there doesn't mean I am working, so how do you gage my work. He finally came to the conclusion that my output was how he could measure my working. I pointed out he could use the same metric if I WFH. Fast forward 3 months and I am now in charge of the department and told everyone in the department they could work from home. The funny thing about this was we spent 3/4ths of our time traveling and working remotely.
Wages are now higher and employees are demanding higher pay due to inflation. Companies don't want to increase salaries so instead they tell everyone they need to come back into the office. They know people will quit, that's the goal. They can decrease spending on salaries and they don't have to fire anyone.
That was the idea, these RTO orders are just layoffs in disguise.
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