Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”
They work in tech, promotions are achieved by moving employers. Internal mobility is always terrible in tech companies.
Very much this. I have never switched employers and not received a sizable salary bump in the process. This isn't quite "don't threaten me with a good time" territory, but it's not far removed from it.
Yup. It's the same fucked-up psychology corps use for their customers. Like running ads for super discounts for new customers. Existing customers that have never missed a payment? Fuck-em. Instead of giving 1% "thank you" for good customers, corps would rather lose the good customers and pay a premium to find new ones.
So it goes.
If you get a new customer, you may get one for several years without adding any new effort.
Yuuuup lowest pay bump I have gotten was 10k highest was over 50k with the potential of a bonus. I got low balled for a long years and am now like pay me. Wish I would have seen/known my worth long ago before getting taken advantage of
I'm admittedly not familiar with the data, but I have the impression that this is true with quite a few fields, tech or otherwise. I think they prey upon loss aversion.
I think it is just American working culture. Corporations slowly eroded benefits over the years to where we are today and your salary is pretty much stuck at a 3% cost of living raise if you are lucky. My last job had an HR cap at 10% and my boss "pulled some strings" to get me an 8% bump (with a ton of extra responsibilities) and I still made 20k less than the fucking new hires. I still stayed 2 more years.
I've never been promoted in a job and the biggest pay increase I've ever gotten was 10%. Switching jobs never failed to get me at least 30% more and a promotion.
Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.
Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.
Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.
Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That's a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.
I'm glad they've got themselves into a sticky situation.
Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):
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.
One major downside of hybrid working really is that if you are having a meeting where even a single person is not there, then the entire meeting may as well be a video call. If you are on a video call, then why do you need to be in the office for it?
At my job we work with physical objects, so being in office is a requirement at least part of the time, but if I'm just going to be in meetings for most of the day, there is no way I'm going into the office just to sit on video calls all day.
You mean to tell me, three days a week, they have to:
All for the same pay and several hours away from my family, home, or bed?
No fucking thanks.
Going remote was the best fucking raise I ever got, and it didn't cost them a dime.
So you could just got he the office days straight and don't show up for the rest of the year... interesting... but considering promotions are everything but lately i'd just go remote anyway.
ineligible for promotion
This seems like an empty threat to me. Every promotion I've ever gotten internally has come with a negligible pay increase (4%). The best promotions I've gotten have been leaving to take a new job somewhere else (20-50%).
And that 4% just buys you a year before inflation cuts it back down again. Searching for a job from home is easier.
Probably while updating their resumes and looking around for replacement jobs in case they find a better one. I know I would.
Man these sensational titles for articles have been setting such a deceiving narrative. I feel like I'm in a veiled world since like 2015
nobody knows whats going on anymore
Lol, more a hope than a plan
This would be a handy way to get rid of half your staff, but the people you chase away are usually the ones you want to keep. As per the Dead-Sea Effect, the ones who will leave are the ones who generally are more able to, who will be your most employable people, and thus your most talented. Usually.
Making work suck, and letting the best half of the staff bail, seems like stupid and a game show.
I read somewhere that convincing people to quit was party of some companies' plan when demanding return to office, but as you pointed out, they probably lost their top 10% or more in the quality workers group. So do that introvert parasites can have their "corporate culture" (or more critically, justify leading that bigass office building).
I think you mean extrovert parasites
So much the better, as far as those executives are concerned.
Let's say you want to cut costs and you know you have momentum and a long lag where your total incompetence won't make a difference to business results in the short term, so cut costs by getting rid of the top talent.
Now if they outright just fire every good person, well that looks obviously stupid, but if those good people just... up and quit... well they are hardly to blame, and don't have to pay out those massive severances. You get your annual bonus which is big, and your big restricted stock payday might be delayed two years, but they know, realistically, they can probably coast a good 3 or 4 years before the game is up. Or if you have a supremely strong 'business brand', you might be able to coast indefinitely as the big shots will never believe that brand isn't good anymore.
Doesn't matter in the world of next quarter vision. So shortsighted.
And Dell said “Great, thanks, saved us a ton on severance packages and allowed us to replace our high paid tenured employees with hungry graduates who are prepared to work themselves to death for peanuts”
Truth.
Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20's, and it's all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.
I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.
More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.
This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.
High paying jobs with tons of new graduates have an oversaturated supply problem. It's no surprise that when people figure out that becoming a software developer is easy street to 150k+++ WFH that there was a huge rush to get those jobs... now that there are TONS and TONS of young junior devs there is no shortage to hire someone for near minimum wage.
Why pay 400k for a senior developer when you can hire a mid-level for ~100k to be a manager, and 4 juniors for 60k a piece, and augment them with chatgpt to help them learn what they are skill gapped by.
Plus junior devs are so desperate you can force them to come into the office, something the dev divas ten years ago refused to do back when there was a huge shortage of coders.
and this is why we are going to have a surge in enshittification in every piece of software and engineering around. eagerness and high energy does not replace decade of experience and ability to hold your composure against corporate pressure to do shady shit (if anything eagerness to please enable it)
It's like seeing the Dracula myth reborn. They periodically come to wreak great violence, but always draining. Always unseen. Always feeding.
Friends don't let bosses purchase Dell computers.
When I got hired at my job where I could write and dictate policy, the first thing I did was write up a new IT Purchasing Policy with a "Banned Manufacturers" section right up top with HP right at #1 and Dell at #2
Considering that HP is the other choice that most businesses consider, I'd take the Dell 100% of the time. HP's laptops are complete and utter trash.
Lenovo is at the top of the enterprise devices game right now. I always say they operate in cycles and usually each brand trades every 2 years who is at number one.
I still will always shit on HP. And HPE Aruba switches are absolutely trash.
HP’s laptops are complete and utter trash
a) yes b) perhaps that also describes their management
Our shop has two options (for security and management, they keep the options lean). Dell Windows 11 machines and Mac. The suckiness of the Dell ecosystem, combined with Windows 11 being fairly terrible, has pushed most all of my colleagues over to Mac over the last few years. Even most of the ASP.NET developers are on Mac at this point. This just solidifies that direction even further.
My company has one option, Lenovo with locked down Windows 11. We didn't want to deal with the IT dept constantly, so we told them we need Macs and bought them ourselves, despite most of our team (including me) not liking Apple. We don't need macOS for anything, we just build software for Linux servers and Windows desktops, but here we are because of stupid corporate policy.
I use a Lenovo running Linux at home, and my next laptop will probably be a Framework. But I use macOS all day because IT depts kinda suck. They won't allow Linux either, if it's company hardware, it runs company images, or stock in the case of Apple...
Anyone want to start a company. Work from home. We'll split profits among ourselves. We can. Build blackjack lottery machines and webhookers
Quiet unionizing?
we should fucking hope. Might catch on
Lolbruh. Go ahead and tell me to go to the office 5 days. I’ll peace the fuck out.
I peaced out at 2. Manager was a bit of a prick, and the office was bright, hot, cramped, loud, and had no visual or audio privacy.
No fucking thanks.
Found a job thanks to my peers and it's a little more pay and 100% remote as per the union contract. Wheeee. Work anywhere in the country.
If this country cared about the environment or workers' safety, they'd fine companies who make employees work in the office/on site when they could work from home instead.
Imagine how many people die every year commuting to jobs they could have done from home
If the commute was included in workplace deaths and injuries, I wonder where it would rank with OSHA's statistics
Problem is most of the folks influencing those that make laws also have huge real estate portfolios of commercial real estate.
As intended. A Layoff by any other name...
Not for 50% of the company though. They're going to have a rough couple years ahead of them.
I wonder if this method doesn't overproportionally eliminates valuable workers, who can easily switch companies.
Sounds like a problem for the next CEO. I got quarterly metrics to meet. When shit hits the fan cause all the talent left I'll just eject with my golden parachute.
Pretty much.
Capable employees don't raise a huge stink.
They quietly put the word out to a few people they know and play along until something interesting appears on the horizon.
Then when they're good and ready they just "suddenly" fuck off to somewhere nicer for them.
That's consistent with my office, plus a hiring freeze so nobody new coming in.
Fortunately, for me, my cardiologist told them to pound sand. Working from home now since 2018.
Dude... you're getting "or else."
They were probably like, “Finally, I can go to a company that doesn’t force me to use a Dell.”
Good luck getting people to waste a ton of gas and time going into the office every day. Even before the pandemic, everyone was already using teams for meetings virtually. I think we had physical meetings a few times a year at most, and even then, some people were virtual.
Your move, Bitch!
Just pick hybrid and fake the system that tracks you. Probably not super hard to trick it.
It's by your employee id card, gotta go on site to swipe card, then you can sneak home. remeber to sneak back in to swipe out!
Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic
This part is wild. So they closed down the office and then punish the employees for not coming into the office. Tell me this is illegal.
There's a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.
Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.
Oh no I have to go back to work!
Anyways....
Good.
In my case, it was pretty effed up and I know some of yall are going to dislike this comment. When covid hit, I was instructed by the CTO to put a plan together to quickly make every employee remote accessible to the organization. Upon completing this project (took roughly 3 weeks since majority of employees were working off laptops and only needed to increase our VPN license count - gotta love Cisco), people were asked to work fully remote and if they needed to come into work, they just needed to send an email for approval from their manager to come into the office the following day.
When an employee comes into the office, at the entrance they had to either show their vax card or get their temperature checked, if the employee had a vax card, they were allowed to go to their assigned desk to work, if you did not have a vax card and didn't have a high temperature, you were sent to a designated area of the building to work from, you were allowed to go to your desk to get any belongings you'd need then come back to the designated area.
After 3 months of this, the company had a new policy, all employees must be vaxxed in order to enter the building, no exceptions. If the employee worked remote, no problem you weren't required to be vaxxed. The CTO tells me that I need to communicate to the entire IT team that we will now be RTO (returning to office) permanently, this included project managers... IT is a set of departments that majority can easily work remote. A small portion could come into office to do any hands on work but because the hands on work was done within a specific region of the building it would require these employees to be vaxxed and to provide proof of it. So the CTO decided instead of targeting a small handful of IT professionals, he would just get the entire IT team to get vaxxed and come back into office permanently.
I told the CTO that I don't plan to get vaxxed, I'd rather ride it out. And that other team members felt the same. The CTO gave me an ultimatum. I told him I will send out an IT wide email but that's the only command I will obey. Flat out, CTO tells me anyone who doesn't get vaxxed will be terminated. So I and 4 others got terminated two weeks later.
And now, companies around the U.S. are getting sued for their employer-imposed vaccine mandates.
Last laugh, bitch.
Glad you got fired. Vaccines should always be mandatory save for legitimate, doctor-validated medical exemptions.
Anti-vaxxers are fucking stupid and should either be educated properly or, if they still refuse to do their civic duty after being de-programmed of misinformation, punished. You are only allowed to participate in society if you take the necessary steps that you are morally and ethically obligated to do in order to protect it from preventable, transmissible disease. We had eradicated polio until stupid motherfuckers like yourself decided that it would be a good idea to forgo the standard polio vaccine schedule that we've had for decades. Now, we saw the first case in 30 years in 2022 because someone selfishly thought that their personal beliefs were more important than the health and livelihood of everyone else.
I understand your anger and agree that anti-vaxxers are stupid. I believe public health education should be part of the school system.
I also agree that it's responsible for a society to impose reasonable restrictions on members that endanger it.
I think people do have an ethical obligation to take reasonable precautions avoid potentially exposing others to pathogens. Vaccination is an example of reasonable precaution. People have the right to bodily autonomy, do not vaccinate them against their wishes.
I do not support the firing of workers for refusing vaccinations if they can do their job remotely. People shouldn't have to decide between their religious beliefs and employment if their employment doesn't bring them into contact with others. (Imo anti-vaxx is essentially a religion, this may say more about my beliefs regarding religion than about anti-vaxx sentiment).
By all means exclude the unvaccinated from places where they can be reasonably understood to endanger the public, or others that have a similar right to be there.
Yeah, me too. In the end it turned out great for me and my family. Literally that job in the Bay allowed us to save even more money allowing us to buy a large property. And if all goes the way we hope, I can eject myself out of the job market and enjoy life with my fam. No more wage slave life.
Pssst... people were still getting the flu after their vaccines, after multiple vaccines. You know what the flu did to me? Literally, lost of taste. I couldn't taste salt for about 4 days. Happened twice only, thankfully. I'll personally take that a million times over.
Stay salty, brah.
I dunno, you lost your job for no good reason. Did you sue?
Kinda seems like they have the last laugh.
And most likely any job will require proof of a vaccine. OP fucked around and is finding out. But yeah the companies being sued
I believe it was a blessing. One door shut, another one, a few months later opened. I had to move from Southern California to the Bay... where my salary was a little more than 1.5x the previous salary and this company, a video game developing company, interestingly, didn't have such requirements in order to work there or come into office (it was like 90% remote work, only came into office to work on projects with my team).
Nope, they didn't have the last laugh. Good thing I didn't sign the NDA either at the time of termination.
getting sued for their employer-imposed vaccine mandates
The only case I've seen succeed is for a company that ignored legitimate religious exceptions. Have you seen any successful cases that support your use case?
I thought we'd moved beyond this sort of nonsense.
