Schwa
Ars TechnicaNearly half of Dell’s workforce refused to return to the office
Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted.
StarcadeWe faced the same at our company. Some of our employees moved away without telling anyone.
rabble@Starcade @arstechnica I moved from SF to Uruguay without telling yahoo HR in 2007. They eventually discovered and fired me. My team knew and were fine with it.
nickIf the work can be done remotely, the employee should be able to live where they want. If a company doesn't like that, don't offer remote work.
Simple as.
Chris Lilley 🏴@arstechnica Form a union
trisweb@arstechnica This sounds like they're calling their bluff bigtime.
Like, good luck running your company and retaining people actually doing their jobs if you're gonna stick with this.
I'd take that bet.
Ratboy (reformed dino pirate)@arstechnica @gemini6ice what a dumb policy from Dell. If you are remote you can't be promoted. C-suite still mad they lost so much power in a covid-changed world.
Matija Nalis@jaykass
have to admire inventive win-win scenario devised by those upper management parasites, though. They've just increased their own bonuses due to ensuring huge profits by making sure half of workforce has "willingly" opted out of raises forever. 😱
@arstechnica @gemini6ice
have to admire inventive win-win scenario devised by those upper management parasites, though. They've just increased their own bonuses due to ensuring huge profits by making sure half of workforce has "willingly" opted out of raises forever. 😱
@arstechnica @gemini6ice
Piotr Bialecki@mnalis @jaykass @arstechnica @[email protected] No, what'll happen is that those folks will just move away & get promoted elsewhere. And Dell will get stuck with new hires & no-one to mentor them.
theheretic@arstechnica those people are based as fuck
ShadSterling@arstechnica kindof surprised it wasn’t more
Ian@ShadSterling @arstechnica I'll bet the other half is all management since Dell seems like one of those top heavy companies.
Bernhard Hofmann 🇬🇧 🇨🇭 🇺🇦@arstechnica This is the way
Davip Prestnod@arstechnica makes me want a dell computer
Xipher@arstechnica Good, fuck that policy :D
Toon Van de Putte 🍉@arstechnica If you save ~2hrs of commute every day, that's kind of a 'promotion' right there.
djw@toon @arstechnica Yep, and it's a helluva pay raise too. My time has value, gas certainly has value (more than it ought to, these days), etc.
sabik
GFJacobs Is Still Masking@arstechnica fuck the corporate vampires.
Jerry on Mastodon@arstechnica Tell me Dell has low employee morale without telling me they have low employee morale.
I keep hearing this claim that coming into the office increases collaboration. But, if this were the real reason, then companies wouldn't hire offshore developers who can only be collaborated with for two hours per day. It's OK to limit collaboration if the company saves money? Somehow it's not so essential, then?
There is some dishonesty about this, especially when people come in to attend video meetings.
@arstechnica they cancled my trip to india a few weeks before they mandated my return to office. There would have been more value in that trip than all my time in the office. I bike to work so at least I get some exercise out of it.
KévinMy take is that it's about protecting commercial real estate valuations (would love for a professionals to weigh in)
Also, many metro areas are experiencing a housing crisis.
1) Commercial to residential conversion: Not easy, but possible.
2) Reduce GHG emissions? More WFH.
But instead the corporate push is "back to office", for many who then collaborate virtually with people not in the same office.
An interesting article on the topic.
The reason I think this is outlined below.
greenpepper22@Jerry @arstechnica exactly, if you wanna get the advantage of the company overall getting like 15 hours of work done everyday you need to accept remote workers cuz nobody’s gunna go into an office for 3 hours of virtual meetings and totally free for the rest of the day. I feel like the obvious solution is to build separate in person and remote teams.
halcy 🔜 
@Jerry @arstechnica offices aren’t even designed for collaboration anymore (i.e. small to mid sized rooms, well separated spaces suitable for working as a small group), they’re all these completely open spaces where if you walk over to a colleague to talk, you’re annoying 10 other people in the vicinity
M.O.M.O.@arstechnica They know they can still get promoted, by accepting another job
Alan@arstechnica Seems like not being promoted if you're remote is not a threat if, like many other corps, Dell isn't promoting very often anyway.
@arstechnica I don’t have a problem with the all staying home. I can see the burden of taking care of a family member with long Covid for years while Dellmakes it’s next billion. Look at physicsgirl. Here you go.
Long COVID condition gets a new definition
Bill LambOnce had a sub-editor (I forget his exact title) at a Texas metro complain to me about how much time he spent in meetings. Never enough time to write, he said.
He was responsible for one column a week.
cow99@arstechnica and most people don’t get promoted after some level, so this just removed the stress. No need to try to prove yourself anymore, just do your job, and turn the computer off at the end of the day.
Space Wrangler@arstechnica
Management really underestimates the damage commutes do to people
Management really underestimates the damage commutes do to people
absinthe@arstechnica
I'll bet they weren't going to be promoted anyways!
F RTO!
@arstechnica
No surprise that Dell sucks up to tfg & the gop.
From leaked ted cruz fundraising papers:
Christie Dudley@arstechnica @briankrebs This speaks to more than just an unwillingness to return to work. It suggests that certain employees do not see themselves as having any possible hope of promotion. That's the kind of hopelessness that foments among minorities and women in tech.
Log 🪵@arstechnica They weren't going to be promoted anyway. And the few who would? Yay! You get a private office with a window now. That you already had at home. But this one you have to drive an hour each way to look out of, and the view here is of an opposing wall of windows and traffic instead of a flower garden with bees and goldfinches in it.
stephen ryner jr. 🦉@arstechnica @jerry “Others still noted that it seemed pointless to go in to an in-person office when the teams they worked on were already distributed across multiple offices around the world, so they'd mostly still be on Zoom calls anyway.”
@arstechnica @jerry “Many interviewed admitted they were looking for work at other companies that aren't trying to corral employees back into the office.”
I am Jack's Lost 404Corral is a good word here. That's exactly what this is.
Jerry 🦙💝🦙@nuthatch @arstechnica this is why I rejected RTO - they want me to pick up and move to a different state so that I can work out of an office that won’t have enough space for me full time to manage the team I lead, which is almost exclusively overseas. No thanks 🚮
David H. McCoy@nuthatch @arstechnica @jerry @maxleibman
Welcome to my world.
reaply Pop&NetBSD🚩@arstechnica corporate right now
maya@arstechnica "workers stayed remote even when Dell dangled some keys in front of them."
Leszek@arstechnica that's great news, ppl will choose life over work if they only can afford it!
Eric Curtin@arstechnica when I worked at Dell in 2019 there was a push to make many people become full time remote workers. Most but not all were fine with it (everybody is different). Employees seemed happier and Dell's stock price has trebled in the meantime. I'm a little surprised by the change of stance, all things considered.
Punished Bernadetta 
@arstechnica "return to office, we want to see your reaction to getting laid off because we replaced your department with workers from India on our CCTVs"
Static Raider@arstechnica
When there is no such thing as company loyalty, and your job can be done fully remote I understand the decision from many employes. From what I hear most, if not all the time, its better to switch companies then get a raise/promotion anyway.
As a side note, it seems like companys and banks are getting pretty desperate about the uselessness of office spaces, at least for tech fields and tech related work. Its going to be intresting watching how this all plays out.
exus1pl@arstechnica almost 4 years of world going fully remote and they still think it doesn't work?
ShoreGuy@arstechnica This company lied to its workforce. Families made "life decisions" based on what they were told. Then they enact a policy that requires a return to office (expecting high levels of resignation)? Then when they realize the workforce won't relocate to go back to an office or quit they try to covert fire people with a No Promotion Policy?
I'll never buy another Dell product nor hire anyone from Dell Leadership.
You shouldn't either.
The Doctor@arstechnica What's a promotion?