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Nearly half Dell's US workforce has rejected RTO. Rather WFH than get promoted (2024)
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoOld story from 6 months ago: Some discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40729588
- vsskanth 2y agoSmart move. One typically needs to move jobs to get promoted anyways.
- throwawaysleep 2y agoI’ve yet to work for a company where promotion isn’t a scam anyway compared to job hopping. You put in way more work than preparing for interviews for a raise that is often less than job hopping. You want me to grind for two years for a raise when I can just be a C player and get it from someone else with stories about being an A player?
- refulgentis 2y ago100%. I worked at a particularly late age FAANG, at this point advancement was few, far between, and was very, very, easy to predict. And the predictive factors were a toxic stew. TL;DR: got here first | overworks | never ever does anything that could possibly be construed as challenging authority, such as having original ideas in front of someone ranked higher than you, or trying to help create some semblance of process. Being absurdly incompetent at writing maintainable code that had serious, consequential, misunderstandings of the material needed to implement it? That's fine. it's a feature, not a bug, to do just good enough a job to rush exec misunderstandings into prod, as long as anything wrong with it can be dissembled verbally, unless someone else wants to dig into the code. This would have sounded horribly cynical and bitter and loser-speak when I was younger. Now that I saw it first hand, it clarified for me why people do startups and turnover is high, given it was a $300K/year job if you just show up 20 hours a week, and 40 hours a week for a month or two a year. Younger me: lesson here is either care, and do a startup, or don't care and do the family and skiing or whatever. Your plan of "I should go bank money for a few years so I can leave and do my own place safely" panned out great. Your plan of "wow...standards are this low? People will see it and care, certainly if you're doing extremely impactful work" was completely wrong.
- yownie 2y agoI find what you wrote difficult to understand.
- refulgentis 2y agome too, on re-read. I can tell from the score it resonated so maybe there's too much insider baseball. TL;DR advancement in your current position is rare in big tech, and there's too much animal spirits to overcome inherent bias
- _heimdall 2y agoOne of the many lessons I've learned (so far) in my career is to do a job you don't mind, maybe even enjoy, on a team you like and ignore the whole ladder climbing game. Promotions are overrated and if you are in software you should be making a comfortable living from the beginning. More money can be helpful, but it isn't worth the stress of chasing promotions and playing the political games required at higher levels.
- bdangubic 2y ago* you, interviewing for a new position Interviewer: “mr. so-and-so, I see that you worked as XXXXX at YYYY for ZZZZ number of years, can you tell us about the core reason your career stagnated and you were not promoted in all that time there?” * assumes you somehow got the interview…
- _heimdall 2y agoI've literally had that exact question asked, minus the word "stagnated." The answer is because job title has little to do with scope, responsibility, or skill. At least at any company outside the most massive FAANG type companies. I've also had interviews where I had to explain long gaps in employment, another topic many assume will be uncomfortable or a red flag. It all comes back to telling a good story at the end of the day, explain what you learned, why you were in that position, and how you are better for it.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> on a team you like I cannot over-stress how important this is. Being on a bad team will drain you fast, no matter how interesting the work is. Meanwhile, churning out widgets is something you can do if you enjoy the people you're doing it next to.
- ninkendo 2y agoIs job hopping to get a bump in salary still a thing nowadays? Serious question. I haven’t needed to look for employment in the past year or so, but I’ve heard some terrible things about the job market, enough that I’d be surprised if it was still possible given how slow hiring seems to be.
- recursivecaveat 2y agoA long time to get hired is a disaster when you're currently unemployed. As a background thing while you're currently employed it's no big deal. If you are someone who intends to change jobs every 2 years or something you just start the process earlier. I think the job market is usually kinder to those looking for a change in jobs too unfortunately, since your current employer is an implicit vouch for you.
- rednafi 2y agoLearned it the hard way. Multiple times. Being an A player isn’t worth the effort in most places.
- Taniwha 2y agoWhere would one get a list of these WFH Dell employees? Asking for an HR friend ....
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gruez 2y agoI'm sure your HR friend has a linkedin recuriter subscription that allows them to blast any dell employee with a cold linkedin message.
- eightysixfour 2y agoInteresting framing - why is this a bad thing for Dell or the employees? It isn’t like a BS hybrid environment where everyone knows, but it isn’t written anywhere, that being in-office is an important part of career growth. There are benefits for employees working at home, there are benefits to companies for employees coming to work. Letting people self-select seems like a great way to have a culture that acknowledges the benefits and weaknesses of both modalities.
- foota 2y agoI suspect this is bad for dell because employees called their bluff, Dell would probably be negatively affected by only promoting from half of their talent pool. It's unclear how this is bad for workers, since they didn't "defect" (in a game theorhetic sense)
- eightysixfour 2y agoI’m not sure it is bad to filter out people from the potential leadership pool that aren’t invested in the culture and style Dell wants. They get the best of both worlds - strong ICs who weren’t bought in and are going to job hop anyways, and self-selected people who want to rise in the company. I’d prefer this as a filter to the old school “first in, last to leave” bullshit.
- danjl 2y agoSo you value passion for the company culture and style over, say, effectiveness, ingenuity, and performance? The idea that you would not just promote the best people because they work at home is just absurd and bad for business.
- odo1242 2y agoTo add, the best people will almost certainly pick the work from home option, leaving behind those who would have difficulty finding another job if they lost the current one. Hence this means you’d actively have worse employees, just for some company culture.
- nradov 2y agoDo any of the office employees get promoted? Dell hasn't grown much in years, so I assume promotion opportunities are close to zero. Wait around 20 years until your boss retires?
- _heimdall 2y agoIt'd be interesting to see their attrition numbers for that. If Dell is losing employees at higher levels you would see promotions opportunities whether the company grows or not.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoFor a lot of software engineers - especially those of us who are actually senior engineers, not folks who've been working for 2 years since graduation - I don't think a promotion makes sense, anyway. From here, it's Staff or Principal (or management, which is fine for some folks, and anathema to others), and the raise does not justify the amount of effort the next level would require. A lot of us are happy where we are, level-wise, and if we do want a significant raise, others have pointed out - we're more likely to get it by interviewing, not by getting promoted. Now, granted, if you're gung-ho and really want the responsibility and the more interesting work that Staff/Principal will give you, fuckin' go nuts - I'm happy there are ambitious folks out there. I just want to do my job and then go play with my kid.
- nine_zeros 2y agoThe next level is also a pyramid level - aka - competition and stack rank and often political. A lot of people cannot be bothered with petty politics.
- c0n5pir4cy 2y agoAs a Principal engineer, I would refuse to RTO and would look for another position or do the same and continue WFH if it's rewarding enough. Most of the Staff/Principal engineers around you are not there because they don't have other (sometimes much better on the face of it) opportunities - we're here because of inertia and realm expertise.
- paxys 2y agoBeing financially secure and not caring about a promotion is the biggest superpower you can have at a tech company. Work on whatever projects you want. Skip whichever meetings you want. Don't want to waste multiple days writing a pointless report? Fine. Don't want to participate in org politics? All good. As long as you are doing decent work and have a good reputation among your peers the threat of firing will always be an empty one. And soon you'll start to realize how much of the work people do at any company, especially at higher levels, is just performative ass kissing. Every single terrible job experience is the result of a shitty power tripping manager. Take away the manager's power over you and suddenly your job will be fun and fulfilling again.
- gedy 2y agoI can't comment on Dell specifically, but as someone who WFH and remote friendly companies, the vast majority of people not working from the office are people who moved for more affordable housing (mostly purchasing, not for renting). I'd have loved to stay and live near our nice offices and biked or short drive to work, but it literally wasn't affordable and just got worse over the 10 years I was in-office. You reach an age where you have make a decision on these life choices and so WFH/remote it was. It wasn't really a choice when no company would pay enough to afford a home near their offices (married with children) - so sorry/not sorry?
- breput 2y agoThe truly essential people who want to WFH will just ignore the directive and their managers will cover for them. I assume they don't show up in this 50%. The rest are literally calling Dell's bluff that any potential promotion would be less valuable (monetary or well-being). Good on them!
- XorNot 2y agoI mean that's the thing. At the end of the day not WFH is at least another 2 hours of your day dedicated to work things. That's an absolutely massive chunk of time.
- breput 2y agoI wouldn't give all 2 hours to work, but you're not wrong.
- tomjakubowski 2y agoHardly "at least" two hours a day. The average one-way commute in the United States is under a half hour; the state with the longest average commute (New York) is at 33 minutes. https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/acs-1yr.html https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...
- letouj 2y agoBeing able to take a few minutes out of the workday here and there to attend to minor home duties (laundry, pets, deliveries, etc.) is a pretty significant extra perk on top of the time savings of avoiding the commute.
- est31 2y agoYes and you do these things during the day and not during the time when everyone else is home from work. I go shopping at various times, but when I go to the stores during the "return from work" rush hour right after common work end times, it's way more busy, queues are longer, etc. WFH is the best.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- LAC-Tech 2y agoCOVID was such a waste of a catastrophe. We all briefly figured out that maybe people who work at a computer all day don't actually need to travel every day to a special computer in a special building. And that we don't need mass tourism and mass migration. But everyone was determined to learn absolutely nothing from it, and just go back to normal but even worse.
- cloudking 2y agoWFH was the best thing to come out of COVID.
- PessimalDecimal 2y ago"was" might be unfortunately too accurate.
- celdon25 2y ago> back to normal but even worse. Yep, I had no problem finding remote jobs before Covid. Now I get no interviews, every application rejected due to competing with literally thousands of remote "applicants" per job.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoWe learned that corporate leadership folks are willing to make workers suffer out of ideology and ignore data. Valuable signal.
- DrillShopper 2y agoSuffer and die
- _heimdall 2y agoIf you're looking for Covid response lessons to learn, WFH is pretty low on the list in my opinion. We saw how fragile our entire system is from infrastructure to food. We saw how quickly a bit of fear turned an entire political party (at least in the US) from vilifying big pharma to putting it on a pedestal, handing over mountains of money, and creating legal cover for any and all liability. We saw how strong of a grip the news media has over society, turning public opinion on a dime as new recommendations/talking points came down. We saw how intertwined social media and the government really is. WFH feels like a quaint novelty to me in the context of what all went wrong and what lessons were missed during the pandemic response.
- booleandilemma 2y agoI think this will just encourage the further replacement of American citizens with H-1B's from India who will do whatever upper management demands, because they have no choice. I look around my workplace and see Indians building simple CRUD APIs because allegedly Americans can't? lol.
- 23B1 2y agoGood. Managers pull your heads out of your ass and lean into the change in working habits. There's a lot you can do to maintain the benefits of office work, just realize you aren't peoples #1 priority and you never were.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- danjl 2y agoThe concept that you would rather promote a mediocre employee who works in the office over a star who decides to work at home is just absurd, and horrible for business. I cannot imagine it actually being implemented.
- Muromec 2y agoIt's consistent with both theories about rto -- one that remote work harms productivity (and someone working remotely cant be more productive than their office peers) and the other postulating its just a power move
- timothevs 2y agoSadly, I was at the receiving end of this. FWIW I don’t work at a tech company, but rather at the IT department of a University in Florida.
- jimt1234 2y agoThis is basically how the federal government works. Employee-A is a "rock star", she is extremely productive, does great work, inspires others to do great work - the rest of the team basically depends on her, but she has to drive her kids to school in the morning and is sometimes 5 or 10 minutes late to the office. Employee-B is basically useless, does as little as possible, helps no one, but is always on time to the office. Now, take a guess who's gonna be promoted. ... I used to do civilian contracting; I saw this situation many times. Totally demoralizing.
- imoreno 2y agoPerhaps they believe their own management abilities are strong enough that mediocre enhanced by close management is better than good but out of management's reach. There's a lot of assumption I don't agree with in that, but I would assume their logic is something like that.
- benreesman 2y agoOpen plan offices are a waking nightmare. If you want people to return to office maybe make offices reasonable places to work.
- rednafi 2y agoAfter only seven years in the industry, a promotion doesn’t make much sense to me right now. I want to write good code and build great products. But in the corporate world, visible work is more important than good work. So, there are two options for me: either be a staff engineer or a manager. While staff seems like the obvious choice, in most companies, staff engineers are just managers who code. The number of meetings and admin work goes through the roof. Not to mention the nasty politics and mind games you have to play just to survive. So, if I have to choose between staying at home or getting promoted, WFH is the obvious choice. Oh, and I learned late that hopping jobs is far better than chasing promotions for my financial and mental health.
- leeoniya 2y ago> in most companies, staff engineers are just managers who code managers, by definition, have direct reports while ICs do not. for L5/L6 roles you're a mix of tech lead/architect/product mgr, with broader scope. you do have more meetings, but they're typically ones where your input is needed, not just ceremonial bs.
- rednafi 2y agoI’d love to expand the scope of my work and do better stuff. But meetings without concrete agendas are the bane of my existence, and even as an IC, I’ve had to sit through far too many. Post-senior paths are kind of hazy, and I’d rather job-hop than climb these ladders. The number of times I’ve gone “above and beyond” only to hear, “Sorry, we don’t have the budget for a raise,” is exhausting.
- scrapcode 2y agoGood. If I have to go back into the office it may as well be with a fat pay raise and a new mission, the likes of which are more likely with a new company.
- daviddever23box 2y agoAn exclusively WFH remote team is dangerous to those team members subject to mandatory RTO directives - especially at Dell - and especially dangerous to middle managers incapable of justifying their existence. I have the receipts.
- imoreno 2y agoWe're on, what, year 2 of the WFH-RTO wars? It's a roller-coaster for sure. I don't get why some companies are so obsessed with RTO for jobs like software engineers, who have no reason to be in the office anyway and tend to have enough technical savvy to figure out slack and zoom (which people use in the office too btw). I mean, if I set aside my cynicism. What do they get out of it? All these tech companies are in very high COL urban areas. In fact, they always put their office in some downtown area as well, so even going to the cheaper suburbs of the area is not always feasible due to commute. It seems like they would save so much money by letting engineers WFH: * Less money spent on office lease, existing office space can be leased to someone else * Less money spent on utilities, kitchen snacks, custodial... * You get more chances to "suck people in" to do just one more thing after hours, since they basically live in their office now (I thought that was the management dream?) * Since the WFH can work in a low COL area, they might accept lower pay * The paycheck becomes more efficient, as both sides pay less tax. Also, often RTO means moving to a state which has much higher state income tax as well. * Child care costs can be massively reduced for the employee, reducing salary expectations * You have a bigger pool of people to hire, not just people in your area * I suspect employees subconsciously count commute towards "hour worked" and adjust their hourly pay accordingly - with WFH the commute is 10 seconds so their subjective pay increases further * A common WFH play is to relocate to a low tax, small govt state which also has fewer regulations for the employer, which saves even more money * People might be more likely to eat at their desk, rather than: Walk to restaurant, order, eat, walk back... * No physical contact probably means fewer HR incidents, less work for HR, so you can reduce HR headcount The savings and efficiencies seem crazy, an I'm baffled how they figure that RTO is a good idea. I get that they have this fear that WFHers will watch Netflix all day instead of working... But honestly, when's the last time you had a software job where, when you miss your targets (KPIs, Jira tickets, whatever) you could get away with "but boss, I've been in the office all day this week! It's not my fault I couldn't get it finished". All these roles are already heavily biased towards deliverables rather than how many hours you spent delivering. Being in the office isn't even the worst part. But the office is always in a location that's extremely hostile to employees. Why can't they open a second office in some cheap place like rural Arkansas, where the workers can get cheap quality housing with a short commute, and send some managers over there? There's something to be said for working in your pyjamas, of course, but this seems like a pretty good compromise. As for trying to get someone who is already WFH to RTO... Sheesh. Suppose they do relocate back within commuting distance. They got into a lease or mortgage, that would otherwise be a bad deal, just so they could come to your office. Who's to say you don't lay them off anyway in a few months? And then they'll be stuck with a house they don't need or want. This creates a risk for the employee, that must be mitigated by having an even higher salary expectation. RTO seems like swimming against the current in so many ways. Maybe I'm missing something really big here.
- fire_lake 2y agoAnother possible reason: managers making RTO decisions are trying to protect their own salary from cheaper international competition by forcing RTO on their reports.
- daft_pink 2y agodoes anyone really believe they are going to just promote people who don’t work from home instead of by merit?