6 ms·

Dell ends hybrid work policy, demands RTO despite remote work pledge

• transcriptase 2y ago
  Someone should probably tell him about teams, zoom, telephones, etc if he thinks the answer to email chains is forcing people back to an office.
  • atomicnumber3 2y ago
    There's not a single person involved in this letter - reader nor writer - who is confused about what this is actually about. Companies would rather not have an employee than have an employee who has leverage over them, even if having them and paying them is objectively better for the company's outcomes. It's all about power. And forced RTO is always about shadow-layoffs.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    It's an easy way to have the least motivated leave the company, without layoffs and severance payments. Whether it's the most productive who remain is always a question, of course.
    • janice1999 2y ago
      It's an easy way to have top talent leave because they will have the easiest time finding a better employer. "Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”: Study " https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/companies-issuing-rto-mandates-lose-their-best-talent-study/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/12/companies-issuin...
    • happytoexplain 2y ago
      >least motivated This is a common misunderstanding. The people who produce value in businesses (anything larger than a true startup) are not "more motivated" regarding the business than the others. They are more talented, more experienced, and/or enjoy what they are doing more. None of that is intrinsic to the business. If you try to root out "unmotivated" people, you are just going to lose your best. Alternatively, depending on how you use the word ("motivation" is a really broad term), a lack of motivation is typically a problem with the business, and not the employee, so getting rid of the employees most affected by the problem won't fix the problem.
    • Tiktaalik 2y ago
      It does seem likely that it is the least productive who remain. The approach ensures that the people who most badly need a paycheque or who just are into it for a paycheque are those that are most likely to stay. Not likely the most experienced and best workers. The most passionate people can go anywhere and do anything and are more likely to leave.
  • SoftTalker 2y ago
    Teams and Zoom is the worst of both worlds. Delivers most of the disadvantages of not being face-to-face, and most of the disadvantages of RTO. These platforms made remote work during the pandemic possible for orgs that didn't know how to work remotely already. But they are not ideal, far from it.
• newyankee 2y ago
  I remember in 2017 ish Dell would market being like 50% remote/hybrid by 2020 as a feature of what makes it futuristic etc. Everything is marketing and when push comes to shove nothing matters.
  • derwiki 2y ago
    They just want to reduce headcount without layoffs
  • davidw 2y ago
    I so very badly want to find a way to "chart my own course" these days. This corporate stuff is just awful. It's all so transactional and soulless and generally unpleasant. I'm fine with transactional if I'm shopping at the grocery store. Somewhere where I spend 8+ hours a day, I kind of want to have some human connection with people. Some days, I really miss where I worked in Italy. We weren't "family", or even "friends" really, but we were all friendly and got on well and people seemed to care about one another. And importantly there was none of that fake-ass "family" crap from management - we were all there to do a job and do it with pride, but without all the 'rah rah' BS.
    • layer8 2y ago
      Look for small companies to work at, ideally owner-managed ones. Yes there’s a salary trade-off, but you get what you pay for, so to speak.
      • timothevs 2y ago
        Or at a University.
• maeil 2y ago
  >Dell's about-face on working from home belies chief operating officer Jeff Clarke's mid-pandemic assertion that "we will never go back to the way things were before." >"Here at Dell, we expect, on an ongoing basis, that 60 per cent of our workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home mostly and come into the office one or two days a week," said Clarke during the corporation's Q2 2020 earnings conference call. I yearn for the day that an investor reminds him of this during an earnings call.
  • ocdtrekkie 2y ago
    Eh, I presume a comment like that makes you look brilliant/prescient if you're right, and nobody cares if you undo it later.
  • absolutelastone 2y ago
    "never" in corporate-speak means not for 4.5 years.
• arrozconcosas 2y ago
  They have zero clue or care about workforce effectiveness
  • fullstackwife 2y ago
    Shadow layoffs / quiet quitting is not related to work effectiveness
• atomicnumber3 2y ago
  More shadow layoffs. I think it's pretty damning that all of the bigcos are so entrenched in their inertia that they can just bleed talent like this and it just. doesn't. matter.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Time will tell, no?
    • dartos 2y ago
      Didn’t seem to matter for Twitter, sadly
      • markeroon 2y ago
        “The social media platform formerly known as Twitter is worth almost 80% less than two years ago when Elon Musk bought it, according to estimates from investment giant Fidelity.” https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-fidelity/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/02/business/elon-musk-twitter-x-...
        • dartos 2y ago
          Id like to believe this is bad news for X, but selling $3B out of $40B isn’t a massive sell off. They’re probably just recouping losses from the last few days of market nosedive
          • markeroon 2y ago
            I edited my link to better capture how much twitter is bleeding in terms of valuation, but you had replied in the interim. My bad! Fair point re: selling the debt.
        • greenchair 2y ago
          "fidelity believes"
• anotherhue 2y ago
  It frustrates me that Good Communication is not seen as a skill, but rather some formless office sprite that had to be coaxed out and captured. TFA talks about email chains that last forever, I'd add my pet peeve of zoom calls that are attended without question because they're recurring calendar invites. Clear communication, towards a well expressed goal, with an understanding of the context your audience holds, and ultimately reasonably tracked outcomes should be the goal. But instead of teaching people how to do this we flail our arms around and complain. Personally I think the real goal is corporate climbing and these companies only incidentally accomplish their vague goals.
  • backtobasix 2y ago
    You make a compelling argument for RTO. I've been in tech since 1990. My first job at IBM, my entire product team of ~100 people was on one floor of one building. We knocked out projects at an insane rate. Today, trying to lead teams over zoom, across multiple time zones, means it takes weeks to solve problems that took a few hours over a whiteboard. If I was a CEO I would mandate RTO, but I would also make sure to colocate my teams, otherwise there's very little point to RTO when you're just calling into a Teams meeting. Of course, the downside no one is talking about: camaraderie is real. If you're an engineer with <5 years experience you probably don't see it, but a very large part of team success is how they work together, and in-person collab is priceless.
    • anotherhue 2y ago
      Agreed, I saw the same in literal cubicle farms at Intel. When there is Bad Communication, whether due to zoom or timezones or whatever, it's like every interaction is a cache miss, for both parties. When it's good people can basically wink and grunt at each other and it's enough to convey the meaning.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
        It seems entirely reasonable some teams will work well remotely, others in person. It maybe be context dependent, and it may be that some people prefer different structures for different projects in different places over time. There is no perfect pasta sauce, only perfect pasta sauces.
• ghaff 2y ago
  After seeing various consultant presentations early in COVID (and much pundit commentary), I find it somewhat remarkable just how little ended up really changing five years later. It has changed a bit some places. Some relatively remote-friendly companies that basically ignored hiring location requirements during COVID really can't go home again without drastically cutting their workforce--which they probably don't want to do if they're doing reasonably well whether they like it or not. But I'm not sure that, aside from seeing a few more masks being worn, that there's really a lot of change overall.
  • dartos 2y ago
    I think a lot changed, socially, over that time. Inflation, crypto, and sports betting removed almost all stigma from gambling. Being in your 20s with a crippling gambling addiction is just normal now. The tech industry has finish metamorphosis and is now just another financial industry. No care towards building great products or solving real problems. Just building great pitch decks and solving for investor attraction. OAI is the peak example. ChatGPT was the fastest growing product ever and, especially in the early forms, sucked. Even now, it’s just kind of mid. OAI seems more focused on regulatory capture and spending on compute rather than innovating. That’s why deep seek caught them with their pants down.
    • ghaff 2y ago
      I think you're overstating the betting angle. I saw and read about people buying buying lotto tickets long before COVID. Sports betting is certainly a bigger deal but day trading was a big thing in the dot-com era well before crypto. And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry. There have been shifts; there's a lot more about open source for example. AI is way over-hyped probably but there's still the core of something useful there even if we don't really know how it will develop.
      • dartos 2y ago
        > I think you're overstating the betting angle My sister is currently 23 and I talk to her about this a lot. At least from what she tells me, I don’t think I am. I mean… pump.fun exists… Remember, the 20yo people now grew up with CS go betting, loot box mania, then sports betting, then crypto. They’ve been cooked wrt gambling their whole lives. > And there's still a ton of innovation going on in the tech industry I don’t think that’s true, mostly. Please give me some links. I’d honestly like to see where. I feel so down on tech right now. I feel like all I do is work on money making machines without solving actual problems for people.
• OrvalWintermute 2y ago
  Pro-Remote employers are going to have such a huge advantage in recruiting talent.
• smitelli 2y ago
  Question for the group here: Has anyone ever flatly said “no” to their manager re: an RTO mandate? Did it work?
  • ghaff 2y ago
    My guess is that, at companies where there really is a from-the-top mandate, the manager probably has very little flexibility. That said, even pre-COVID, I'm aware of companies that really didn't want even very senior (and well-known) folks to work remotely and eventually parted ways whereas they seemed to be OK with others who didn't work out of an office.
  • habosa 2y ago
    I have seen this work. You just work it out with your manager directly and don’t involve HR or leadership and it’s fine.
    • bobnamob 2y ago
      That works till management n layers up starts tracking office entry badge taps or wifi access
  • bongodongobob 2y ago
    Yes, twice. I did it and it did work, but I was on a shitlist because of it. Excluded from higher level meetings/information, given menial/impossible tasks, etc. They hired someone else in my area pretty quickly to replace me. If you do this, you're going to have to start looking for a job immediately. Telling management to fuck off is a job ender even if it doesn't happen immediately. The second time I did it, I already had another job lined up for leverage. I worked for two more weeks until my paperwork was done at the new gig and then bailed.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    It’s not a low level management decision. I am all for remote work. But I won’t work for a company remotely if it isn’t a “remote first” culture where everyone is remote. It puts you at a real disadvantage.
• varelse 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• schnebbau 2y ago
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  • upheaval7276 2y ago
    citation needed
    • schnebbau 2y ago
      https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/31/dell_ends_hybrid_work_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/31/dell_ends_hybrid_work...
      • formerly_proven 2y ago
        Are you referring to the 30 second quip or the generic non-response? > Asked whether Dell has any financial data that suggests working from the office leads to better productivity or results, a spokesperson said, "We continually evolve our business so we're set up to deliver the best innovation, value and service to our customers and partners. That includes more in-person connections to drive market leadership."
  • tester756 2y ago
    >but companies are simply acting on the numbers: in most cases, productivity is higher when the workforce is on site. How the hell you even measure it?! Measuring productivity when it comes to software engineering is worth some very serious award
  • r14c 2y ago
    At least we're being honest about the kind of world we live in. Long live the Shareholders!
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• silisili 2y ago
  > all hybrid and remote team members who live near a Dell office will work in the office five days a week Seems it's employees within an hour of the office, unclear on those not. Years ago the company I worked at implemented the same policy. Funnily enough I had been planning to move but being lazy about it, and you can bet that policy lit a fire under me. Was further than an hour away within 2 months.
• JediPig 2y ago
  Dell does this but continues to outsource to India and China where communication is an epic problem that has never been solved. This is nothing short of a stealth layoff. If they were so interested in communicating they would hire all US and stop the outsourcing. This is utter bullsh*t and everyone knows it.
  • pjmlp 2y ago
    They are not alone, this is the reality in all companies demanding RTO.
    • rubicon33 2y ago
      I think the underlying problem here is that despite what the stock market would have you believe, sales are down, moral is down, and many industries are experiencing light to moderate headwinds. RTO is an (desperate) attempt to resuscitate businesses experiencing economic woes.
      • pjmlp 2y ago
        Yes, I have heard that as well, because having people on the office is going to magically ramp up sales, as that is the missing factor why they aren't taking off. /s
        • ffsm8 2y ago
          You're misunderstanding what was said. It's about costs/income. RTO (probably) doesn't increase income - but people will (most likely) quit, reducing costs. Thus the ratio gets better.
          • pjmlp 2y ago
            That for sure, note the sarcastic remark on my comment.
            • 2y ago
• gtirloni 2y ago
  My experience working in offices has always been that almost everybody was wearing headphones and there wasn't much talking, except when everybody went to a conference room to meet (and half of them were fiddling on their laptops/phones). Having not seen big advantages of collocating everybody (usually against their will and with the heavy burden of commuting), I can only attribute shadow reasons for RTO policies everywhere.
  • akudha 2y ago
    I asked around, got these as reasons from various people (management or otherwise) for forcing workers to come to office 1. Effective tool to force people to quit, instead of laying them off 2. Smart, fast workers have figured out ways to do extra work (freelance, part time job etc) which enrages employers. We can debate the ethics of this all day, but remember that prices of everything is going up every year, but raises/promotions are hard to come by 3. Pettiness, micromanagement - just relishing the fact that people suffer from long commutes, have to find baby sitters etc. A manager at my job was collecting names of people who don't come to office minimum 3 days a week. This was his biggest "achievement" last month, he contributes nothing to actual work. Showing people who is "the boss" 4. Keeping commercial real estate prices from crashing
    • closeparen 2y ago
      There probably is a world where you get paid per line of code or story point, but you might not like it. When an employer pays a salary they are buying out your entire professional capacity. In a creative field like ours, part of that price encodes a bet that you might be one of those rare workers whose contribution exceeds their cost many times over. If everyone is able to titrate their contribution to the exact level of management’s expectations, like by context-switching to childcare or another job when their assigned workload is done, then the budget for the role is going to be exactly what that bare minimum is worth. What could break us out of this jam is either radically more individualized compensation structures, or other costly signals of commitment and engagement that are as meaningful to the firm as transporting your physical body to be somewhere for 8 hours a day. I think there’s an interesting world of co-presence technology beyond the Zoom call that could be relevant here, but explorations in this area are also a stone’s throw from rather dystopian employee surveillance regimes, so it’s hard to say.
• belter 2y ago
  "...Remote work made it too easy to hire people from different time zones. Now that you’re back in the office, we can focus on hiring people from the same zip code as the CEO..."
• khold_stare 2y ago
  The comment about an "email chain could have been a 30-second chit chat" is such a straw-man argument. On top of that, forcing everyone to commute up to an hour each way is a blatant disregard for people's personal time. How productive would the workforce be if the commute counted as work hours?
  • juujian 2y ago
    Hate that. Yes, some issue can be resolver faster by talking in person, but that can be accomplished by a phone call, too. Just like a face to face conversation can end in an hour of gossip. How's that for more efficient?
    • ghaff 2y ago
      Back when a lot of my work conversations were with sales reps and system engineers over the phone, certain reps in particular would take 10 minutes to get to a point where they could have been handled in a minute with an internal email. Though, yes, sometimes the real-time conversation was useful.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        Yep. Some people are just the "let's hop on a call" type and others are "send me an email." If these people need to talk to each other it's difficult.
      • TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
        Sales are a different breed of people. Sales is hard. For some it comes naturally, others have had to work at it. A good sales person is valuable, and a good relationship with a sales person is very valuable, especially to those of us of the engineering breed. Give them the time, build the relationships, could be worth the effort.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          On a busy day, I resented it sometimes. And there were a few who, when I got a call from them, I silently sighed. But, as a product manager, keeping field people happy was part of my job and I mostly did.
• 4ndrewl 2y ago
  Assuming Dell doesn't pay for commuting costs, does this mean you can get an effective pay rise by moving 1h 1m from the nearest office?
• wnevets 2y ago
  What was the last good product dell has made? I avoid Dell & HP at all cost.
  • dreamcompiler 2y ago
    The XPS laptops used to be decent Linux machines. But they're not going to make them any more.
• GoToRO 2y ago
  Dell is not green then.
• whatever1 2y ago
  It's also funny that companies crack down on business travel. C-Suite folks decide, are in-person meetings critical or not? Zoom only works from the local office?
  • bluGill 2y ago
    They cancled my trip to India for budget reasons just before they mandated wfo. nobody on my team works from the same office as me (other than my boss) i'd complain more except I bike to the office and thus I'm getting exercise that I'd otherwise put off.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    Yep. When I was working at AWS ProServe (consulting department), until mid 2022, I could just tell my manager I need to fly out to a customer site and AWS would pay for it. The same if I wanted to meet some of ny team in person we could just all fly out to an office. That all changed later where we had to get approval from our skip skip manager for travel on the company dime.
• ocschwar 2y ago
  For my first full time job, I was a junior sysadmin. My toolset had to include LOAF floppies, one FREEDOS floppy, and a bent paper clip. I had an office. My office. With a door. Since then, every advance in my career raised my skill level, raised my pay, and shrank my office. First came the open office plan. Then came hot desks. Now I'm all-remote, and I mostly float around libraries and cafes when I'm not zooming. The people making these RTO demands should remember they are demanding people meet in person in what is little more than a set of hot desks dedicated to one company. It's really demoralizing to have to come to work to such an environment where you can't even put a backpack's worth of things on a desk and leave them there at 5 PM. If the managers making these demands vacate their own dedicated offices and go hotdesk for a while, they'd realize why there's so much pushback on RTO.
  • emchammer 2y ago
    Please refresh my memory, what is LOAF?
    • bitwize 2y ago
      Linux on a floppy?
    • olddustytrail 2y ago
      Linux On A Floppy
  • sys_64738 2y ago
    Milton?
    • ocschwar 2y ago
      I was told there would be cake.
  • devnullbrain 2y ago
    All office discussion today is seen through the post-COVID WFH lens. It's easy to forget that there was a time before, largely filled with complaints about office conditions falling on deaf ears. The cat is out of the bag - we know remote can work and we know how different hotdesking in a room full of zoom calls feels.
• zoogeny 2y ago
  I had an idea recently that some of the agile rituals we engage in are actually spiritual rituals. Like, they are these weird kind of shared prayers. The thought came as a result of a YouTube video of monks I happened to watch. The day of some monasteries is strictly regimented, often starting at 4am. There are designated times to pray individually, pray as a group, sing as a group, eat and work. Every monk is required to attend and failing to regularly attend the communal prayers, meals or songs can be grounds for the monk to be asked to leave the monastery. It made me think about how rituals are valuable as a recurring communal activity, even more so than their content. That is, just the monks all congregating in the chapel together may be more important than the prayers they say. I mean, it must suck to show up at 5am to chant some hymns but then you look around and see all of your brothers dutifully there and it may have some kind of psychological affect. I'm a proponent of remote work but I often wonder if I am being selfish. Monasteries are notoriously ridiculously productive and I wonder how much those rituals play into their success.
  • tangjurine 2y ago
    Monasteries are notoriously ridiculously productive?
    • gwbrooks 2y ago
      If you view the products as prayer, worship and reflection... yeah, probably ridiculously productive.
      • janice1999 2y ago
        Also, depending on the Order, some really good wine or beer.
        • fuzztester 2y ago
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trappist_beer
      • 2y ago
• hsuduebc2 2y ago
  Ah management needs to prove to everyone that they are doing something usefull once again because they inherently produce nothing. It's just power move.
• mugivarra69 2y ago
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• saxonww 2y ago
  Does Dell just have one campus? Are teams typically homogeneous near one campus? I'm thinking about my own employer, where I have been WFH since I got hired. My team is spread across 5+ states. I'd be the only person from my team in the office nearest to me were there an RTO mandate. I think there would only be one or maybe two other people there who I've even worked with on anything, in my several years of employment. No 30-second chitchat opportunities.
  • dboreham 2y ago
    Quick note that when I worked on a campus (not Dell, big silicon valley outfit) 30 years ago, I seldom met most of my co-workers face to face, except once in a while in a meeting or randomly in the cafeteria. This was because the campus was large and the probability that someone you interacted with was on the same floor let alone the same building was low.
• GoToRO 2y ago
  There is no RTO push. There are also no layoffs. What's happening is salary renegotiations. If people leave, they need to renegotiate their salaries and then the employer has the advantage.
• dboreham 2y ago
  This is a great A/B test. Since clearly it isn't necessary to all be in the same building to produce software or hardware (and hasn't been necessary since around 1994), and the companies that allow remote work get to hire from a much larger talent pool, we aught to eventually see the remote organizations thrive and the RTO ones die.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  Oh this is the old story of shadow layoff. Of course the more talented go away while the less talented one stay. They know this but don't care because the cost cut is immediate but the damage is long term.
• bitwize 2y ago
  My wife worked as a customer support rep for D-E-Double-Hockeysticks in the 2000s. She liked working for Apple much, much more. I think relatively poor treatment of employees is just ingrained into Dell's culture.
• blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  This is dishonest, unnecessary, and likely a shadow layoff. But it’s also bad for the economy. If we can have people spread out, live how they want to in a mix of different environments, we can remove pressure on housing, traffic, services.
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  Yeah, as if pledges by commercial entities mean something...
• trimethylpurine 2y ago
  I think the future of remote work is reserved for small businesses. Publicly traded companies have no choice in the matter because of the legal risks. I have to work from home. A day at home is like a week at the office for me in terms of productivity. The office is a distraction. Conversely, I have an employee who repeatedly demonstrates that zero office days translates directly into zero commits. Small companies can afford to give managers the freedom to apply different policies to different people as suits their work habits and abilities. But at publicly traded companies, the risk of a discrimination case is far too great to go with anything other than a blanket policy that screws everyone equally.
• twistedanimator 2y ago
  Dell wants to crack the whip to see how many servants remain.
• linotype 2y ago
  These companies are killing themselves. They learned nothing from manufacturers that offshored to China decades ago.
• fred_is_fred 2y ago
  If work can only be done at the office then be sure to take Email, Teams, and Slack off your phone and leave your laptop at work so you don't break any rules.
• claar 2y ago
  It strikes me as a strange that not one comment in this thread supports RTO, so I will weigh in with my unpopular opinion - I really wish all our employees would work from the office 3+ days per week. I like the energy we get when we work in the same space. I like being able to look people in the eye when discussing challenging or emotional topics. I like being able to brainstorm together at will, and use the whiteboards. I like seeing our office space we pay for being used by more than just 2 people. I enjoy our staff lunches and getting to know each other socially. Most people have a <10m commute in our small town, so travel time isn't a big deal. Half our company is remote, and the other half work from home most days. But I'd prefer we all be local and in the office ideally. There, I said it.
• normalaccess 2y ago
  I am 100% for this. During Covid some of my coworkers started second jobs. Some of them slept all day. Even now the ones who are hybrid I see get on steam and play games right in the middle of work hours. It's a slap in the face to people who actually work hard.
• brinkofdth 2y ago
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• thomas4151 2y ago
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