• Boozilla@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Alternative headlines:

    • Dell wants to contribute to global warming for no good reason.
    • Dell wants to expose workers to death by automobile for no real reason.
  • Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    So Dell wants to do a layoff of sales staff, and is going to lose their best performers first.

    • pandapoo@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Dell’s inside sales team probably has a much flatter bell curve, performance wise, then their outside (traveling) reps.

      So yes, they are looking to do a layoff without the headlines, or severance, but probably aren’t as concerned where on the bell curve those employees rank.

      Middle and lower management of those teams is absolutely sweating bullets about their teams getting wrecked, but big picture, whatever impact the C Suite is expecting, clearly isn’t enough to outweigh whatever net outcome they’re hoping for here.

      Edit: also, I pretty much guarantee that any of their far high-end outliers on the inside sales team bell curve, will be given an exemption by whoever is 2 or 3 levels above their direct manager.

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      i hate how this “best performers” rhetoric always comes out in WFH discussion. everyone should be able to work from home if it’s better for them regardless of if they’re The Best at their dunder-mifflin ass job

      • Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz
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        4 months ago

        Sure, everyone that has a job that can be done from home should be permitted to do it from home if they want to.

        What the best performers rhetoric is about is that these companies are harming their long term prospects by doing things like this, since the personnel that make the most money for the company are generally the ones that can easily leave for another company that will not treat them like a child that needs to be directly monitored.

      • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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        4 months ago

        That’s not the argument. The argument is rather that good employees can easily find new and better jobs. So the remaining people are on average worse.

        It’s also called Dead Sea Effect. The good ones evaporate, only salt remains.

      • danafest@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        They are saying the return to office mandate will cause the best performers (who are likely more confident in securing another job) to quit first, not that everyone shouldn’t be WFH.

  • Kit
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    4 months ago

    Why the fuck would any office worker whose job is 100% on a computer need to be in an office? I don’t understand why companies want to pay for all of that electricity and real estate just to make people sit in cubicles.

      • Kit
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        4 months ago

        Meh fuck the commercial real estate market. Turn all the buildings into micro apartments or tear them down and install fields of solar panels.

        • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          I’ve been screaming its just wage theft. My city provides tax breaks for occupancy (employees prop up the local economy buying lunch). They are making me pay for gas, time, and car maintenance (and lunch but fuck them, I’ll just not eat) for this tax break which goes to C-level bonuses/shareholders. Its just another way of skimming off the top of employee wages.

          We worked fully remote for nearly 2 years and the hybrid policy just keeps getting worse and worse. Coupled with quarterly riffs, I also suspect this is to avoid severance pay/unemployment while accelerating the down sizing. Yet our CEO bonus keeps going up and up despite our stock plummeting since the end of COVID lock downs.

        • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Tear them down and build houses. Flood the market of every major city with houses so it becomes unprofitable to buy thousands of houses just to rent.

          Then home sales go up, and millenials can ACTUALLY buy houses in their lifetime!

          • Kit
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            4 months ago

            Condos! Best of both worlds. Especially in a dense city, a standalone house isn’t really feasible when you can fit 8+ families into the same lot.

      • fluxion@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Why should they care though? It’s not like commercial real estate sells more computers. Staff still needs desktops, infrastructure still needs datacenters.

        • Crashumbc@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Because all these companies have a shit load of money in the market including real state…

        • Themadbeagle@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          This is what is so fascinating to me about most people, they don’t understand that companies hord their assets in my different kinds of investments when they are this large. Having real estate gives them an asset they can can store large sums of money in that generally appreciate in value over time. If a company is under finacial duress, they can fire a bunch of employees, then sale the land where those employees worked and and save themselves from much larger losses on revenue for a given time period.

          • fluxion@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Both major companies I’ve worked for sold their commercial real estate and leased it back as one of their very first measures when cost cuts were needed. What we have here is essentially the reverse where tech companies scare off their workforce and industry knowledge and drive up employee costs so they can impart some secondary effect on the commercial real estate market… so yes i remain confused about the priorities in play here.

        • Kit
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          4 months ago

          Cloud infrastructure is great for this. You don’t need your own data center when you can just rent space on a farm. As a bonus, it’s less work for the IT team who no longer have to deal with server hardware upkeep.

      • erwan@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Why would Dell care about the commercial office real estate market?

        • Themadbeagle@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          You do understand that large corporations invest in many kinds of assets in order to diversify them right? Real estate is one of the oldest investments any entity can make, and is often considered a pretty strong investment. Everyone needs land right?

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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      4 months ago

      Some people are bad at working remote, and want to drag the rest of us down with them, too.

      Yes, it’s a slightly different skill set to work remote. You have to be better at the written word. You can’t just roll up to someone’s desk and be like “have a minute?” (which is fucking awful anyway). You also need to be responsive and set your status appropriately. A lot of coworkers just wander off and leave their slack status as active. To my mind if you’re running an errand longer than taking a dump, you should update your status.

      • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        I just have slack running on my phone. If I’m at IKEA instead of my computer and someone wants something, I’ll just tell them I’ll take a look at it after lunch. If I’m out biking in the afternoon, I just tell them I’ll take a look at it tomorrow morning.

        If someone wants something really urgently, I’ll tell them to give me thirty minutes. Thirty minutes later I’ll tell them that the results are inconclusive and this will need more time, for which I have scheduled a block for tomorrow.

        • jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
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          4 months ago

          A response (or status!) on slack that’s like “I’m at the grocery, back in 20” is fine with me. It’s more annoying when someone wanders away with no status and is unresponsive for hours.

          • dubyakay@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            I’m obviously exaggerating. I got some stupid “top slacker” award at the last company function. My wife told me that actually does not shine a good light on me.

    • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      So managers and other poor personality types have someone to torment. This is said flippantly but I’m quite serious.

    • leisesprecher@feddit.org
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      4 months ago

      Especially in sales and finance: every call is potentially on the record, and that’s a problem.

      A lot of internal communication in these departments is, to put it mildly, legally not without interest. A quick chat after a meeting is completely off the record, an email is not.

  • letsgo@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Quite right too. The most important factor for me when buying a computer is that the sales droid is in an office. All those CPU, RAM and disk numbers are secondary to that.

  • mEEGal@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    lmaoooo Murica is just 10 companies in a trenchcoat pretending to be a country

    • Clbull@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.

      It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.

  • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I quit answering my dell sales buy. His quotes have been above what I can get buying right off the website. Their premier login must tack on a 25% charge.

      • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        We just test piloted a few for the first time since IBM stopped making them. I was really disappointed when one had a fan problem just outside of warranty, I went ahead and cracked it open. It was all Phillips screws which was kind of nice. They weren’t all the same which kind of sucks but not that bad. I went to pull the fan out to get a replacement, found out I had to replace the entire fan assembly heat pipes heat sinks everything. I was super pissed off until I found out I could buy the part off their website and it was 80 bucks. Dell won’t even sell me parts. 80 boxes a lot to pay for a fan, But when replacing it replaces both the CPU and the GPU fan and gives me fresh radiators, It could be worse.

        From a corporate standpoint I’m a fan.

        • stoly@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          This is where I am coming from. I buy computers buy the hundreds and really suffered what Dell offered and really loved what Lenovo offered.

      • JustARegularNerd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        Working at a computer shop, Lenovo ThinkPads are usually pretty fine, but the main fault we’ve seen with them is lack or completely missing thermal compound. On one occasion I saw my colleague’s machine not post, and IIRC we had to reset the CMOS to get it back up.

  • PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk
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    4 months ago

    Unless it’s the initial outreach team or on-premises staff, sales would be one of the few roles totally suited to remote working.

    Some of the more creative or collaborative roles I can see the argument for hybrid working - even if it’s just one day a week or month in the office - but sales, customer service, or first line support seems to be the last area you’d impose a return to work mandate on.

    That said, I haven’t got extortionate office rents to justify 😂

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’ll be looking for work in about 3 months and my hard line is wfh.

    I will never work in an office with people again.

    • WoahWoah@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I totally get it. Good luck though, make sure you find a landing space first. WFH jobs are decreasing and are getting much more competitive. They’re also, unfortunately, prone to be suddenly or slowly shifted to in-office positions. Trying to work a mandatory period of WFH into your contract might be useful, but that’ll be pretty difficult.

      As long as you are very employable and in the right field you should be fine. Using “transitional WFH” as a way to entice workers is becoming more commonplace and employers are often not transparent about it.

      A friend works in HR at a place that hires as “WFH” and doesn’t mention at any point that there is already a timeline in place for two days in office after six weeks and then full time in office after three months. It’s not stipulated anywhere, it’s a “new policy” that comes down… on the same timeline… for every new employee. Lol

      • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        thanks for the heads up and I’ll definitely will keep that in mind when I’m looking.

        If I can’t find wfh work, I’ll focus my efforts on building/supporting software developer unions while working construction. rather be outside and be miserable than inside and miserable.

  • qarbone@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’m beginning to think companies are doing this to get people to leave by themselves

    • FenrirIII@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      I’d say it depends on what you want from a job. I’ve mostly been able to do nothing 90% of the time and still make good money. That 10% earns my share because it’s often brutally stressful. But I can hide amongst the bureaucracy.