https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/dell-tells-remote-workers-that-they-wont-be-eligible-for-promotion/
Report highlights big turnaround from Dell's previous pro-WFH stance.
Remote workers tell Dell they got a promotion at another company and are giving their 2 weeks notice. 🤞
Dell executives celebrate over lines of coke after successfully getting people to leave on their own without paying severance
This is why the solution is worker laws that forces companies to offer remote option for certain titles/roles.
That's exactly what dell wants, it's a way to do layoffs without the bad PR and without having to pay the benefits (or whatever they are called). They know full well a good chunk of people working at home don't want to go back to the office and will hunt for another job instead.
Sure but doesn't mean you can't be applying and interviewing on their dime. This bullshit isn't anything new and only leads to the company retaining the blow average employees. If you can leave and get a raise in the process you should.
Yeah that’s the most fucked up part, it’s still bad for the company, but not next quarter.
it's a way to do layoffs without the bad PR
In what world isn't this bad PR? I know it's making me never want to work for Dell or buy any of their computers again.
The thing corporations are risking though when they do this, is brain drain. Brain drain is a real and dangerous thing for a corporation.
The sad thing is a lot of companies are doing the same thing...
I'm job hunting rn and most of it is hybrid or in office. I am not saying all of them are I seen a few that are remote but they feel sorta rare at least for the jobs I'm looking at (graphics programming, games and GPU stuff).
Have you entertained the idea of agreeing to a hybrid job and sorta just appear fewer and fewer times in the office? It's been working for me so far.
Most of them seem to mandate a fixed number of days in office. Some even say specifically certain days. I dunno... currently software job market feels pretty fucked up rn, but I been getting some good interviews so hopefully it all works out.
For WFH something I might be able to do is recently I was diagnosed autistic and my diagnosis documentation lists WFH as a workplace accommodation.. so I could pull that card but I for sure am not gana bring that up till I have actually accepted an offer and have started working for a bit of time. And even then I am not sure how it will play if I tell them that, how it will effect things or how they treat me. It's all kinda fucky.
I went from fully remote to hybrid (2 days in office) and it's not bad. Got a $30k raise for the trouble, and the job security is much better because the pool of local candidates is much smaller than a remote employee who can hire from anywhere.
People talk about quiet quitting a lot so I looked it up. That just sounds like doing your job without trying to get ahead.
There are two interpretations.
It's either do the intended job, but nothing extra, which I think is just normal work, or don't even try to do the job properly, do as little as possible while staying unnoticed to avoid getting fired.
The name implies the latter, but that's not how all people use it.
Which is actually a perfectly good way to approach work, but even the hustle-is-virtue people who think workers should constantly be overperforming will have a hard time justifying it when the company has specifically said high-performance cannot yield a promotion.
It's honestly a great fit for all those remote Dell workers who are ineligible for promotion.
More like intentionally dragging your team down and making your teammates pick up your slack until management has gone through all the written warning steps required to fire your ass.
Still their loss, firing you means paying out that severance they tried to dodge by inviting the quiet quitting in the first place
Not true. If terminated for performance concerns, most companies would consider that “for cause” meaning that you would be ineligible for severance. The only costs are the OpEx of the manager and HR team member’s time in addition to the “lost productivity” that your underperformance caused.
The best thing about a soft barrier like this (as opposed to "you have to be in the office next Monday") is that it doesn't cost the employee anything to coast along until they find their better opportunity. Dell may trim their workforce, but not on their own timetables.
This is unequivocally true. Most (not all) people who come in to the office are there for “social” reasons, aka politics and optics. Note that this isn’t the same as people who go to the office for actual social reasons, but they prefer once a month type get togethers.
Productive people are productive from home, period. Productive people don’t need to be nannied into being productive.
And nanies cost money. So do you have another employee who could be productive now play babysitter half the time? That isn't going to help anything but a lot of companies seem to think it's the answer.
Wouldn't be surprised if the people trying to push this policy are heavily invested in office real estate also
It’s all coming from Michael Dell. He pushed this policy out and offered no explanation.
If true, that's so strange, considering he said this before...
“If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong.”
Customer tells Dell it won't be eligible for consideration as a replacement PC. No conditions were mentioned.
What an absolutely buck wild strategy. Dell official policy is no longer promoting the best person for the job.
Even if they wanted this to be the strategy, it works better not to announce it. Announcing it just means literally anyone worth promoting who is remote will go looking externally, maybe immediately.
This is either a sneak layoff or inexcusable management.
Hybrid sucks. It's like the worst of both worlds.
If you are going to have meeting with remote and in office, never have anyone in a meeting room.
I love working hybrid. I feel like it’s the best of both worlds. You get 2-3 days in office where if you really have something collaborative to do you can just schedule it then, and then utilize the rest of the week on more singular tasks without the commute. I currently work 3 days in 2 days remote, and I think 2 days in 3 days remote makes more sense, but I don’t think I’d go out of my way to look for a fully remote job, and I definitely don’t want 5 days a week in office.
The key thing is that everyone who’s hybrid has the same days in office, and the in office days are consecutive. Without those two things hybrid is kind of pointless.
That last bit is HUGE. Part of what is great about working from home is flexibility and forcing people to be in on certain days just isn't ever going to work for everyone. Inevitably you will end up with meetings where one person has to dial in and now the rest of team is annoyed they made the effort to show up that day.
Anyway, I don't disagree with you that a hybrid where everyone is on the office together for some amount of time could be very good for productivity and teamwork. However, it just isn't a realistic which then, as you said, makes it pointless.
Just let people work from wherever works for them.
That’s why you affix the office days. Like Monday Tuesday. Then if you have a meeting Monday everyone’s together. If you have a meeting Friday everyone’s remote. That takes the guesswork out of it. And since that’s set in stone, they can tell you that in your interview and you’ll know whether you can make that work or if you’ll need to keep looking.
I agree. 2 days in office where one is expected for everyone, and then remote 3 days. I find that I actually value the in office time more this way. Consider that for the vast majority of companies they were 5 days in office, the hybrid schedule is still pretty revolutionary and I think I almost prefer it to fully remote, at least at my current job!
I'm similarly in love with hybrid and would never go back to 100% either direction.
I disagree with consecutive, but definitely agreed on everyone having the same days.
As a hybrid worker myself, I honestly enjoy it. I've got an open office with a couple of new hires that I'm mentoring. I can bother people at their desks, rather than fighting to schedule them over Teams for a five minute talk. Lunch spots downtown are genuinely good and I can stretch my legs a bit walking around.
Then I've got W/F to myself at home, so I can roll out of bed and dive in and eat out of my fridge.
The worst part about my job, atm, is that all our DBAs are these overseas contractors who are constantly coming and going and don't know our systems past whatever documentation got telephone-gamed to them over three prior managers. Would love for a little less work from a trans-Pacific timezone home, tbh.
Seems like your documentation should be out in the open not sent over to them. You should all be looking at the same thing.
Bothering people at thier desk is exactly what I do not want. Why not put your question into teams or what ever you use, and it will get answered when they have time?
Seems like your documentation should be out in the open not sent over to them.
Take that up with my utterly dysfunctional security-through-obscurity obsessed managers.
Bothering people at thier desk is exactly what I do not want. Why not put your question into teams or what ever you use, and it will get answered when they have time?
Because Teams is constantly ringing, as everyone is on a dozen different groups with back-and-forth that they aren't really a part of. So we've stopped paying attention to Teams messages in real time.
Also, sometimes its easier to carry a laptop over to someone and show them a thing with a simple question than to Teams in and share screen when they've got a dozen things up on their own monitors.
Yeah, I was think about that with teams. Mine doesn't ring or notify, I will get it when I get it. It's like IRC: you just ask the question.
In the end if it works for you that's great. My biggest problem is hybrid meetings. A roomful of people and a bunch of remotes makes them a mess.
Either everyone in one place, or no one.
For me remote is great. I keep a lot of wasted time stopped because I force documentation as a requirement. If there is a question needing asked, it and the answer gets written down, or it wasn't worth asking in the first place.
I like spending my time in other cities and countries instead of commuting.
Edit. I wanted to add that you make a good point inadvertently about local businesses downtown. A lot of them were hurting without the foot traffic so that's a positive.
My biggest problem is hybrid meetings. A roomful of people and a bunch of remotes makes them a mess.
Oh, yes. That's awful. But then most large participatory meets are awful, just because its hard to engage that many people for any extended period of time. Unless you're just doing a quick presentation, large meetings almost always feel like a waste of time.
For me remote is great. I keep a lot of wasted time stopped because I force documentation as a requirement.
Getting documentation out of my coworkers is like pulling teeth. Everyone does things their own way and its almost never recorded in a central (much less organized) repository. One of my tasks over the last year has been about changing that, but even just getting a central Sharepoint repository that lots of people can access has been difficult.
Having a crowd of people in the office I can bother physically has been - in my experience - much more efficient than firing off emails or Teams notices that can be easily ignored.
Edit. I wanted to add that you make a good point inadvertently about local businesses downtown. A lot of them were hurting without the foot traffic so that’s a positive.
I've worked in offices for a while, and there's definitely a difference between the "run out for a Subway sandwich then get back to work ASAP" and "meander down to the Tonkotsu ramen spot and chat with the owner while you enjoy some mid-day leisure time". If you're living the former, I get why WFH is orders of magnitude better. If you're enjoying the latter, it feels like you're being robbed if you can't experience the nicer parts of the city that you're ostensibly earning enough money to live in.
Why even have a good job in a nice city if you can't go out and do the things that these cities are known for?
From the article...
The upcoming policy update represents a dramatic reversal from Dell's prior stance on work from home (WFH), which included CEO Michael Dell saying: "If you are counting on forced hours spent in a traditional office to create collaboration and provide a feeling of belonging within your organization, you’re doing it wrong."
Fucking dipshits... Always have been, I hope their CEOs find themselves locked in a SAW like puzzle with the HP CEOs
Well, I found plenty of remote work jobs are available.... Even for less money, it's still worth it. I can move to an area with very low cost of living, scaled down to just 1 car, saves on gas, clothes, time. I do the same job on the same screen no matter where I sit
Recruiters usually find me. The online postings are usually junior level or entry level. Find a placement form that is reputable, find a few. Let them place you.
Coding, devops, cloud eng, are great remote skillets
WFH and successful collaboration are not mutually exclusive. Quality of life and commuter culture are (unless you define yourself by your job ... which is sad).
Studies are just statistics hidden behind words and statistics can be twisted to support any theory. Also, the main study being touted in this thread as verifiable facts is absurdly manipulated and miniscule.
The "researchers" of that study have constantly been changing the dataset used to calculate their numbers and then doing fuzzy math to "re-weight" the results. Removing and excluding participants based on salary or the year of salary that it uses to generate statistics from. Oh and the participant count is 200k since May 2020. Meanwhile, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics National Current Employment Statistics show about 135 MILLION non-farm private sector workers in the US.
Yeah. An actual study of how WFH impacts companies and workers does not exist. Mostly because companies don't care to spend the money to find out and no one else has the money or access to truly determine the truth.
So, in the absence of an actual facts, let me randomly quote anecdotal statistics which is completely unscientific, 6 out of 10 people you ask prefer WFH or Hybrid (except if they are a people person and need personal interaction for their own happiness or their home life sucks). The 7th one out of 10 want full time back to office for whatever personal reasons they have. Usually related to in office romance or criminal activities. The 8th out of 10 wants no one to be able to WFH because their job can't be done remotely and are envious that they chose a career they don't like. The 9th and 10th out of 10 people are the ones who stand to benefit from people being tethered to a life of nothing but your job being the sole focus of everything you do. So, when it comes down to it, it feels like a toss up when you ask people but really, its just those with personal reasons or a vested interest in the rat race that want asses in seats. Governments, real estate property companies, business district establishments and ride share companies for example.
I personally would love for my job to be fully remote without any ridiculous salary adjustments based on where I live. The skills I need/have, the work required of me and the quality of work that I perform does not change because I moved to a LCOL area. The compensation I get for my work shouldn't either.
As a compromise or if I have other reasons for being willing to commute to an office for my type of work, I would prefer a 4 day work week with 2 days in office and 2 days remote. Also, no stupid rules about making the days non-consecutive or otherwise forcing artificial barriers to minimizing the impact to your personal life for office face time.
Glad this comments section is filled with thoughtful posts instead of just mindless raging.
The evidence is mounting that hybrid seems to be the most productive, with full WFH being less productive than full in office.
And this lines up with my experience, having been full wfh for around 10 years, and now in a hybrid setting.
I get that commuting sucks and wfh is way better for workers, but if we want to work out what's best for both employees and business, we have to actually be reasonable, rather than just have some kind of mindless knee-jerk reaction that these companies are trying to be productive.
I think the future of work is hybrid, with lots of flexibility for workers to take the time they need for typical shit, like going to the doctor, without it counting as vacation.
Every study I read shows that WFH makes people happier and more productive.
If hybrid was once every two weeks or something sure
Other than that, it's absolutely unnecessary
Every study I read shows that WFH makes people happier and more productive.
There were a bunch of studies early on in the pandemic that wfh showed a small boost in productivity. But we have to agree that this was a weird time and also the novelty of wfh might have affected these measurements.
Newer studies have concluded a pretty substantial drop in productivity with wfh. I'll dig them up and link them, if you think the evidence would actually convince you.
Hybrid sucks. It's the worst of both worlds. Meetings with half In a room and half not are awful.
Hybrid stops the progress to efficiency, allowing for bad practices to creep back in. Poor documentation, bad workflows, side work nobody knows about, to name a few.
Work from home can be just as productive, if not more so, but the workload has to be managed to achieve it.
Maybe it can be just as productive, but the current evidence does not support this conclusion. Although I fail to see how wfh would even remotely be better for poor documentation and side work, it seems like it would be way more open to this than either.
Feel free to post this evidence that wfh is not more productive. Everything I have seen has unusual metrics or seems obvious that a conclusion was reached based on what the purchaser of the study wanted.
Wfh is better for documentation and stops side work nobody knows about because you bake it into your business.
Creating a document? Better have Metadata and a reason, and stored publicly. No one off excel sheets, or emailed word docs.
Wikis and collaborative tools are used in the open by everyone, as well as dashboarding and production metrics. Clear defined work processes and workflows are a must.
What happens in hybrid, is people start doing the sticky notes, using email, word of mouth work, and undocumented training/knowledge share.
By publicly. I mean internally, all workers should have access to, and edit rights to, all knowledge.
There is nothing about working from home or hybrid that limits nor enables your ability to implement all of the policies you've listed out.
It seems to me that your defeating your whole point by arguing that because wfh has some shortcomings you have to implement extra policies to make it work, which makes work better. But what would probably be just as good would be implementing those things with a hybrid schedule.
The point is that you can't measure productivity if there is no effort to actually make it work. At that point hybrid is just as bad.
The article was interesting, and this stood out:
“In many of the studies we cite and in some of our own survey evidence, workers often get more done when remote simply because they save time from the daily commute and from other office distractions,” Barrero tells Fortune. “This can make them look more productive on a ‘per day’ basis, even if it means they’re actually less productive on a ‘per hour’ basis.”
So why does per hour win over per day? I would rather be productive each day and manage my own time over an hour by hour basis.
Which leads to another key point in productivity: asynchronous work. Hybrid and in office tends to go back to synchronous work, which in itself is not productive.
Linked it in another post. But based on your response, we can all rest assured that the facts don't matter.
"A sample of 26 studies out of 112 potential studies (from various databases, including Scopus, Google Scholar, and the Web of Science database from 2020 to 2022) were used after a comprehensive literature search and thorough assessment based on PRISMA-P guidelines. Findings reveal that the impact of the WFH model on employee productivity and performance depend on a host of factors, such as the nature of the work, employer and industry characteristics, and home settings, with a majority reporting a positive impact and few documenting no difference or a negative impact."
As I already said, the evidence early in the pandemic, which your study is pulling from, showed a slight increase. Although yours claims a mixed bag. Your link doesn't challenge my claim at all.
I'm pointing to the more current evidence showing the reverse is true and productivity is dropped.
I guess we will have to wait for more studies, the consensus now is that it's beneficial. My personal experience is that I'm happier and working harder than ever.
Thank you for your comments. I feel the same. And I can especially understand that you would tie promotions to at least hybrid. If you're responsible for other people, need to discuss, brainstorm and instruct, it's just a necessity to show up in person every now and them.
And c'mon.... Being obliged to work hybrid for a promotion... It's not like that's a draconian measure at all.
My office the managers have to be in every day, the team leads have to be in 4...the rest of us are 3. So while it's not stated that you have to be in to be promoted, I imagine if you aren't really in 3 days a week, promotion is off the table.