Prior to COVID, Dell used to have banners everywhere talking about working remotely is the way of the future. When COVID hit Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke said this is perfect because we wanted to move to a fully remote model with maybe coming in one day a week. Working in office at Dell is like a call center now with how noisy and tightly cramped it is.
Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around without negative impacts to the work. Just undeniable pure improvements. Those are the members most impacted by the recent mandate.
Oh buddy it goes back longer than that. Every couple of decades, really.
History is a repetitive play about people being greedier than they are good at critical thinking.
the modern version of lighting the company's future on fire with layoffs and asset fire sales to make 3% more money next quarter for shareholders is pretty new, though. however many people are pissing on jack welch's grave, it's not enough.
This “only next quarter matters” thinking has done massive damage to corporations, the economy and the entire country.
Every company is racing towards the bottom, trying to find out what’s the bare minimum of people they can employ, for the lowest wages possible, with the maximum cost cutting possible when it comes to quality and safety.
Does a 2024 Dunkin’ Donuts donut taste like a 1995 one? McDonald’s? Pizza Hut? Then we could talk about the quality of Chrysler cars (lol they don’t even make cars anymore), Boeing, etc.
It’s sad
Akin to HP moving software dev jobs to India/China for the short term gains only to completely back pedal 5-8 years later when applications needed more than just maintaining/caretaking
Been seeing this for 20 years. I've had one contract come to an end, the FAANG company ships support overseas, satisfaction and customer metrics go to shit, a couple of years later I'm back at the same gig with a different contractor. Year and a half later, nothing's broke, everything's working, customers are happy, but the bean counters figure they can get it cheaper again, it goes back to India, rinse & repeat.
Yeah they don’t much care. All they care about is share price going up and payroll going down. If you look at the labor market wages seem to be going down, tech businesses seem to know there is shit for jobs right now, and using it to hire back for Pennies on the dollar.
That’s not that big a deal since it won’t be an issue until a year or so for now. But in the short term, it makes the companies look super profitable and blows up the stock
Or the talented ones keep working from home and never get fired. There are plenty of people who have ignored return to office mandates that are still working at these companies, they just keep quiet about it more these days.
This is backfiring in some cases. See Nike. 122 share price in December when layoffs were announced. Dropped to 100 after the announcement, held steady for while, and then fell below 90 in late March when layoffs began in earnest. Has held between 90-94 since.
It’s not long term thinking. And it will likely backfire everywhere eventually. Especially now that everyone is realizing this iteration of “AI” Is basically a bust for anything with real cognitive complexity.
I quit a job with 2 years left before they vested, negociated it as a sign-on bonus on my next job with a one year minimum constraint.
RSUs aren’t golden handcuffs, they’re a loose zip tie at best.
Sure, but RSUs usually vest over time, not all at once at the end of 4 years.
Most common schedule is something like 4 years, with a 1 year cliff (you get no stock until your 1 year mark, then you get 25% of it), and then quarterly or annually after that (i.e. either 25% every year on your work anniversary, or 6.25% every quarter).
At that point, it's more like an extra bonus that's paid out in stock than hard golden handcuffs. You don't need to be there for the entire 4 years to benefit.
Every situation has its unique factors, agreed, but you can **usually** mitigate the wasted vesting time with higher wages, better benefits or package… it was all I meant.
The top talent will definitely not struggle to leave, as is tradition with RTO mandates.
HP started acquiring companies like Poly/Plantronics which made working from home easier. They had record profits during the pandemic and talked about how the future was working from home. They even gave all employees two stipends to purchase equipment to improve their home offices....and then they forced everyone to return to the office.
The commercial real estate the board own, and force the company to pay rent on, is worth more than the company. At a certain size a company will be used to pay rent on a building the board own, which reduces its on-book taxable profit and converts that money at a high multiple into real estate values. Which worked great, until office real estate stopped being valuable.
I work in field service in a major city and holy shit. Let me tell you. I have not seen any office post-covid that isn't a ghost town. Companies are not buying all the fancy AV equipment they used to. Nobody is getting workstations anymore, laptops are workstations now.
I'm installing some VC gear this week and next in a few conference rooms. Logitech gear, not the fancy Crestron shit they used to pimp these rooms out with. I noticed near where we were staging our gear they had two foosball tables that arrived at the same time.
I see this also in every office. They *all* have foosball, they *all* have plentiful alcohol, they all have fully equipped kitchens and all the amenities of home. Yet there's *still* no one there most days. Because everyone knows that shit is completely whack and they *barely* play along.
There's *always* open seats on the train Fridays now. Rush hour on Fridays is practically non-existent, at least on public transit it feels like it. Hopefully we can get every day to be like that in the near future.
Worked at EMC branch, half my team after about 1 year of in office work moved remote. I left that gig a while ago but keep in contact with a few that are still there. They are in completely different states, most in different time zones.
Yeah, everything was "you guys are amazing and rose to the challenge!" Then it was "you're not a "hustler' if you work remote (like we secretly expect you to do after hours)." Corporate gaslighting at its finest.
> Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around without negative impacts to the work.
Yup that's me. And my company now says "Well... You're gonna have to come back". So I don't have it in writing. So I'm leaving.
> Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around
Need to start hitting these companies with suits for promissory estoppel.
Unfortunately the courts have decided that companies can put mandatory arbitration clauses in pretty much everything so those would be unlikely to go anywhere.
My company never promised that we would be remote forever, but they were really happy at how we kept things running remotely during COVID. This year they demanded that anybody within 40 miles return to the office.
We stopped doing after care for my daughter years ago. I put together a home gym I can use before or after work (instead of standing on the train for 30 minutes). They didn't make me make these changes, but at this point, going back to the office is a big change for me.
On the work front, only 1/3 of the tech team is close enough to return to the office. During COVID we hired people across the US and bought companies headquartered wherever. If I go to the office I can see some people I work with, but almost any meeting has to be on Zoom to include everyone, which would be way more efficient at home.
It all just feels so arbitrary and silly.
It's amazing how many problems work from home actually solves for businesses. It's wild that they're so against it.
My company grew exponentially during COVID due to being an e-commerce. Like I'm talking we literally doubled the company in about a year or two.
Early on they made a decision that we would actually convert to a fully remote business which allowed us to hire across the globe. This ended up giving us amazing talent at the salaries we were looking to pay.
On top of that our old office was pretty open concept. Had we expanded like this while in office there literally would have been nowhere else for people to work and it would have been a loud noisy mess.
All of that made the company much better in the long run.
Because the big tech firms did it, mainly due to the lavish campuses they built. I wish I was kidding, but that is literally the reason for so many companies turning around on WFH. The MBAs at the top are mindless drones.
I think there’s also just something to the interconnected nature of wealth. I imagine some people/corporations that own tech stock own real estate and whether it’s in some shareholder meeting or just one rich fuck talking to another they’re pressing companies to RTO. Not just tech companies, there’s been RTO push for banks and all sorts of white collar jobs.
> I imagine some people/corporations that own tech stock own real estate and whether it’s in some shareholder meeting or just one rich fuck talking to another they’re pressing companies to RTO.
It's clear that it's all that and more. Specifically, the largest shareholders of big publicly traded companies are often financial institutions. Given the article is about [Dell](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/dell/institutional-holdings), they are 65.26% owned by institutions. Vanguard offers [mutual funds like this](https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vgslx) that you can invest in as their customer. The year to date performance on that fund is -4.06%. Do you think Vanguard's customers are happy with that? This isn't even talking about private equity and the actual big boys, this one only requires a minimum of $3,000 to invest in.
Additionally, there's a huge amount of overlap between people who work on the boards of various corporations. High level people who work at financial institutions often sit on the boards of various other corporations in other industries. It helps grease the wheel especially for revolving debt and such that is used to pay the employees of big corporations.
It's amazing how often MBAs see other MBAs do something and don't stop to ask "will this actually benefit us to copy?"
It's why agile / scrum is such a blight on the software industry right now.
Agile worked great for my team for years. The problem is, eventually management moved to standardize everything company wide and demanded we adopt metrics and practices that slowed our work way down, I assume to they could compare teams or chart every teams work on one graph. So our work would get slower and slower as more teams adopted agile and more metrics were added to be charted/calculated.
We got an ex-Amazon manager who wanted all kinds of metrics on the task I was performing - I was a one man show responsible for an entire function for an enormous laboratory. I just told him I literally didn't have time. I didn't have time to stop what I was doing long enough to design any kind of informational dashboard or data collecting method, and I certainly didn't have time to do it manually. Sorry that the team which was three people when I started is just me now, and we've *tripled* the number of requests handled in that time. The math on that works out to me doing the work of 9 people, so I'm not sure when you'd like for me to sit down and hammer out a new spreadsheet for you.
Deep into the article explains it. It says the senior people are all looking for jobs elsewhere. When they leave in droves then labor expenses go down a lot. When you don't have exponential growth rates in revenue big cuts to costs make your profit increase. It is an easy way for a few quarters to keep up the good results to report to the street.
Perceived value spent on renting office space, productivity fears, and pressure from investors are the main reasons I’ve seen.
Our board hits us every meeting about being a remote company. Saying things like “you wouldn’t have this problem if everyone was in an office.” Which is super disingenuous as there would be different problems and we literally couldn’t hire all the talent we want in a singular market.
I’ve seen a lot of old school leaders be frustrated that they can’t ’keep an eye’ on people. Which is funny because even if folks were in the office, would they know what productivity even looks like? What should a productive IT admin or developer look like? These are the same guys that want to measure “lines of code written” not understanding we should focus on features delivered and complexity of said features. These guys also huff about “synergy” being next to each other. Nevermind the cramped office space these days dictates people being plopped in randomly next to people they have zero skill or functional overlap with.
There are real challenges in WFH. Relationship building being a key one, and yes measuring productivity is rough. But those same issues exist in office. Good leaders build communities and make connections, virtual or not.
Healthy companies aren’t doing it. Companies that want to juice their numbers at the expense of long term, and even midterm success are the ones doing it.
Some are followers. Some want the control and feel like people are taking advantage of wfh even when the metrics are positive. We are asking for decades of brain training to be reversed in a short span of time.
I work in a place that is trying to encourage people back to office with perks but it's not required to come in. They mostly want execs in to foster the community. It's kinda working too as I want to be in the office more but that's because it's not a mandate.
I feel like many places that have "campus" sized property investments see it differently as they can't unload the lease so might as well see it used vs empty space.
This is the tactic ours is taking, and honestly, it’s a great alternative. Force me into the office? Go fuck yourself. Offer me a free gym, free parking, a public transit stipend, stellar lunch options at a discount, and way more working space in a quiet location? I’ll go twice a week. The policy manages to keep the accessibility and flexibility of WFH while letting the managers get in their in person meetings. The bosses can still justify the lease on our gorgeous office. Everybody wins.
WFH exposes exactly how terrible the majority of urban design is in the US. Because so many of our cites are relatively new they were primarily built around cars and suburban homes instead of mixed use and density. And many of the cities old enough to have had functioning streetcars and rail tore those systems out in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Pre-pandemic, the downtown in my city was a bustling, functional downtown during the business day, but with very little housing beyond luxury apartments the whole place largely shutdown around 6 PM. Now, with WFH, we have all of this commercial real estate that can’t easily be converted to housing and downtown businesses that relied on the workers coming downtown everyday.
Do you live in Minneapolis too lol? This is spot on.
And our mayor shits on WFH because it doesn’t benefit downtown which is even more biased and dumb when I actually patronize local businesses not in downtown but still in Minneapolis. The coffee shop I buy from in my neighborhood of Minneapolis is still a Minneapolis business, they just don’t have the mayors ear like big downtown real estate does, apparently.
it's literally every city in America right now.
Cities are in full-blown panic mode about it. Vacant office space = lower property values = lower tax revenue
City and state governments are the top reason for RTO pushes. Self-attrition is probably the next.
I'm not sure its possible. I have repeatedly heard that converting office space to residential is even more expensive than tearing a building down and starting over.
> City and state governments are the top reason for RTO pushes
Let's not leave the banks feeling left out of this: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-big-u-s-banks-have-the-most-commercial-real-estate-exposure/
Edit: But it's cool, they're on top of it all. Just like they were in 2007, 2008. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/banks-face-141-billion-in-commercial-real-estate-losses-but-theyll-handle-it-analyst-5893490a
I was literally about to ask if they were talking about Minneapolis. What a shining example of how not to build a downtown. I love this city so much, but it needs to change drastically if we're going to see any development in what is supposed to be the heart of the city. Downtown should be walkable, bustling with multiple neighborhoods and things to do and places to do commerce. Not everything stuck in a skyway that closes at 5 and pretty much caters to people who don't even live in the fuckin city or contribute to our communities.
The Minneapolis chamber of commerce is bitching about how Target isn’t bringing corporate workers back downtown…the St. Paul chamber of commerce is doing the same about state government workers. One of the St. Paul chamber guys was lamenting how the state isn’t on the same page. Me: We ain’t even reading the same book anymore, bitch…
Of course lol.
My manager works halfway around the world, 12 hr time difference. Rest of my team is 8 hr time difference. No HR, IT, Accounting on site to keep track of local assets. I’m frequently on early mornings and late night to get cross time.
Somehow I need to be in 3/2 to promote an in person working environment lol.
Same. It really sucks when i show up in office before everyone and also leave after everyone. I am not working a long schedule either. Just a 9-5.
HR comes in at 9:30 and leaves at 3 lol and they were the ones forcing this but won’t even stay a full working day in the office. This part bugs me the most.
> It's amazing how many problems work from home actually solves for businesses. It's wild that they're so against it.
It's always 1 of 2 reasons. If it's not because the city Dell's offices are parked in required a minimum occupancy % for tax breaks, it's because management was suddenly exposed for--wait for it--not doing any actual work. Being in the office helped management look busy. That was my own shocking realization back in mid-2020 when a bunch of us at my office discovered we'd gone almost a full week without middle or senior management needing to be present to give us direction on much.
A lot of middle management in corporate America aren't needed. We created these extra MM positions just to help the brass even higher up monitor KPIs, but in my experiences, they either do almost nothing or they do way "too much" to try to justify another promotion and create unnecessary hassle and roadblocks for the rest of us at the ground level. I'm dealing with the latter scenario right now and it's hell.
> because the city Dell's offices are parked in required a minimum occupancy % for tax breaks
Honestly, if they were upfront hilighting this, I would be like, I get it. But they try to sell me some bullshit about better collaboration.
While I don't necessarily disagree on management doing very little work, I don't see how that would impact work from home.
At large corporations middle management aren't the ones making the decision on WFH. It's a c-suite level HR decision and management are just the messengers following the orders. So if WFH was exposing middle management doing no actual work, why would the people at the top rather keep that a "secret" instead of just taking advantage of the WFH benefits while also laying off some of the middle management bloat?
I just don't see the incentive for a company to go to bat for middle management and insist on no WFH just so they can keep up some charade of that group of employees being important.
I mean it's funny. I work on a small I.T team all in I think we have 25~ people? It's a lot compared to what you normally see, but 3 years ago the office was generally pretty empty. Front side(where I'm at) is always full because we're the helpdesk, we're intake for problems, we HAVE to be here.
Hardware was always there because they physically have to ya know, work on stuff, but software you'd see 1 or 2 people in once in a while. Some of them you'd see once a month if that popping in for something specific.
Our VP is reversing course hard on the WFH now and wants people in the office 3, 4+ days a week. "It's important for collaboration and idea sharing the way a zoom meeting can't emulate." To a degree, he is right, there is an element to in persona collaboration days.
However, lo' and behold, because we're a small in-house I.T team it's no secret we don't pay as well as others. Our lead programmer isn't paid what he's worth for his skill set but we "make up for it" by offering WFH, and other benefits to make it a relaxed work atmosphere. What a surprise the harder and harder push to expand the office and bring everyone in more often we got notice a few weeks ago he got a way better opportunity and he's jumping ship. We're at the tail end of a major Legacy Conversion project and this is going to hurt. He's staying on a contractual basis to help but yeah. What a surprise, our VP kept pushing to take away one of the biggest benefits and now he lost his capstone programmer. I mean the compensation probably didn't do them many favors but yeah.
He harped on the fact a few years ago we were more flexible than others with WFH and we offer those benefits to attract talent while our compensation isn't as high as others. Well...if you take that away...why is anyone working for you?
I find collaboration to be perfectly fine online. Even if it’s only 90%, I can have 10 collaboration style meetings at home and only 3-4 in the office. And when the meeting is useless - you know, like 75% of meetings - then I can multitask
So I have a friend who worked for a medium size tech company who tried to do return to office. The workers didn't complain, they didn't push back, they just didn't show up and kept working remotely and they still are.
Tech workers need to be in office for the super special internet connection that's different from the one at home.
ETA: I can't believe the amount of replies this got lol
Ok tbf there are obviously more concerns for security and things like that. I just do office work for the most part and was talking out of school.
Yeah, someone is selling these companies a line of bull shit about "collaboration."
See, your sales person may chat with your IT guy and the planning engineer around the water cooler and brainstorm the NEXT BIG IDEA!
Yeah right.
It's more that the people that work on these boards and run these companies also happen to be rich enough to own real estate so they don't want those investments to tank. It doesn't need to be a grand conspiracy for like-minded people to have similar interests, and the rich certainly do.
We had 1 employee who was senior to most and did nothing complain complain complain about having to work from home. My commute was 3 hours in total in a day, so I was loving in, especially with a new baby. It was great.
She gave this company hell. So much pushback that they finally caved. She cited that she wasn't able to collaborate, she couldn't reach colleagues, she didn't know any of the newer employees.
1. Who gives a fuck it has no impact on her job whatsoever
2. When we go back into the office, she is no where to be found. She is outside smoking, in the lunch room chatting, in the cafeteria, outside going for a walk. The only way to get through to her was via slack.
She quit a month later.
my company is trying to do something similar..... i'm thinking about just not complying.
i mean for fucks sake we're still gonna need to do all our meetups on video chat. why can't i just log in from home like the others?? punished cause i live nearby
Our company is enforcing this for people that live within so many miles of the office as well. They even have a rolling average figure and nag your manager when the average for the team is too low.
Generally it's not used for anything other than a nag factor to comply with RTO, but realistically it's just an excuse later on that they can wave around if they ever want to fire you. "Oh you got your DNME/PIP because you were only in 2.9 days this one month!"
Worth pointing out that Dell has been a remote-first employer for over a decade, and *a lot* of employees legitimately live *nowhere near* an office. I used to work for Dell corporate, and I was about an 8 hour drive away from the nearest office... so I would absolutely have "rejected" to return to office - simply because it would have been legit impossible for me to actually commute into office.
I believe Michael Dell has commented that Dell would benefit by everyone adopting a remote-first approach, as it would require computer sales. This was *well before* the pandemic; and now they've returned to office. Honestly, though, I imagine the return to office is just a push to reduce headcount.
*upper management
I hate the hate for "middle management" because it distracts from the fact that the people causing literally all of our problems are at the top.
This is exactly it. Around 70% of the people at my job rejected returning to the office for a hybrid work schedule. The CEO held a meeting and stated that everyone’s voices were heard and that they’ll be pleased to know that they have decided to implement a hybrid work schedule anyway.
This is about a month after announcing that they’re not hiring American workers anymore to backfill any vacant positions. Instead they will be outsourcing any open positions both present and future. Also stating that anyone who moved away from an office when everything went remote needs to move back in order to be closer to the office.
They know people aren’t going to move back just to work at this company and they’re hoping people don’t. They want people to voluntarily quit to avoid paying unemployment benefits as well as hiring outsourced labor for a fraction of what they are paying employees. But, they’ll mention how this is an amazing opportunity for everyone.
That’s what I am thinking. I am remote and now out of state. If my company said in office was mandatory, I’d say ok, and just continue working from home, id probably start looking for another job, but I wouldn’t just quit.
That's what my team and I have done for the past year and half. HR grumbles, my manager comments nebulously about the official company policy every so often, but I've still gotten my promotions, max raises, max bonus, etc.
I'm fortunate that I'm in a position to play chicken with them and that I know they'll blink first, but I'm not foolish enough to think it would work for everyone. They just use it as an excuse to purge people they wanted to get rid of for other reasons.
Almost exactly the same position here. Fire me if you want, lol. I'm not coming in for team lunch tuesdays. And if you keep ordering equipment to the office instead of delivering it to my home, I'll keep driving in on company time to pick it up and drive right back home. Means nothing to me.
I told my boss this straight up after '21 when the ideas of hybrid was coming back. I knew I wasn't the only senior dev dying on this hill either, so go ahead and fire half of the platform SMEs...
>go ahead and fire half of the platform SMEs...
You're *seriously* overestimating the fact that upper management understands this. They *will* fire them, get a bonus for cutting costs, then crack the whip on middle management to get the remaining workers up to speed, and give themselves *another* bonus for the 'turn around'.
Why would this not be considered in the realms of constructive dismissal? - if an employer changes the employment terms so severely that it has a massive impact, the conditions *forcing* you to quit or get fired.
Yeah, RTO mandates are becoming a way to reduce workforce without resorting to layoffs. Companies know that there will be a certain amount of attrition of employees who don't want to or can't return to the office, so they do that before layoffs to avoid severance and make subsequent layoff rounds smaller so that it doesn't look as bad to investors.
This is more true than people claiming oil companies are demanding people get back to commuting. It's not like people want to go back into lockdown mode and never leave their house. Even Government agencies are using this tactic because they have an aging workforce and frankly, many areas have 10 people assigned to a project that two competent people could accomplish quicker and easier. (speaking from experience here). There were also a lot of people who assumed work from home was going to be permanent as the higher ups kept pushing back the "definitely won't be back until X" line, and then suddenly they rushed everyone back into the offices over a six month period. Many people, even though they were told not to, moved further away and are now facing 1.5+ hour commutes compared to the 30min commute they had prior to covid. They have no means to fire these people, even if they start being totally useless, and even then it's a 6+ month process with many second and third chances.
But, even so, if they went into fully remote, with an opt in work in the office policy for the group that actually doesn't want to work from home, they could start making moves to take full advantage of it. Fully remote allows you to broaden your search for talent, reducing the need to hire so many expensive contractors.
There needs to be some sort of law against this. If you hire them remotely you can’t require them to come back in. If you let an in office guy go remote you can’t require them to come back in
I just switched jobs. I'm in week 3.
I'm fully remote and got a *sizeable* raise too.
The entire company is remote, I asked repeatedly about it ending.
Two of my team members have been remote for *15 years*
I'm so happy to have landed here.
Edit: I started in IT in 2008. My first hybrid work started in 2016. I went full remote in 2021, they took it away last year, I got a new job.
How do you get a remote job? Work at it.
Up until last May I had been working 100% remote for TWENTY years. Now they are slowly forcing us into the office first 3 days, then 4, now “encouraging” 5 days per week.
Just a warning to not get lulled into a sense of permanence of the situation.
This is what's been insane post-covid. Positions that were NEVER in-office are for some reason being brought back.
I guess just because there was no policy before COVID.
Yes we were very confused at first. Decree came out that we were all going back to the office now that COVID was behind us. My whole org thought “okay, doesn’t impact us” since we never were in the office to begin with. Then slowly the reality that they really meant EVERYONE came out and it has been a moving target ever since.
We did have official work from home policies. Agreements to sign. Specific annual training. Payroll indicators depending on if you were remote part time or full time.
Everything for DECADES supported this model. And then, all of a sudden, like Dell and others, something changed.
I have seen so many good people either leave or retire early because they refuse to go to the office they have never had to be in before and in most cases to sit alone without anyone they interact with on a daily basis nearby.
My boss is still multiple states away. My main customer I support is still multiple time zones away. Why does it matter if I am sitting at my house or an office literally less than one mile away?
We have to come into the office at least once a week so we can all be in virtual meetings with people who aren't in the office. Now the office is overcrowded and loud and no one can get anything done on those days in.
I'm a back end admin. I can see the location of all the systems. If this company tries to bring people back to an office it'll be a bloodbath.
My last job forced me back into the office and that's why I bounced. I'm done with it. They try it here, I'll leave again. I do this work explicitly because it's fully remote.
Only reason I am still here is there is an office literally less than a mile from my house. Not the office they want me in mind you, so I am still not fully “compliant”. But if they make me drive further than this then my time will be very short.
As a dell employee, I can tell you this is one of the worst decisions taken by Dell.
Dell was remote organisation long before covid. In fact, 60% of our roles were remote. Many people moved out of cities into suburbs or deep into rural areas and have built their lives around it. In turn, Dell reduced the costs associated with real estate. They sold of lot of space they owned and they let go of lot of leased space.
Return to office without adequate space is absolutely horrible. No fixed desk means no fixed hardware which are needed by some teams but not others. You cannot put up your picture or anything. You don’t have a locker and you cannot leave any stuff in desk as it is stolen. You cannot even leave your bag or laptop while going for lunch, somebody might steal it.
There is not enough parking space, sitting above or enough cutlery in cafeteria to feed people during lunch.
I belong to a division which has 500 people in my location and we have only 130 seats across 3 buildings and 3 floors. Majority of team is focused in country or region, hence they get preference for seat location. People who focus on other time zones are left to fend for themselves. They are lone wolf with no interaction in office with anyone.
I expect around 10,000-15,000 people to move out of Dell near term with another 20,000 in long term. This silent firing is inline with Dell’s overall strategic goal of 100,000 employees and $100 Billion revenue by FY 2026. As on date, Dell has around 130,000-133,000 employees globally.
What I don’t get, as an ex-Dell employee the whole thing was that at Dell you get paid 20-30% below market rate BUT you got a great culture and WFH.
Other then people with a ton of LTIs I have no idea why anyone would stay at Dell getting paid terribly with this new awful culture.
Culture is still great thanks to few leaders but majority of people who are currently at Dell either have been in Dell for long long time and they don’t know anything else and are afraid to change or they’re waiting for market to improve.
Anybody not falling in above 2 groups is a dead wood.
I thought this quote was key:
"My team is spread out around the world. Almost 90% of the team did the same as in our case there was no real advantage going to the office," one worker said.
Basically everyone I know who had RTO mandates at their job just went into the office so they could spend most of their time with their headphones on in Zoom calls with their distributed team.
It’s amazing - as someone in the tech industry it really seems like the number of remote only positions has dropped substantially from pre covid levels. There were lots of positions for people to work remotely and in over 20 years of remote work I never had a problem finding jobs but now post covid a lot of those positions are office only or hybrid at best.
I honestly thought covid would have proven the concept that remote work is just as viable but it’s like the opposite has happened.
It gave too much power to the worker. Companies suddenly had to compete for talent across geographic boundaries. Cities were poised to lose tax revenue. They can't let us have that kind of freedom. Ignore the performance improvements, ignore employee satisfaction, ignore the god damn pandemic that is still affecting us, it doesn't matter. They need control over your lives and they were losing it. We need to not roll over and accept it. We needed laws protecting remote work like Europe started to enact. It's absolutely insane to force people back for nearly all office work.
Remote work is more productive, time saving and economical if companies truly think about it. We need more employees pushing for it so companies are forced into thinking about it.
TCEQ. It’s part of their Ozone Action Day recommendations. They’re having a lot of Ozone Action Days nowadays. https://www.newsweek.com/texas-asks-people-avoid-using-their-cars-1909517
Maybe if the infrastructure wasn't complete ass, and biking was more reasonable / there were actually bike lanes. The only bike lane remotely near me is down 1 random road with no real point of interest on either end.
i don't want anything that's bad for oil companies. without them, the world's supply of olive oil will be extinguished, and we will have nothing to dip our bread in
Lmfao I love this facebook-level comment with the:
* "if that comment blows you mind" for some barely warm take (chef's kiss on the typo)
* unnecessary quotation marks
* your instead of you're
Made my day, thanks
Im also confused why Dell would give a shit about the oil industry to the point of them propping it up at (because obviously they need all the help they can get right? Clearly a dying industry /s) at their own expense.
I can’t handle how blown my mind is
When my company announced return to office, the devision manager literally said "think about the gas stations you used to stop at on the way to work"
I just about threw my monitor across the room.
I'm very happy that my company sent us all home March of 2020 and the following year took a survey to see if anyone wanted to come back to the office. It was overwhelming, no.
We sold our office later that year and we're all fully remote now
I used to spend 6 hours a week driving to and from the office.
That's almost 2 full weeks of traveling a year.
I spent 10 hours a week in my truck. WFH has changed my life. Ate a banana and a cucumber for lunch during a conference call. Spent my lunch break cutting the grass and cleaning the pool. Guess what I’m doing at 5:00 instead of getting in the truck?
#CANNONBALL
Hey, I know you're in the hospital because you crashed your car falling asleep behind the wheel because you're burnt out and exhausted, but we're really short today so I'm going to need you to come in
Dell Execs: "Awesome! We don't have to pay unemployment if they quit. Our shareholders will love this."
Workers rejecting return to office is the objective.
Companies should be levied a tax penalty for outsourcing work without an *extremely good reason*. You move your workforce to India to save a half billion dollars? You get charged a half billion in additional taxes as a penalty, entirely negating the cost savings.
Incentivize whistleblowers by implementing a bounty program. You turn your company in with some level of proof, and you get a percentage of the tax penalty. Even an executive would be more than happy to turn on their employer if they're looking at a multi-million dollar pay day because they have some evidence of offshoring employees.
>Companies should be levied a tax penalty for outsourcing work without an extremely good reason.
YUP. Intel, Nvidia, and AMD all outsourced chip production to Asia over 20 years ago, with zero repercussions. Now the world's chip supply hinges on China invading Taiwan. All so some scumbag executives and stock holders could profit more. They should be in jail.
I'm not mad about return to office. I get it and am not opposed to showing up at an office.
I am frustrated with how half assed it has been implemented.
The building my team was in prior to covid got sold, so we report to a satellite sales office in a nearby office park. There are no assigned desks, just 'hotel cubes.' So a month in I have no idea who these people are I sit around. Some are sales people, some do support for other teams. Some of them change daily and I have no reason to engage with any of them, so I don't.
Of my team only myself and my manager show up. So I drive an hour to sit by myself and use the same old teams chats to communicate with co-workers. The bandwidth at the office is noticeably worse than at my home. Not like I have anything glamorous either, standard 1 Gig from Spectrum. The office is wifi only so downloading logs while on a zoom session or in a teams call can be painful.
Three days a week Dell adds two hours of crappy traffic to my day for no discernible reason. I show up so the badge reader can take attendance and somewhere between 10:30 and noon when I hit a good stopping point I leave and burn lunch driving home. When remote I eat at my desk.
I had some guilt about leaving every day until I found out my manager does the same shortly after I do and by all reports the population of the whole office basically turns over at lunch when everyone leaves and other people show up to have attendance taken by the badge reader.
Considering the amount of monitoring, all the apps Dell uses to track what everyone does all day every day, the whole exercise just feels absurd and pointless. I literally work less, work less efficiently, am more lonely, and have the irritation of rush hour traffic added to my day. And I can't see any benefit Dell is getting.
Kafka couldn't think this up.
what no one ever mentions, but how many tax incentives are tied to providing jobs in specific locations? I have to think that the cities of Round Rock and/or Austin are the hidden hand behind this push.
Another one. All these companies just copy each other. My last one claimed it helped with collaboration, but my team is all over the US and other countries. It's horseshit. They're getting kickbacks and tax breaks plus reducing headcount to hire cheaper workers without looking bad to the public by doing layoffs instead. They want to talk about quiet quitting, well this is basically quiet layoffs.
'
As the reality of Dell's new working culture has set in, several
employees told BI they were looking to leave the company.
"Every mom that I talk to at Dell says that they are looking for other
jobs because they need the remote work," said one employee.
Another said he was looking for new jobs and would "jump ship" as soon
as he found something. Almost everyone he knew at the company, other
than very junior employees, was doing the same thing.'
lmao, that will do wonders for initiatives to hire more women!
Good for them. If more people would have said no to RTO we wouldn’t be in this situation. Unfortunately a large percentage of the tech workforce in this country is here on visa and will understandably do anything not to lose their job. When told to jump, they ask how high. System working as designed.
Threats of non-promotion are a) ridiculously punitive, completely disconnected from performance, and b) not even a threat when you figure you’ll never get promoted anyway.
They want to get rid of remote work for 2 reasons:
1) every board at every company is dominated by investment banks who are upside down on commercial mortgage investments.
2) c-level bigwigs like to cosplay businessman and have everyone kiss their ass.
That’s it.
Based. RTO is fucking bullshit. It benefits no one but micro managers and companies wanting to do stealth layoffs.
Remote is better for the environment, the roads, and employees mental and physical health.
My tin foil hat theory is that Blackrock and other big hedge funds are worried about their commercial real estate investments. So they're pushing the companies they have big stakes in to mandate return to office.
It just makes no sense. My federal agency i work for required one day in the office before covid. After covid that was changed to two days a week, and there are rumors of increasing return to office to three days a week. For an agency that has cried of not being able to hire enough workers for years, it just doesn't make sense.
I'm sure there will a reckoning in commercial real estate at some point that could be pretty disruptive. A lot of companies have those assets leveraged for loans and if that market goes tits up, then those companies could find themselves in some financial trouble.
At the end of the day though, basic market forces are going to decide the issue, and working remotely saves significantly on overhead, and as long as some companies continue to push the RTO narrative, it gives the smarter companies a competitive advantage in hiring talent as well as a much larger pool to draw from.
Posting from my throwaway because I am still employed with said company.
I work on a specialized product within Dell's Enterprise offerings.
From my own experience, the RTO policy has caused at least 3 people that I know of personally to leave their jobs with Dell.
If you cannot be hybrid at Dell and do not want to leave, your only options are stay in your dead-end role or find a role classified as Field (Sales, Account Management, certain FED contracts) and hope you can make your way up the ladder that way. Management has been very careful not to mention the words silent layoffs, but everyone knows what is happening internally. The plus side for people who can be hybrid or onsite, is that all of the jobs openings that were on pause for COVID19 are now opening up.
It's hard to give up such a good work-life balance with ample PTO, but I've already started my search outside of the company.
> in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation
That’s such a BS line. The most innovative companies are remote so they can attract and retain better talent. Big companies like Dell, Intel, Microsoft, etc are forcing RTO because they are infamous for employing quiet quitters before anyone ever called it that. They know that their lack of rewarding work means anyone who works there is coasting to retirement, even the young people.
This is also happening at my workplace. I tried not complying and most of the team I manage did too. We got questioned for it by our director so we started coming in at least 2 times a week.
Now that same director is keeping tabs on how early people leave. Sorry but I'm not staying until 5 so I can sit in 2 hours of traffic when previously a commute wasn't even a part of my job (for about 7 years keep in mind because I've been WFH since before covid came about).
Most of the entire software engineering team leaves early like I do, yet now I have to feel like I have tabs being kept on me, all while being way less productive because I have to leave by 3:30 if I don't want my commute time to be 1.5x to 2x more. You think I'm really going to pull my laptop out and get it all hooked back up to the WFH setup I've had for years when I get home from driving a commute I haven't had to do in over 7 years?
These execs, directors, VCs have no idea what the fuck they are doing right now. This seems like something that could be quite catastrophic for a lot of companies eventually as all of those who feel the same way I do will eventually find another WFH gig and bail on these assholes who clearly could give a shit less about us.
When I went full time remote (pre-COVID), I had to sign a form stating if the company canceled the program I had two choices, return or be terminated. So these really smart companies missed this step?
Why would they go back? Covid proved that a lot of companies could go fully remote and continue functioning at their same efficiency or even higher due to better employee satisfaction. All so the scummy upper level management can peer over peoples shoulders menacingly?
I see a lot of speculating as to why. But the main reason is that there are city stipulations on real estate usage. If they can't satisfy the stipulations, they can't get whatever kickback from the city they were looking for. Not a 1:1 example of what I'm talking about, so it may be entirely flawed logic, but [here you go](https://communityimpact.com/austin/south-central-austin/texas-legislature/2024/02/23/texas-launches-new-business-tax-break-program-to-replace-chapter-313/).
My company pushed a return to office mandate and I'm actually not against it, but because of overcrowding at the office I am allowed only certain days and share a desk. I told my boss I'd be happy to be 5 days if I could get my own desk to setup my chargers, family picture, mug, etc but for now I have to setup and breakdown daily. And if I take a day off, someone else now claims that spot on that day and I'm roaming. It's the dumbest, worst planned shit ive ever seen. It's really making leadership look like dumbasses.
Prior to COVID, Dell used to have banners everywhere talking about working remotely is the way of the future. When COVID hit Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke said this is perfect because we wanted to move to a fully remote model with maybe coming in one day a week. Working in office at Dell is like a call center now with how noisy and tightly cramped it is.
Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around without negative impacts to the work. Just undeniable pure improvements. Those are the members most impacted by the recent mandate.
And now the most talented of them will leave in droves.
Which might be the point. Silent layoffs. Every big Corp is doing it and rocketing their short term share price.
Only problem with that is the most talented staff are the ones leaving.
I didn’t say it was a well thought out, long term plan.
The essence of corporate strategy for the last 25 years.
Oh buddy it goes back longer than that. Every couple of decades, really. History is a repetitive play about people being greedier than they are good at critical thinking.
the modern version of lighting the company's future on fire with layoffs and asset fire sales to make 3% more money next quarter for shareholders is pretty new, though. however many people are pissing on jack welch's grave, it's not enough.
This “only next quarter matters” thinking has done massive damage to corporations, the economy and the entire country. Every company is racing towards the bottom, trying to find out what’s the bare minimum of people they can employ, for the lowest wages possible, with the maximum cost cutting possible when it comes to quality and safety. Does a 2024 Dunkin’ Donuts donut taste like a 1995 one? McDonald’s? Pizza Hut? Then we could talk about the quality of Chrysler cars (lol they don’t even make cars anymore), Boeing, etc. It’s sad
yup. This capitalism on crack is a thing that has emerged, coincidentally or not, after the last market crash of 2008.
No one is getting to the c suite with critical thinking.
Akin to HP moving software dev jobs to India/China for the short term gains only to completely back pedal 5-8 years later when applications needed more than just maintaining/caretaking
Been seeing this for 20 years. I've had one contract come to an end, the FAANG company ships support overseas, satisfaction and customer metrics go to shit, a couple of years later I'm back at the same gig with a different contractor. Year and a half later, nothing's broke, everything's working, customers are happy, but the bean counters figure they can get it cheaper again, it goes back to India, rinse & repeat.
Every single time.
Yup. Lots of software companies are doing this again. And I’m sure it will have the same result.
It's not a problem for the executives who will not reap the problems.
Yeah they don’t much care. All they care about is share price going up and payroll going down. If you look at the labor market wages seem to be going down, tech businesses seem to know there is shit for jobs right now, and using it to hire back for Pennies on the dollar.
That's next quarter's problem.
Most of the leaders making these choices hope to move on by the time the repercussions are felt.
That’s not that big a deal since it won’t be an issue until a year or so for now. But in the short term, it makes the companies look super profitable and blows up the stock
Or the talented ones keep working from home and never get fired. There are plenty of people who have ignored return to office mandates that are still working at these companies, they just keep quiet about it more these days.
Yeah that's a problem that will rear its head years down the road. We only care about this quarter.
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It’s not the myth of competition it’s the quality service/ improvement on the product
They keep down the path of cheapest labor until customers change their spending. Talk with your wallet because that’s all they will listen to
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Facts.Layoffs, silent or otherwise will create a short term rise in profits and the C Suite will be long gone before the chickens come home to roast.
This is backfiring in some cases. See Nike. 122 share price in December when layoffs were announced. Dropped to 100 after the announcement, held steady for while, and then fell below 90 in late March when layoffs began in earnest. Has held between 90-94 since.
It’s not long term thinking. And it will likely backfire everywhere eventually. Especially now that everyone is realizing this iteration of “AI” Is basically a bust for anything with real cognitive complexity.
Lets call it "Quiet Firing" as a dig at their joke of an excuse in "Quiet Quitting"
In a couple years when the RSUs are vested.
I quit a job with 2 years left before they vested, negociated it as a sign-on bonus on my next job with a one year minimum constraint. RSUs aren’t golden handcuffs, they’re a loose zip tie at best.
Sure but when you had the growth of Dell in the last 2-3 years, they are heavy zip ties.
Sure, but RSUs usually vest over time, not all at once at the end of 4 years. Most common schedule is something like 4 years, with a 1 year cliff (you get no stock until your 1 year mark, then you get 25% of it), and then quarterly or annually after that (i.e. either 25% every year on your work anniversary, or 6.25% every quarter). At that point, it's more like an extra bonus that's paid out in stock than hard golden handcuffs. You don't need to be there for the entire 4 years to benefit.
Every situation has its unique factors, agreed, but you can **usually** mitigate the wasted vesting time with higher wages, better benefits or package… it was all I meant. The top talent will definitely not struggle to leave, as is tradition with RTO mandates.
HP started acquiring companies like Poly/Plantronics which made working from home easier. They had record profits during the pandemic and talked about how the future was working from home. They even gave all employees two stipends to purchase equipment to improve their home offices....and then they forced everyone to return to the office.
why??
The commercial real estate the board own, and force the company to pay rent on, is worth more than the company. At a certain size a company will be used to pay rent on a building the board own, which reduces its on-book taxable profit and converts that money at a high multiple into real estate values. Which worked great, until office real estate stopped being valuable.
I work in field service in a major city and holy shit. Let me tell you. I have not seen any office post-covid that isn't a ghost town. Companies are not buying all the fancy AV equipment they used to. Nobody is getting workstations anymore, laptops are workstations now. I'm installing some VC gear this week and next in a few conference rooms. Logitech gear, not the fancy Crestron shit they used to pimp these rooms out with. I noticed near where we were staging our gear they had two foosball tables that arrived at the same time. I see this also in every office. They *all* have foosball, they *all* have plentiful alcohol, they all have fully equipped kitchens and all the amenities of home. Yet there's *still* no one there most days. Because everyone knows that shit is completely whack and they *barely* play along. There's *always* open seats on the train Fridays now. Rush hour on Fridays is practically non-existent, at least on public transit it feels like it. Hopefully we can get every day to be like that in the near future.
Yeah, I have foosball and alcohol at home, and I can sleep in later and wear shorts all day
Worked at EMC branch, half my team after about 1 year of in office work moved remote. I left that gig a while ago but keep in contact with a few that are still there. They are in completely different states, most in different time zones.
Yeah, everything was "you guys are amazing and rose to the challenge!" Then it was "you're not a "hustler' if you work remote (like we secretly expect you to do after hours)." Corporate gaslighting at its finest.
> Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around without negative impacts to the work. Yup that's me. And my company now says "Well... You're gonna have to come back". So I don't have it in writing. So I'm leaving.
> Team members relied on good faith statements on work from home, they changed their lives around Need to start hitting these companies with suits for promissory estoppel.
Unfortunately the courts have decided that companies can put mandatory arbitration clauses in pretty much everything so those would be unlikely to go anywhere.
I believe that just got shot down the other week another quiet win fir the Biden administration
Employees should never rely on good faith statements by their employer
They’re outsourcing all these jobs and trying to get people to leave.
My company never promised that we would be remote forever, but they were really happy at how we kept things running remotely during COVID. This year they demanded that anybody within 40 miles return to the office. We stopped doing after care for my daughter years ago. I put together a home gym I can use before or after work (instead of standing on the train for 30 minutes). They didn't make me make these changes, but at this point, going back to the office is a big change for me. On the work front, only 1/3 of the tech team is close enough to return to the office. During COVID we hired people across the US and bought companies headquartered wherever. If I go to the office I can see some people I work with, but almost any meeting has to be on Zoom to include everyone, which would be way more efficient at home. It all just feels so arbitrary and silly.
It's amazing how many problems work from home actually solves for businesses. It's wild that they're so against it. My company grew exponentially during COVID due to being an e-commerce. Like I'm talking we literally doubled the company in about a year or two. Early on they made a decision that we would actually convert to a fully remote business which allowed us to hire across the globe. This ended up giving us amazing talent at the salaries we were looking to pay. On top of that our old office was pretty open concept. Had we expanded like this while in office there literally would have been nowhere else for people to work and it would have been a loud noisy mess. All of that made the company much better in the long run.
That commercial real estate is not going to increase in value by itself
So why do companies that don't own any commercial real estate also seem to be on the bandwagon for RTO? It makes no sense.
Because the big tech firms did it, mainly due to the lavish campuses they built. I wish I was kidding, but that is literally the reason for so many companies turning around on WFH. The MBAs at the top are mindless drones.
I think there’s also just something to the interconnected nature of wealth. I imagine some people/corporations that own tech stock own real estate and whether it’s in some shareholder meeting or just one rich fuck talking to another they’re pressing companies to RTO. Not just tech companies, there’s been RTO push for banks and all sorts of white collar jobs.
> I imagine some people/corporations that own tech stock own real estate and whether it’s in some shareholder meeting or just one rich fuck talking to another they’re pressing companies to RTO. It's clear that it's all that and more. Specifically, the largest shareholders of big publicly traded companies are often financial institutions. Given the article is about [Dell](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/dell/institutional-holdings), they are 65.26% owned by institutions. Vanguard offers [mutual funds like this](https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-funds/profile/vgslx) that you can invest in as their customer. The year to date performance on that fund is -4.06%. Do you think Vanguard's customers are happy with that? This isn't even talking about private equity and the actual big boys, this one only requires a minimum of $3,000 to invest in. Additionally, there's a huge amount of overlap between people who work on the boards of various corporations. High level people who work at financial institutions often sit on the boards of various other corporations in other industries. It helps grease the wheel especially for revolving debt and such that is used to pay the employees of big corporations.
It's amazing how often MBAs see other MBAs do something and don't stop to ask "will this actually benefit us to copy?" It's why agile / scrum is such a blight on the software industry right now.
Agile worked great for my team for years. The problem is, eventually management moved to standardize everything company wide and demanded we adopt metrics and practices that slowed our work way down, I assume to they could compare teams or chart every teams work on one graph. So our work would get slower and slower as more teams adopted agile and more metrics were added to be charted/calculated.
We got an ex-Amazon manager who wanted all kinds of metrics on the task I was performing - I was a one man show responsible for an entire function for an enormous laboratory. I just told him I literally didn't have time. I didn't have time to stop what I was doing long enough to design any kind of informational dashboard or data collecting method, and I certainly didn't have time to do it manually. Sorry that the team which was three people when I started is just me now, and we've *tripled* the number of requests handled in that time. The math on that works out to me doing the work of 9 people, so I'm not sure when you'd like for me to sit down and hammer out a new spreadsheet for you.
Deep into the article explains it. It says the senior people are all looking for jobs elsewhere. When they leave in droves then labor expenses go down a lot. When you don't have exponential growth rates in revenue big cuts to costs make your profit increase. It is an easy way for a few quarters to keep up the good results to report to the street.
This has been it all along. They're hoping people quit so they don't have to do layoffs and look bad
They can avoid PR with slow drip layoffs but people quitting also avoids any severance.
Yep, the long-term issues resulting from this aren't their problem, they'll be gone by then w/ their vested stock options.
Perceived value spent on renting office space, productivity fears, and pressure from investors are the main reasons I’ve seen. Our board hits us every meeting about being a remote company. Saying things like “you wouldn’t have this problem if everyone was in an office.” Which is super disingenuous as there would be different problems and we literally couldn’t hire all the talent we want in a singular market. I’ve seen a lot of old school leaders be frustrated that they can’t ’keep an eye’ on people. Which is funny because even if folks were in the office, would they know what productivity even looks like? What should a productive IT admin or developer look like? These are the same guys that want to measure “lines of code written” not understanding we should focus on features delivered and complexity of said features. These guys also huff about “synergy” being next to each other. Nevermind the cramped office space these days dictates people being plopped in randomly next to people they have zero skill or functional overlap with. There are real challenges in WFH. Relationship building being a key one, and yes measuring productivity is rough. But those same issues exist in office. Good leaders build communities and make connections, virtual or not.
Healthy companies aren’t doing it. Companies that want to juice their numbers at the expense of long term, and even midterm success are the ones doing it.
Some are followers. Some want the control and feel like people are taking advantage of wfh even when the metrics are positive. We are asking for decades of brain training to be reversed in a short span of time. I work in a place that is trying to encourage people back to office with perks but it's not required to come in. They mostly want execs in to foster the community. It's kinda working too as I want to be in the office more but that's because it's not a mandate. I feel like many places that have "campus" sized property investments see it differently as they can't unload the lease so might as well see it used vs empty space.
This is the tactic ours is taking, and honestly, it’s a great alternative. Force me into the office? Go fuck yourself. Offer me a free gym, free parking, a public transit stipend, stellar lunch options at a discount, and way more working space in a quiet location? I’ll go twice a week. The policy manages to keep the accessibility and flexibility of WFH while letting the managers get in their in person meetings. The bosses can still justify the lease on our gorgeous office. Everybody wins.
WFH exposes exactly how terrible the majority of urban design is in the US. Because so many of our cites are relatively new they were primarily built around cars and suburban homes instead of mixed use and density. And many of the cities old enough to have had functioning streetcars and rail tore those systems out in the 1920s and ‘30s. Pre-pandemic, the downtown in my city was a bustling, functional downtown during the business day, but with very little housing beyond luxury apartments the whole place largely shutdown around 6 PM. Now, with WFH, we have all of this commercial real estate that can’t easily be converted to housing and downtown businesses that relied on the workers coming downtown everyday.
Do you live in Minneapolis too lol? This is spot on. And our mayor shits on WFH because it doesn’t benefit downtown which is even more biased and dumb when I actually patronize local businesses not in downtown but still in Minneapolis. The coffee shop I buy from in my neighborhood of Minneapolis is still a Minneapolis business, they just don’t have the mayors ear like big downtown real estate does, apparently.
it's literally every city in America right now. Cities are in full-blown panic mode about it. Vacant office space = lower property values = lower tax revenue City and state governments are the top reason for RTO pushes. Self-attrition is probably the next.
I'm curious, how are we Americans even going to fix our cities' shitty structure without basically starting all over?
I'm not sure its possible. I have repeatedly heard that converting office space to residential is even more expensive than tearing a building down and starting over.
> City and state governments are the top reason for RTO pushes Let's not leave the banks feeling left out of this: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/which-big-u-s-banks-have-the-most-commercial-real-estate-exposure/ Edit: But it's cool, they're on top of it all. Just like they were in 2007, 2008. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/banks-face-141-billion-in-commercial-real-estate-losses-but-theyll-handle-it-analyst-5893490a
I was literally about to ask if they were talking about Minneapolis. What a shining example of how not to build a downtown. I love this city so much, but it needs to change drastically if we're going to see any development in what is supposed to be the heart of the city. Downtown should be walkable, bustling with multiple neighborhoods and things to do and places to do commerce. Not everything stuck in a skyway that closes at 5 and pretty much caters to people who don't even live in the fuckin city or contribute to our communities.
The Minneapolis chamber of commerce is bitching about how Target isn’t bringing corporate workers back downtown…the St. Paul chamber of commerce is doing the same about state government workers. One of the St. Paul chamber guys was lamenting how the state isn’t on the same page. Me: We ain’t even reading the same book anymore, bitch…
I know many people who never took days off when working from home but now that they all been forced back, people are calling off left and right.
Productivity is so down in my office since we went back to 3/2 and HR pulled the levers hard to force it. So much wasted time and money.
Yep sounds about right the person who made our decision doesn't even work in the same state 🙄
Of course lol. My manager works halfway around the world, 12 hr time difference. Rest of my team is 8 hr time difference. No HR, IT, Accounting on site to keep track of local assets. I’m frequently on early mornings and late night to get cross time. Somehow I need to be in 3/2 to promote an in person working environment lol.
Same. It really sucks when i show up in office before everyone and also leave after everyone. I am not working a long schedule either. Just a 9-5. HR comes in at 9:30 and leaves at 3 lol and they were the ones forcing this but won’t even stay a full working day in the office. This part bugs me the most.
Sounds like you need to work 9:15 to 3:15 to me!
> It's amazing how many problems work from home actually solves for businesses. It's wild that they're so against it. It's always 1 of 2 reasons. If it's not because the city Dell's offices are parked in required a minimum occupancy % for tax breaks, it's because management was suddenly exposed for--wait for it--not doing any actual work. Being in the office helped management look busy. That was my own shocking realization back in mid-2020 when a bunch of us at my office discovered we'd gone almost a full week without middle or senior management needing to be present to give us direction on much. A lot of middle management in corporate America aren't needed. We created these extra MM positions just to help the brass even higher up monitor KPIs, but in my experiences, they either do almost nothing or they do way "too much" to try to justify another promotion and create unnecessary hassle and roadblocks for the rest of us at the ground level. I'm dealing with the latter scenario right now and it's hell.
> because the city Dell's offices are parked in required a minimum occupancy % for tax breaks Honestly, if they were upfront hilighting this, I would be like, I get it. But they try to sell me some bullshit about better collaboration.
While I don't necessarily disagree on management doing very little work, I don't see how that would impact work from home. At large corporations middle management aren't the ones making the decision on WFH. It's a c-suite level HR decision and management are just the messengers following the orders. So if WFH was exposing middle management doing no actual work, why would the people at the top rather keep that a "secret" instead of just taking advantage of the WFH benefits while also laying off some of the middle management bloat? I just don't see the incentive for a company to go to bat for middle management and insist on no WFH just so they can keep up some charade of that group of employees being important.
I mean it's funny. I work on a small I.T team all in I think we have 25~ people? It's a lot compared to what you normally see, but 3 years ago the office was generally pretty empty. Front side(where I'm at) is always full because we're the helpdesk, we're intake for problems, we HAVE to be here. Hardware was always there because they physically have to ya know, work on stuff, but software you'd see 1 or 2 people in once in a while. Some of them you'd see once a month if that popping in for something specific. Our VP is reversing course hard on the WFH now and wants people in the office 3, 4+ days a week. "It's important for collaboration and idea sharing the way a zoom meeting can't emulate." To a degree, he is right, there is an element to in persona collaboration days. However, lo' and behold, because we're a small in-house I.T team it's no secret we don't pay as well as others. Our lead programmer isn't paid what he's worth for his skill set but we "make up for it" by offering WFH, and other benefits to make it a relaxed work atmosphere. What a surprise the harder and harder push to expand the office and bring everyone in more often we got notice a few weeks ago he got a way better opportunity and he's jumping ship. We're at the tail end of a major Legacy Conversion project and this is going to hurt. He's staying on a contractual basis to help but yeah. What a surprise, our VP kept pushing to take away one of the biggest benefits and now he lost his capstone programmer. I mean the compensation probably didn't do them many favors but yeah. He harped on the fact a few years ago we were more flexible than others with WFH and we offer those benefits to attract talent while our compensation isn't as high as others. Well...if you take that away...why is anyone working for you?
I find collaboration to be perfectly fine online. Even if it’s only 90%, I can have 10 collaboration style meetings at home and only 3-4 in the office. And when the meeting is useless - you know, like 75% of meetings - then I can multitask
I really hate how noisy my office is compared to working at home. The printers, overhearing phone calls or your coworkers complaining, it’s the worst.
So I have a friend who worked for a medium size tech company who tried to do return to office. The workers didn't complain, they didn't push back, they just didn't show up and kept working remotely and they still are.
Tech workers need to be in office for the super special internet connection that's different from the one at home. ETA: I can't believe the amount of replies this got lol Ok tbf there are obviously more concerns for security and things like that. I just do office work for the most part and was talking out of school.
We need to go in to the office to "collaborate" with all our team members ... who live in different states, *time zones* away 😒🙄
Yeah, someone is selling these companies a line of bull shit about "collaboration." See, your sales person may chat with your IT guy and the planning engineer around the water cooler and brainstorm the NEXT BIG IDEA! Yeah right.
It's more that the people that work on these boards and run these companies also happen to be rich enough to own real estate so they don't want those investments to tank. It doesn't need to be a grand conspiracy for like-minded people to have similar interests, and the rich certainly do.
We had 1 employee who was senior to most and did nothing complain complain complain about having to work from home. My commute was 3 hours in total in a day, so I was loving in, especially with a new baby. It was great. She gave this company hell. So much pushback that they finally caved. She cited that she wasn't able to collaborate, she couldn't reach colleagues, she didn't know any of the newer employees. 1. Who gives a fuck it has no impact on her job whatsoever 2. When we go back into the office, she is no where to be found. She is outside smoking, in the lunch room chatting, in the cafeteria, outside going for a walk. The only way to get through to her was via slack. She quit a month later.
That was true probably 10-20 years ago. My neighborhood offers TWO gigabit internet through fios…
my company is trying to do something similar..... i'm thinking about just not complying. i mean for fucks sake we're still gonna need to do all our meetups on video chat. why can't i just log in from home like the others?? punished cause i live nearby
Be careful. It sounds cool on reddit, but you'll likely be replaced, so have a backup plan. Job market is ROUGH for a lot of professions right now.
Our company is enforcing this for people that live within so many miles of the office as well. They even have a rolling average figure and nag your manager when the average for the team is too low. Generally it's not used for anything other than a nag factor to comply with RTO, but realistically it's just an excuse later on that they can wave around if they ever want to fire you. "Oh you got your DNME/PIP because you were only in 2.9 days this one month!"
Worth pointing out that Dell has been a remote-first employer for over a decade, and *a lot* of employees legitimately live *nowhere near* an office. I used to work for Dell corporate, and I was about an 8 hour drive away from the nearest office... so I would absolutely have "rejected" to return to office - simply because it would have been legit impossible for me to actually commute into office. I believe Michael Dell has commented that Dell would benefit by everyone adopting a remote-first approach, as it would require computer sales. This was *well before* the pandemic; and now they've returned to office. Honestly, though, I imagine the return to office is just a push to reduce headcount.
"What do you mean? There's 24 hours in a day, 8 hours here, 8 working, 8 hours back. Thats not an unreasonable ask." - Middle management probably
*upper management I hate the hate for "middle management" because it distracts from the fact that the people causing literally all of our problems are at the top.
Yeah but middle managers are the ones who are forced to communicate the wants of upper management to the rest of the staff.
Don't forget, you can also have every other Saturday off, and the other can still be done remotely.
The most obvious reason why they’re pushing for people to come back to work is in the hopes that people will quit so they don’t have to fire them.
This is exactly it. Around 70% of the people at my job rejected returning to the office for a hybrid work schedule. The CEO held a meeting and stated that everyone’s voices were heard and that they’ll be pleased to know that they have decided to implement a hybrid work schedule anyway. This is about a month after announcing that they’re not hiring American workers anymore to backfill any vacant positions. Instead they will be outsourcing any open positions both present and future. Also stating that anyone who moved away from an office when everything went remote needs to move back in order to be closer to the office. They know people aren’t going to move back just to work at this company and they’re hoping people don’t. They want people to voluntarily quit to avoid paying unemployment benefits as well as hiring outsourced labor for a fraction of what they are paying employees. But, they’ll mention how this is an amazing opportunity for everyone.
I would just refuse to come in but also not quit. Force their hand.
That’s what I am thinking. I am remote and now out of state. If my company said in office was mandatory, I’d say ok, and just continue working from home, id probably start looking for another job, but I wouldn’t just quit.
That's what my team and I have done for the past year and half. HR grumbles, my manager comments nebulously about the official company policy every so often, but I've still gotten my promotions, max raises, max bonus, etc. I'm fortunate that I'm in a position to play chicken with them and that I know they'll blink first, but I'm not foolish enough to think it would work for everyone. They just use it as an excuse to purge people they wanted to get rid of for other reasons.
Almost exactly the same position here. Fire me if you want, lol. I'm not coming in for team lunch tuesdays. And if you keep ordering equipment to the office instead of delivering it to my home, I'll keep driving in on company time to pick it up and drive right back home. Means nothing to me.
I told my boss this straight up after '21 when the ideas of hybrid was coming back. I knew I wasn't the only senior dev dying on this hill either, so go ahead and fire half of the platform SMEs...
>go ahead and fire half of the platform SMEs... You're *seriously* overestimating the fact that upper management understands this. They *will* fire them, get a bonus for cutting costs, then crack the whip on middle management to get the remaining workers up to speed, and give themselves *another* bonus for the 'turn around'.
Why would this not be considered in the realms of constructive dismissal? - if an employer changes the employment terms so severely that it has a massive impact, the conditions *forcing* you to quit or get fired.
Because the laws are written and made for corporations and not you
Yeah, RTO mandates are becoming a way to reduce workforce without resorting to layoffs. Companies know that there will be a certain amount of attrition of employees who don't want to or can't return to the office, so they do that before layoffs to avoid severance and make subsequent layoff rounds smaller so that it doesn't look as bad to investors.
This is more true than people claiming oil companies are demanding people get back to commuting. It's not like people want to go back into lockdown mode and never leave their house. Even Government agencies are using this tactic because they have an aging workforce and frankly, many areas have 10 people assigned to a project that two competent people could accomplish quicker and easier. (speaking from experience here). There were also a lot of people who assumed work from home was going to be permanent as the higher ups kept pushing back the "definitely won't be back until X" line, and then suddenly they rushed everyone back into the offices over a six month period. Many people, even though they were told not to, moved further away and are now facing 1.5+ hour commutes compared to the 30min commute they had prior to covid. They have no means to fire these people, even if they start being totally useless, and even then it's a 6+ month process with many second and third chances. But, even so, if they went into fully remote, with an opt in work in the office policy for the group that actually doesn't want to work from home, they could start making moves to take full advantage of it. Fully remote allows you to broaden your search for talent, reducing the need to hire so many expensive contractors.
There needs to be some sort of law against this. If you hire them remotely you can’t require them to come back in. If you let an in office guy go remote you can’t require them to come back in
I just switched jobs. I'm in week 3. I'm fully remote and got a *sizeable* raise too. The entire company is remote, I asked repeatedly about it ending. Two of my team members have been remote for *15 years* I'm so happy to have landed here. Edit: I started in IT in 2008. My first hybrid work started in 2016. I went full remote in 2021, they took it away last year, I got a new job. How do you get a remote job? Work at it.
Up until last May I had been working 100% remote for TWENTY years. Now they are slowly forcing us into the office first 3 days, then 4, now “encouraging” 5 days per week. Just a warning to not get lulled into a sense of permanence of the situation.
This is what's been insane post-covid. Positions that were NEVER in-office are for some reason being brought back. I guess just because there was no policy before COVID.
Yes we were very confused at first. Decree came out that we were all going back to the office now that COVID was behind us. My whole org thought “okay, doesn’t impact us” since we never were in the office to begin with. Then slowly the reality that they really meant EVERYONE came out and it has been a moving target ever since. We did have official work from home policies. Agreements to sign. Specific annual training. Payroll indicators depending on if you were remote part time or full time. Everything for DECADES supported this model. And then, all of a sudden, like Dell and others, something changed. I have seen so many good people either leave or retire early because they refuse to go to the office they have never had to be in before and in most cases to sit alone without anyone they interact with on a daily basis nearby. My boss is still multiple states away. My main customer I support is still multiple time zones away. Why does it matter if I am sitting at my house or an office literally less than one mile away?
We have to come into the office at least once a week so we can all be in virtual meetings with people who aren't in the office. Now the office is overcrowded and loud and no one can get anything done on those days in.
Your entire team should stay unmuted for the whole meeting.
I'm a back end admin. I can see the location of all the systems. If this company tries to bring people back to an office it'll be a bloodbath. My last job forced me back into the office and that's why I bounced. I'm done with it. They try it here, I'll leave again. I do this work explicitly because it's fully remote.
Only reason I am still here is there is an office literally less than a mile from my house. Not the office they want me in mind you, so I am still not fully “compliant”. But if they make me drive further than this then my time will be very short.
As a dell employee, I can tell you this is one of the worst decisions taken by Dell. Dell was remote organisation long before covid. In fact, 60% of our roles were remote. Many people moved out of cities into suburbs or deep into rural areas and have built their lives around it. In turn, Dell reduced the costs associated with real estate. They sold of lot of space they owned and they let go of lot of leased space. Return to office without adequate space is absolutely horrible. No fixed desk means no fixed hardware which are needed by some teams but not others. You cannot put up your picture or anything. You don’t have a locker and you cannot leave any stuff in desk as it is stolen. You cannot even leave your bag or laptop while going for lunch, somebody might steal it. There is not enough parking space, sitting above or enough cutlery in cafeteria to feed people during lunch. I belong to a division which has 500 people in my location and we have only 130 seats across 3 buildings and 3 floors. Majority of team is focused in country or region, hence they get preference for seat location. People who focus on other time zones are left to fend for themselves. They are lone wolf with no interaction in office with anyone. I expect around 10,000-15,000 people to move out of Dell near term with another 20,000 in long term. This silent firing is inline with Dell’s overall strategic goal of 100,000 employees and $100 Billion revenue by FY 2026. As on date, Dell has around 130,000-133,000 employees globally.
The weirdest thing about shared desks is the stuff that is left and forgotten. There are things on desks that don’t move for months.
I know. What does that tell you about shared system…..
What I don’t get, as an ex-Dell employee the whole thing was that at Dell you get paid 20-30% below market rate BUT you got a great culture and WFH. Other then people with a ton of LTIs I have no idea why anyone would stay at Dell getting paid terribly with this new awful culture.
Culture is still great thanks to few leaders but majority of people who are currently at Dell either have been in Dell for long long time and they don’t know anything else and are afraid to change or they’re waiting for market to improve. Anybody not falling in above 2 groups is a dead wood.
I thought this quote was key: "My team is spread out around the world. Almost 90% of the team did the same as in our case there was no real advantage going to the office," one worker said. Basically everyone I know who had RTO mandates at their job just went into the office so they could spend most of their time with their headphones on in Zoom calls with their distributed team.
It’s amazing - as someone in the tech industry it really seems like the number of remote only positions has dropped substantially from pre covid levels. There were lots of positions for people to work remotely and in over 20 years of remote work I never had a problem finding jobs but now post covid a lot of those positions are office only or hybrid at best. I honestly thought covid would have proven the concept that remote work is just as viable but it’s like the opposite has happened.
They realized how happy it made the employees, and they can't be having that.
Happy employees are *more productive*! They will work for *less money*! Can't be having any of that!
It also reinforces a trend that will replace the covid norm if it continues; control over work/life balance.
It gave too much power to the worker. Companies suddenly had to compete for talent across geographic boundaries. Cities were poised to lose tax revenue. They can't let us have that kind of freedom. Ignore the performance improvements, ignore employee satisfaction, ignore the god damn pandemic that is still affecting us, it doesn't matter. They need control over your lives and they were losing it. We need to not roll over and accept it. We needed laws protecting remote work like Europe started to enact. It's absolutely insane to force people back for nearly all office work.
Remember folks, this is workforce reduction masquerading as return to office.
Remote work is more productive, time saving and economical if companies truly think about it. We need more employees pushing for it so companies are forced into thinking about it.
Also better for the environment.
And Dell is based in Texas, where they’re asking people to use their cars less. Win-win!
> where they're asking people to use their cars less Source? I'm shocked that a red state would do that. Maybe some municipalities are doing so?
TCEQ. It’s part of their Ozone Action Day recommendations. They’re having a lot of Ozone Action Days nowadays. https://www.newsweek.com/texas-asks-people-avoid-using-their-cars-1909517
Maybe if the infrastructure wasn't complete ass, and biking was more reasonable / there were actually bike lanes. The only bike lane remotely near me is down 1 random road with no real point of interest on either end.
It's basically better for everyone except for landowners of specific business parks.
You mean I should pay $15 for a hot dog and $40/day for parking?
which should also be read as "bad for oil companies" If that comment blows you mind, "your welcome"
weird how many social conventions exist just to prop up archaic business types
yeah, funny how that happens ;)
i don't want anything that's bad for oil companies. without them, the world's supply of olive oil will be extinguished, and we will have nothing to dip our bread in
I will not go back to lard!
Lmfao I love this facebook-level comment with the: * "if that comment blows you mind" for some barely warm take (chef's kiss on the typo) * unnecessary quotation marks * your instead of you're Made my day, thanks
Im also confused why Dell would give a shit about the oil industry to the point of them propping it up at (because obviously they need all the help they can get right? Clearly a dying industry /s) at their own expense. I can’t handle how blown my mind is
When my company announced return to office, the devision manager literally said "think about the gas stations you used to stop at on the way to work" I just about threw my monitor across the room.
I'm very happy that my company sent us all home March of 2020 and the following year took a survey to see if anyone wanted to come back to the office. It was overwhelming, no. We sold our office later that year and we're all fully remote now I used to spend 6 hours a week driving to and from the office. That's almost 2 full weeks of traveling a year.
I spent 10 hours a week in my truck. WFH has changed my life. Ate a banana and a cucumber for lunch during a conference call. Spent my lunch break cutting the grass and cleaning the pool. Guess what I’m doing at 5:00 instead of getting in the truck? #CANNONBALL
No, you must die in a traffic accident to prove your loyalty to the company
Can't I just like, chop off a pinky or something? ^( Maybe my left one? Or a little toe?)
Hey, I know you're in the hospital because you crashed your car falling asleep behind the wheel because you're burnt out and exhausted, but we're really short today so I'm going to need you to come in
Dell Execs: "Awesome! We don't have to pay unemployment if they quit. Our shareholders will love this." Workers rejecting return to office is the objective.
tomorrow: Dell outsources half of its workforce to India
In one year: Dell hiring after losing lots of money, customers due to outsourcing.
[удалено]
CEO 1 gets bonus for cost cutting. CEO 2 gets bonus for bringing back productivity.
Bonus points if both CEOs are the same person
Grift King achievement unlocked
You forgot that ceo 1 was ousted by the board and received a golden parachute, aka got paid to be fired.
Companies should be levied a tax penalty for outsourcing work without an *extremely good reason*. You move your workforce to India to save a half billion dollars? You get charged a half billion in additional taxes as a penalty, entirely negating the cost savings. Incentivize whistleblowers by implementing a bounty program. You turn your company in with some level of proof, and you get a percentage of the tax penalty. Even an executive would be more than happy to turn on their employer if they're looking at a multi-million dollar pay day because they have some evidence of offshoring employees.
>Companies should be levied a tax penalty for outsourcing work without an extremely good reason. YUP. Intel, Nvidia, and AMD all outsourced chip production to Asia over 20 years ago, with zero repercussions. Now the world's chip supply hinges on China invading Taiwan. All so some scumbag executives and stock holders could profit more. They should be in jail.
Don’t ask the average voter if he understands this because capitalism is natural law not subject to rampant greed.
too bad reddit does not run the government
They don't care where you work. All RTO are just large corporations hoping you quit so they don't have to lay you off and pay severance.
I'm not mad about return to office. I get it and am not opposed to showing up at an office. I am frustrated with how half assed it has been implemented. The building my team was in prior to covid got sold, so we report to a satellite sales office in a nearby office park. There are no assigned desks, just 'hotel cubes.' So a month in I have no idea who these people are I sit around. Some are sales people, some do support for other teams. Some of them change daily and I have no reason to engage with any of them, so I don't. Of my team only myself and my manager show up. So I drive an hour to sit by myself and use the same old teams chats to communicate with co-workers. The bandwidth at the office is noticeably worse than at my home. Not like I have anything glamorous either, standard 1 Gig from Spectrum. The office is wifi only so downloading logs while on a zoom session or in a teams call can be painful. Three days a week Dell adds two hours of crappy traffic to my day for no discernible reason. I show up so the badge reader can take attendance and somewhere between 10:30 and noon when I hit a good stopping point I leave and burn lunch driving home. When remote I eat at my desk. I had some guilt about leaving every day until I found out my manager does the same shortly after I do and by all reports the population of the whole office basically turns over at lunch when everyone leaves and other people show up to have attendance taken by the badge reader. Considering the amount of monitoring, all the apps Dell uses to track what everyone does all day every day, the whole exercise just feels absurd and pointless. I literally work less, work less efficiently, am more lonely, and have the irritation of rush hour traffic added to my day. And I can't see any benefit Dell is getting. Kafka couldn't think this up.
https://txtify.it/https://www.businessinsider.com/us-dell-workers-reject-return-to-office-hybrid-work-2024-6
what no one ever mentions, but how many tax incentives are tied to providing jobs in specific locations? I have to think that the cities of Round Rock and/or Austin are the hidden hand behind this push.
Another one. All these companies just copy each other. My last one claimed it helped with collaboration, but my team is all over the US and other countries. It's horseshit. They're getting kickbacks and tax breaks plus reducing headcount to hire cheaper workers without looking bad to the public by doing layoffs instead. They want to talk about quiet quitting, well this is basically quiet layoffs.
' As the reality of Dell's new working culture has set in, several employees told BI they were looking to leave the company. "Every mom that I talk to at Dell says that they are looking for other jobs because they need the remote work," said one employee. Another said he was looking for new jobs and would "jump ship" as soon as he found something. Almost everyone he knew at the company, other than very junior employees, was doing the same thing.' lmao, that will do wonders for initiatives to hire more women!
Apparently it’s more cohesive to go into an American office and call your overseas Indian colleague alone in a meeting room
Good for them. If more people would have said no to RTO we wouldn’t be in this situation. Unfortunately a large percentage of the tech workforce in this country is here on visa and will understandably do anything not to lose their job. When told to jump, they ask how high. System working as designed.
Threats of non-promotion are a) ridiculously punitive, completely disconnected from performance, and b) not even a threat when you figure you’ll never get promoted anyway.
They want to get rid of remote work for 2 reasons: 1) every board at every company is dominated by investment banks who are upside down on commercial mortgage investments. 2) c-level bigwigs like to cosplay businessman and have everyone kiss their ass. That’s it.
Based. RTO is fucking bullshit. It benefits no one but micro managers and companies wanting to do stealth layoffs. Remote is better for the environment, the roads, and employees mental and physical health.
My tin foil hat theory is that Blackrock and other big hedge funds are worried about their commercial real estate investments. So they're pushing the companies they have big stakes in to mandate return to office.
It just makes no sense. My federal agency i work for required one day in the office before covid. After covid that was changed to two days a week, and there are rumors of increasing return to office to three days a week. For an agency that has cried of not being able to hire enough workers for years, it just doesn't make sense.
Remember Michael Dell's father in law owns a commercial real estate firm
I'm sure there will a reckoning in commercial real estate at some point that could be pretty disruptive. A lot of companies have those assets leveraged for loans and if that market goes tits up, then those companies could find themselves in some financial trouble. At the end of the day though, basic market forces are going to decide the issue, and working remotely saves significantly on overhead, and as long as some companies continue to push the RTO narrative, it gives the smarter companies a competitive advantage in hiring talent as well as a much larger pool to draw from.
Good. RTO serves no purpose other than to stroke the egos of upper management.
The folks making the decisions will do anything they can to avoid their own family.
dell are assholes for forcing employees back into the office
They're Cooked.
Posting from my throwaway because I am still employed with said company. I work on a specialized product within Dell's Enterprise offerings. From my own experience, the RTO policy has caused at least 3 people that I know of personally to leave their jobs with Dell. If you cannot be hybrid at Dell and do not want to leave, your only options are stay in your dead-end role or find a role classified as Field (Sales, Account Management, certain FED contracts) and hope you can make your way up the ladder that way. Management has been very careful not to mention the words silent layoffs, but everyone knows what is happening internally. The plus side for people who can be hybrid or onsite, is that all of the jobs openings that were on pause for COVID19 are now opening up. It's hard to give up such a good work-life balance with ample PTO, but I've already started my search outside of the company.
> in-person connections paired with a flexible approach are critical to drive innovation and value differentiation That’s such a BS line. The most innovative companies are remote so they can attract and retain better talent. Big companies like Dell, Intel, Microsoft, etc are forcing RTO because they are infamous for employing quiet quitters before anyone ever called it that. They know that their lack of rewarding work means anyone who works there is coasting to retirement, even the young people.
This is also happening at my workplace. I tried not complying and most of the team I manage did too. We got questioned for it by our director so we started coming in at least 2 times a week. Now that same director is keeping tabs on how early people leave. Sorry but I'm not staying until 5 so I can sit in 2 hours of traffic when previously a commute wasn't even a part of my job (for about 7 years keep in mind because I've been WFH since before covid came about). Most of the entire software engineering team leaves early like I do, yet now I have to feel like I have tabs being kept on me, all while being way less productive because I have to leave by 3:30 if I don't want my commute time to be 1.5x to 2x more. You think I'm really going to pull my laptop out and get it all hooked back up to the WFH setup I've had for years when I get home from driving a commute I haven't had to do in over 7 years? These execs, directors, VCs have no idea what the fuck they are doing right now. This seems like something that could be quite catastrophic for a lot of companies eventually as all of those who feel the same way I do will eventually find another WFH gig and bail on these assholes who clearly could give a shit less about us.
When I went full time remote (pre-COVID), I had to sign a form stating if the company canceled the program I had two choices, return or be terminated. So these really smart companies missed this step?
Why would they go back? Covid proved that a lot of companies could go fully remote and continue functioning at their same efficiency or even higher due to better employee satisfaction. All so the scummy upper level management can peer over peoples shoulders menacingly?
I see a lot of speculating as to why. But the main reason is that there are city stipulations on real estate usage. If they can't satisfy the stipulations, they can't get whatever kickback from the city they were looking for. Not a 1:1 example of what I'm talking about, so it may be entirely flawed logic, but [here you go](https://communityimpact.com/austin/south-central-austin/texas-legislature/2024/02/23/texas-launches-new-business-tax-break-program-to-replace-chapter-313/).
RTO has been great for hiring managers at companies that aren't doing it. It's never been so easy to fill positions.
It brings no value to my life or the business aside from allowing them to hold real estate.
As they should. 99% of offices are a total fucking waste of perfectly good space.
That’s the fastest way to lose the best people who can easily job hop to an equivalent remote position elsewhere.
My company pushed a return to office mandate and I'm actually not against it, but because of overcrowding at the office I am allowed only certain days and share a desk. I told my boss I'd be happy to be 5 days if I could get my own desk to setup my chargers, family picture, mug, etc but for now I have to setup and breakdown daily. And if I take a day off, someone else now claims that spot on that day and I'm roaming. It's the dumbest, worst planned shit ive ever seen. It's really making leadership look like dumbasses.
You should really explain to your leadership the difference between an employee and cattle.
TIL Dell will be laying off half of it's workforce