All RTO mandates have stealth layoffs as a key positive reason to do them.
It’s almost worse than actually just laying off x% of a workforce—you stress everyone out and force them to contemplate leaving, some amount do (achieving the ulterior motive) and the rest who didn’t leave now have increased workload and are also immiserated by being forced to commute to a stupid cube farm some portion of the week. It’s like they found a way to make layoffs affect everyone more than they already did in the past.
The beatings will continue until morale improves
Man I'd be so mad if I'd built up a sweet severance, only to have to quit for better work
"The company is also calling for AI to reinvigorate sales from B2B to gaming, but has seen little lift on consumer purchases (seen by the reduced finances mentioned). Each new memo on the RTO continues to bring AI into the conversation; positioning the solutions as bleeding edge, meanwhile the house is barely being held together internally."
What a bunch of jackasses
Welp, looks like my next hardware isn't gonna be Dell 🤷♂️
If you are buying a laptop, Framework is where it is at. Huge focus on a quality product as well as repairability and interoperability between parts.
I have two of them, and I think they are great. That being said, they are significantly more expensive than similar options from Dell (or Lenovo, HP, etc.) They just don't have the volume of production needed to compete.
MAYBE you'll end up ahead with upgradability or repairability, but honestly, you're paying more to support good company practices.
I'm planning on keeping these laptops for a long time and upgrading when I need to, but we have to be realistic that most people aren't going to stomach a minimum of 30% premium for options they don't care about.
Do Frameworks still use that goofy resolution that makes it close to impossible scale the UI properly on Linux?
Yeah, but fractional scaling works fairly well on Wayland
Wasn't aware of this, thanks!
I got fucked by them over a decade ago. Naively bought an Alienware for college. Burned out two motherboards on it while it was under warranty which they replaced. Naturally it burned out a third one outside of my warranty window which they refused to help with unless I paid them half the value of the laptop. Told them no thanks, instead I’ll tell everyone I know that their hardware is garbage.
"Gaming laptops" are a lie anyway. You can't generate that much heat in that small of a space without something eventually going wrong, this applies to all of them. They're all hot and underpowered.
Yeah, I expect any gaming laptop to have a shorter lifespan, but killing three mobos in the span of 3.5 years shouldn’t happen. Now that I’m older and wiser, I wonder if I had a bad power supply, but that’s something that should have come up on my second repair.
I had that in a year with Asus/ROG, garbage.
They've gotten a bit better within the Nvidia 1000-3000 series, but I can't vouch for the 4000 series. Better thermal management techniques and lower target thresholds.
That being said, I'm sure there are manufacturers that buck the trend and set higher thermal targets for more performance. I'd say monitor your temps, and target for no higher than 75c if possible.
75c is impossible on a gaming laptop if you dont have a low power gpu (eg max q)
I've run into so many people who have had Dell laptops totally crap out / burn out on them. I saw several myself years ago through an old job. Mostly bad LCD displays right out of the box, but also an assortment of other problems. I vowed never to get a Dell computer of any kind after that.
Now in my current job we are forced to use refurbished Dell laptops. And guess what? All of them are total pieces of garbage. I've had two of them now. The first one became inoperable so they had to get me a new one. And now I find that the audio and USB ports are faulty on the new one.
I'm not surprised Dell is screwing over their lower-level employees, considering they consistently fuck over their customers. Fuck Dell.
Just sharing my experience here as well. I bought a Dell gaming monitor - it was a TN panel with gsync and 144hz it was quite expensive at the time.
Anyway, that piece of shit was replaced 5x under warranty. Faulty panel, backlight dying, lots of issues with input ports, broke firmware, etc. their warranty and service was top notch, but that was a lot to go through with a $500 piece of equipment. I bought an LG after that one died and have had 0 issues.
I managed to get one of the "desktop replacement" laptops before they got sold to Dell, and that fucker was a solid brick shithouse, lasted like 7 years before functional issues. Heat was definitely a problem, couldn't rest my left hand on the keyboard (above the GPU) after a couple hours and could probably sit outside in a blizzard without pants comfortably. Miss that bad boy... Shame Dell ruined them.
My old dell server hardware is surprisingly crap as well
I've gone through 4 PSUs in the last 5 years
Surprisingly? Not sure.
IMO it's a bit surprising
I'd expect a company to at least sell decent hardware to their enterprise customers but I guess not in this case
If it breaks, you can just sell them more 🤷♂️
In EU at least there's a new law-mandated warranty period for the replaced part but I of course can't say if this holds true where you live.
They are doing you a favor. I bought my kid a Dell laptop (xps13) for college and 6 months later the battery life dropped from 12 hours to 2 and Dell support said it was normal and refused to do anything about it. That was after the original order which was supposed to take 6 weeks for delivery (bad enough) actually took 14 weeks. It arrived two days before they left for school. Worst experience ever.
The replacement MacBook Air was delivered to their dorm the next day and has been flawless since (over a year now). It actually cost less too.
I think the xps is garbage. My laptops never break. They become obsolete before they break except my xps13. Broke after the warranty. It’s the only laptop I’ve had do that.
Have you seen what they did to the XPS?? It's a tragedy.
What the hell does RTO have to do with women specifically? It's a mandate regardless of gender.
Reads article.
Ahh. Nothing. One department happened to be more heavily impacted for females, so suddenly it makes Dell a "boys club" (someone quoted in the article). The only reason provided was the possibility of women with spouses in the military that couldn't move.
Yeah, that's really stretching there and then slapped into the title for rage bait.
RTO mandates are newsworthy by their own right. No need to rage bait with nonsense to accompany it.
Of those adversely affected, most have more than eight years of experience at Dell and most are 40–55 year old women, we're told.
I think you are basically arguing that the policy is equal, whereas the article is basically arguing that the policy isn't equity. Two different values. You are not wrong, it's an equal policy. But the article is right in saying that the policy isn't equity.
Our first source cited personal experience of the return-to-office order's impact and told us only two men were affected, compared to 29 women. Our source made calculations about the impact using internal data, and suggested women will bear the brunt of the RTO mandate.
"Per sample data pulled, this group is disproportionately female," with women whose partners serve in the military perhaps especially impacted as life in uniform often means relocation.
Again, that's a huge leap they are making.
The sample set could have simply been from a female heavy department. Other departments could be disproportionately male afflicted. We have no idea what their sampling covered, and given how incredibly biased the source seems to be, that's more than enough reason for me to doubt their methodology.
Again, RTO is not inheritantly sexist, as this article claims. If you're intentionally targeting departments with disproportionate representation to specifically marginalize them, then that's discrimination. If this is a corporate policy expanding many departments, and one happens to be disproportionately represented by a gender, then it's far harder to substantiate claims of prejudice.
That’s what systemic bias is.
What the hell does RTO have to do with women specifically? It’s a mandate regardless of gender.
Nothing. This is very lazy journalism and boring rage-bait.
As a generalization, take any bad thing "Rising mortgage rates":
"Mortgage Rate Hike Disproportionately Impacts Women, Minority Communities"
As the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates in an effort to curb inflation, recent studies suggest that these measures may be adversely affecting women and minority communities more than their counterparts. The reason behind this disparity lies in existing wealth gaps between various demographic groups.
Women and minority households tend to have lower median household income levels compared to white men, according to data from the US Census Bureau. This means they often start with smaller down payments for homes and rely on riskier loans, such as adjustable-rate mortgages....
Congratulations, you have now turned a generic news story into some cheap click-bait. Note: with a small amount of work you can apply this technique to any negative news story.
In November, Dell reported Q3 fiscal 2024 revenue of $22.3 billion – down ten percent year-over-year.
Hm, maybe this is trying to hide post-pandemic contraction...
Profits were healthy, however, at over $1 billion for the quarter, a 317 percent year on year rise.
IT'S UNION TIME
There was a unionization attempt at Dell once. They laid off the entire group and moved their jobs overseas.
~~I might be a moron, but how can a business be down in revenue but up in profit?~~
Edit: confirmed moron. Their expenses were just that much lower.
But it's also tail time, right? Right?!
It sounds like Dell is just run by assholes. I don't believe for a second that Dell doesn't know where all their offices are and their plan for each of them. They seem to have picked the worst possible way to demand RTO that reveals how weak their management is. All RTO demands are short sighted and lose you the better employees that have options, but doing it the way they are causes far more employee morale damage and will hurt the company longer than if they had a clear plan for what RTO was.
Not to mention, anytime I see something neboulous about AI to solve problems without specifics I roll my eyes because it is quite obviously some idea thought up by someone who is caught in hype without any understanding of the utility of it. It reeks of some exec telling their subordinates, "I hear this new AI thing can solve all our problems, make it happen and don't come back until you have it implemented."
and lose you the better employees that have options
They don't see these as better employees, they just see costs.
Friendly reminder: We are all cogs to the machine that is capitalism regardless of what we personally believe.
It sounds like Dell is just run by assholes.
RTO is coming from Michael Dell, a millionaire who is out-of-touch with the actual people this policy is going to hurt.
I don't believe for a second that Dell doesn't know where all their offices are and their plan for each of them.
They closed a ton during covid. Many offices that remain open are touchdown only without enough space to accommodate the staff in the region.
They seem to have picked the worst possible way to demand RTO that reveals how weak their management is.
The RTO push came from the very top. Most directors cannot justify or defend it, but their job is to pass it along. Upper management doesn't give a shit about their employees.
All RTO demands are short sighted and lose you the better employees that have options, but doing it the way they are causes far more employee morale damage and will hurt the company longer than if they had a clear plan for what RTO was.
This RTO is going to effect senior employees who were hired to be local to customers then became remote. Forcing them to quit or retire means you can replace them with cheaper employees, outsource their job, or simply push their work onto the remaining staff.
Not to mention, anytime I see something neboulous about AI to solve problems without specifics I roll my eyes because it is quite obviously some idea thought up by someone who is caught in hype without any understanding of the utility of it. It reeks of some exec telling their subordinates, "I hear this new AI thing can solve all our problems, make it happen and don't come back until you have it implemented."
Management has no idea what to do with AI except buzzwords and promises for the gleefully ignorant customers asking for AI.
Agreed, it's definitely coming from the top! I didn't realize they had closed a ton of the other offices during the pandemic, but I suppose it's not surprising either. It also seemed like a lot of remote hiring happened during the pandemic?
Most of the people I know personally affected are in that category (remotely hired or relocated), and most of those people are women. Small sample size with lots of bias, but I've been pretty upset the whole situation. It definitely feels/looks like a way to quietly push a bunch of folks out... whether overtly or as a "bonus" for upper management, it has the same unfortunate effect.
I guess it is what it is, but what it is ain't good. It feels good to commiserate though, thank you stranger!
Dell specifically has been super gung ho on work from home. Michael Dell had some article in Forbes or something a couple years ago that was hyping how great WFH had been for the company. They were actually paying people to WFH since it saved the company money. Dell's business model benefitted heavily from WFH since companies had to buy more computers and peripherals to support a remote workforce.
So, the "return" to office seems like a pretty naked attempt to cause people to quit without having to pay severance.
I have an old 2014 era Dell Latitude E something and the laptop itself is alright if a little slow running no but the battery refuses to charge and you buy a new charger and it works for a little bit and then still refuse to charge again. A new battery didnt help either. So it's always tethered to the wall, which is pretty annoying.
I had an asus rog laptop where after years of daily use the power port had gotten detached from the motherboard at least for one of the connections
Disassembled it and soldered it back in place and got a few more years out of it
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
