I get that companies have the right to dictate location policies, but I wish they'd grow a spine and actually say it up front rather than play games like these to force employees to resign. But I guess then they'd have to follow the rules and offer stuff like unemployment benefits and severance where required.
In most US jurisdictions a material change to employment conditions is grounds for an unemployment claim even if the employee voluntarily resigns. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing requiring in office for a remote job, or what Dell did would constitute this.
This also removes the loophole of a company reducing an employee's salary to minimum wage rather than laying them off. They could still quit and get unemployment.
Same, it also lines up culture internally. If you say you’re an in-office company up front, you know the people you hire can at least tolerate (even enjoy!) in-person work. I don’t think people realize how the minority of people that enjoy office work, sudden RTO policies also suck. Maybe 80% of people that come in are unhappy, don’t want to be there, and don’t want to participate in any of the office stuff some people like.
I don't get the "force employees to resign" meme. I resigned from my last job because aspects of it were shitty. But my employer wanted me to continue working there. We could negotiate some things but not others and eventually the incompatibility became too much.
I think I'm more effective at my job in certain conditions, they disagree. I don't get the histrionics and accusations about an employer's intentions. At a certain point it's an important adult thing to be able to recognize you're just in disagreement with another party over something subjective, and you're not being victimized.
Yeah this'll really attract the best and brightest to Dell! The leading supplier of mid tier office PCs! They'll be loaded with the best engineering talent in the world!
That's like saying the best and brightest won't work for Dell because they're looking for C programmers, or Java programmers, or programmers with a frontend preference, or backend preference. Totally orthogonal. The right people will self select into or out of the situation like any other aspect of a job description. Thinking the "best" talent is defined as being like you is just solipsism.
I wonder if we need an entire generation of middle managers to retire before the workplace catches up to the remote working tools and methods that have been around for a decade now.
They are looking to leverage labour into a weaker position. It's not generational, it's institutional.
Some companies acknowledge, support, and empower those who generate the value and fully embrace the servant leadership ideals, most do not.
The biggest impact AI will have is empowering those in leadership positions to further extend their leverage against labour to drive down compensation and working conditions.
I believe that this will create a vacuum for smaller, more agile organisations empowered by the likes of AI and employees who are motivated and appreciated to emerge and dominate.
The free market should consign the tie-wearing corporate performative productivity dinosaurs to history. Only results matter. Nimble startups with ~1 - 10 employees + AI + contracting with other companies can run rings around the average 100-person corporate team.
> A survey of 5,458 Americans that Bentley University recently conducted with Gallup shows that your own employees’ answers — their attitudes and expectations — might vary widely depending on the generational cohort.
> Everyone wants a four-day workweek. The survey asked what actions employers could take to increase employees’ well-being. The No. 1 answer was to offer a four-day 40-hour workweek in place of a five-day 40-hour workweek. Overall, 77% of respondents said this would improve their well-being. But among younger workers ages 18 to 29, a whopping 82% favored a shorter workweek.
> That finding was presented to a group of 25 CEOs, none of whom saw a four-day workweek as viable. However, some companies that have participated in experiments with four-day 32-hour workweeks have seen good results for well-being and productivity and have made the change permanent. Older executives might not see employee wellness quite the same way as younger employees — and leaders who figure out how to successfully manage in ways that better support well-being might have a recruitment edge.
Like remote work, even in the face of data, the 4 week workweek is considered "unviable." But it eventually will be as those in positions of leadership and power retire or age out. Make change where you can, otherwise, hold fast.
Well, vote with your wallets. Buy remote (some ppl on HN are in purchasing/leadership positions now).
If proper remote first companies can out-execute in-office companies and show better revenue performance, doesn't matter what middle management says. In Dell's case, a company that doesn't need expensive office space and HCOL employees should be able to provide cheaper office equipment than Dell as well.
I feel like there's a difference between someone's subconscious bias causing promotion to be harder than it should be, and an official policy that remote workers are second-class.
I don't think it's possible for them to think they are unbiased. They are probably thinking they are very smart by trying to sit on two chairs at once - declare they are "remote friendly" and force people on-site at the same time. They are clearly biased towards onsite work, but they don't dare to say it in the open.
This is a classic response when numbers are down. From what i could find for the full fiscal year of 2024, Dell’s revenue was $88.4 billion, down 14% from fiscal year 2023. The operating income for the year was $5.2 billion and non-GAAP operating incom was $7.7 billion, both showing a decrease of 10% and 11% YoY, respectively.
I have been to Dell in Round Rock a few times, I used to manage the build and deployment of hardware for a sw dev co that spend about 4 million each quarter on hardware so I would get invited to training events - I was actually there for 9/11 - fun times. They believe in cost cutting to the bone. Keep in mind this was 20 years ago, their facilities were still new, and that we were spending $20M/yr, back in 2000. I came for a tour and our inside rep sat at what could barely be considered a desk in what could have passed as wide hallway, and she would back her chair into the person sitting behind her on a regular basis. No one has an office, they have small conference rooms you can book if you need to talk privately. Who would want to come back to that? And whose home office wouldn't be better than that?
I have been home based since 2006 and I wouldn't be opposed to going into the office under the right circumstances. And there are things you have to do when you are remote that just naturally occur when you are in the office with your peers day-to-day, but it doesn't impact my work. Maybe if you are more junior and rely on your peers more it might impact it that way but usually ppl seek me out for help instead of the other way around.
Since the 1970s the prevailing logic in most c-suites in the US (and really, the rest of the Anglosphere, but especially the US) is that companies exist solely to "create" (I'd say transfer, but regardless) value for shareholders, really by any means necessary.
If they can make money letting you work from home, they will. Unfortunately most companies have long-term leases or ownership of commercial real estate, which is getting less and less valuable by the minute. The value of these obligations outweighs the value created by not having to have people work in the office. So back the workers go.
They care about those things insofar as they're legally obligated to and/or they can be mined for positive PR. All of them would sell your grandma into slavery for $5 in shareholder value if they knew they wouldn't be penalized more than $4 for it.
It's also a great way to distract people (read: shareholders) from bad performance in other areas. Set yourself up some obtainable goals, and obtain them!
I was told something like this and I worked at IBM, a few years before the pandemic.
They decided they wanted everyone to work on site in a smaller number of offices. Some folks were just laid off, many others were told they had to move or find a new job. But they made an exception for me and said I could keep working remote - but would not be eligible for promotion unless I moved to work on site. I switched jobs and doubled my pay. (Still remote.)
Genius idea, so the people who want to work hard and get ahead would leave, and people that don't care about anything but paycheck and can't find anything better will stay and bide the time, doing the absolute minimum not to get fired. While likely working on side gigs.
Everyone in my office is back to working in the building. Working from home is only granted to exceptional employees for exceptional reasons. I only Know of one person still working from home and she’s five months pregnant. We may say that this is a bad thing for Dell because they’re not going to be able to attract top talent, but I think this is the direction most companies are going. Either work from the office, or you don’t work. Maybe the highflyers will still be able to demand certain things, but for 95% of us, there will come a point when we simply don’t have a choice.. Companies are like governments, they rarely back down or admit they were wrong.
As a corollary, if a company is awful to work with before you've signed anything, they're telling you they'll be awful to work with after you've signed on.
Dell isn't growing much anymore so promotion opportunities will be few and far between anyway regardless of work location. In organizations like this, usually the only way to have a chance at promotion beyond a mid-grade IC role is if your boss leaves. It's fine to take a job at a place like this to gain some experience and have a steady paycheck for a few years, but you should do it with one eye looking outside for a better growth opportunity.
Honestly if they're still offering remote roles with this being the ultimatum, I'd rather take the remote with no promotion and live happily. I think most people have figured out by now that if you want a promo, you have to job hop.
It’s funny to see how scared these companies are to just let go remote workers. Almost as if… they’d lose their best employees and be left with nothing but HR…
Or do no work at all and keep depositing checks until they eventually terminate you. This takes a lot longer than you think at any large dysfunctional organization.
Well yes but you're going to have to have traded on your reputation to enter a position where they trust you so freely and it's going to take a frustratingly long time to rebuild that reputation afterwards.
I can tell you from first-hand experience, if I'm not doing much work from home, I'm doing even less in the office. I used to just walk around and bullshit with my colleagues instead of doing work.
So it's like a soft-power move to get people to RTO without directly mandating it?
It sounds like mgmt really wants people to RTO and has realized that de jure RTO backfires so it's trying to figure out the right "incentives" to get the desired results. There's this element of, "we really think you're that dumb," that they seem to keep deluding themselves with.
It's the kind of work that matters. Also, Remote work may be more popular with certain kinds of employees, like young parents, people from remote areas, with disabilities, so this could be a case of indirect discrimination. But that's my European perspective.
Discrimination per se is never illegal, otherwise you couldn't use things like education, experience, or skill level to decide who to hire/promote. It's discrimination against a protected class which is (often/normally, depending on where you live) illegal.
While there are protected classes that benefit from flexible working locations (people with some disabilities, for example), working from home in and of itself isn't a protected class, so there's no real chance for a lawsuit on that grounds.
It might be worth reviewing whether you're qualified to pontificate on this; not all comments are "constructive": this one spreads misinformation. Please comment on things where you have a bare minimum of expertise. Charges of discrimination by employers can only be for the enumerated reasons of:
> "because of your race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity, and sexual orientation), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information."[0]
Things like whether you are working remote or in-office, your political beliefs/affiliation, personality, where you choose to live, what color you died your hair, whether you re-heat salmon in the office microwave...these are generally not covered by charges of "discrimination" in the USA.
> It might be worth reviewing whether you're qualified to pontificate on this; not all comments are "constructive": this one spreads misinformation.
I think this is a pretty harsh framing. They directly ask for input from someone with expertise (indirectly making it known that their existing belief is not backed by relevant expertise). Then they state what their existing belief is. It reads to me like an invitation for someone to correct their existing belief.
It was overly harsh. I'd apologize for that. But I'd have a less-strong reaction if they said "What do employment lawyers have to say about this? Could it be a discrimination lawsuit?"
Instead, they said:
> "Seems like a pretty obvious discrimination lawsuit."
Which is the difference between lazy inquiry and spreading misinformation.
No, but there might still be basis for a lawsuit. For example, if a worker can prove that they need to be remote due to a medical condition, that might make this discrimination on that medical condition.
