Thread regarding Dell Inc. layoffs

never said we did nothing, we work hard. Maybe it's all not in your utopian development environment. You're more than welcome to show us how it should be done. I'd be very interested to see how you would handle our environment. Many have tried and failed. You sound like you're top notch so you could figure it out I'm sure.

@jd And therein lies the problem. You get paid for doing nothing.

actually, not at all. I get paid either way.

@gw The truth hurts doesn't it.

@gf Thanks for being a di-khead.

I've worked on some teams that did it right, like the old Cloud IQ team and I've worked for others that did not. Some never started with automation right out of the gate and as the years went by, it was tough to make up for lost time. You would need 6 months worth of sprints to automate all the test cases. Just not enough people or time to get to Nirvana.

@gf yeah that's how it is SUPPOSED to be, but rarely do we engineer in a perfect world where we have time to do all of that. QA doesn't happen because execs want the next feature before we are done with the current one. Agile+scrum doesnt just magic man hours into existence. It'd be perfect if we had green field development and more time, but most of dell is brown field and poorly scoped/timed. Anyways, get back to what you do best, playing the victim and yelling at a world that confuses you.

@fy @fy Thanks for proving the point. You just proclaimed to the world:

• "Some teams never had automation or even did agile."

"They're don't have any automation [experience.]"

• "QA was done by people in a QA team."

-"Most of the issues are customer configurations that we have never seen."

Sounds to me like you have it backwards; Q/A teams are probably doing all the development.

I laughed out loud when you said most of you have never done automation or agile before. OMG, you work for one of the largest IT tech companies in he world and you've never done automation or agile???!!! NO WONDER our products are years behind the competition, quality is in the toilet, and customers literally don't want anything to do with them. All excuses! Engineering is a joke.

No, not true. Some teams never had automation or even did agile. They're being asked to do it now and don't have any automation nor the people to do it. For some, it got pushed off. The QA was done by people in a QA team. Most of the issues are integration related, or customer configurations that we have never seen. It's issues that are tough to find unless you have every customer configuration out there. Perhaps you work in an area that is not difficult.

@dy Good summary below but I think you just admitted the quiet part out loud.

Aren't Engineers supposed to build in Q/A and automation pass/fail scripts as part of each sprint work? In other words, in any other software development environment on planet Earth, you don't move to the next set of stories and tasks until all your current stories are automated and pass Q/A?

Ohh...silly me...I forgot, Dell Engineers have never heard of Agile or Scrum or Scrum@Scale or sAFE or LeSS or DA or Kanban or Scrumban or AUP or any other modern software development methodology. You're still coding in caves.

Shirt Answer: they got rid of Sudhir

The trend in ISG is to still push out releases even though there are known critical bugs. Their rationale is that if we're always fixing bugs, we'll never release. So, many times we have pushed out a release only to have to give it a status of 'not recommended for download'. We push it up, and then say don't take this. But hey, we released it and it looks good for the India management teams in ISG. It needs a patch in two weeks and then it's all hands on deck. It's such a lousy development environment, but this is the way they do things and they're perfectly fine with this. The real problems with this start at the top. Teams are low on developers, which they want because the feel that with automation we should have less developers and no QA. Don't get me started on the automation that we don't have. We would need a year to get the level where it would need to be and doing only that, but unfortunately, we need more developers to help write the automation. They feel that we don't need more developers, we need more AI to write the automation. So AI writes the automation that you don't have so that you automate the testing that you need to reduce the amount of bugs each release. I guess the answer is more AI. See where we're going with this.

@c2 power flex?

Big cleanup is happening atm... VP, half of senior directors... Sadly yes man crowd still promoted.

PowerFlex, i have never spoken to so many frustrated customers trying to install and upgrade that nightmare of a product. A complete and utter broken mess..

@b8 Triggered much? You just proved the point to everyone here that engineering at Dell (well, you anyway...) have absolutely no understanding of how the development process should work.

Even if Dell had Product Managers, which Dell does not, they should NEVER EVER EVER give two sh--s about what "executives want." They should care about what the customers want. Their job is to interpret customer problems and translate those into requirements. We don't do that here at Dell. And if by some miracle you do get a couple of customer based requirements, it takes Engineering 5 years to develop a single feature.

Now, go develop something.

@bm Excuses excuses my friend. ISG hasn't delivered sh-t for years. And what they did finally deliver had to be pulled back off the shelf.

The answer in ISG to every single question you asked is they over corrected reducing our headcount. Most of us are barely treading water

btw if you think bugs everywhere... just wait 6 months when "pseudo devs who cant code" will spam AI generated stuff.

Seriously so much uhhs and ahhs about windsurf here, but when you ask anyone who actually can code what they think about free tier models :D

Prepare popcorn and look for jobs :/

If you think engineers have any say in what they build or how, consider how much sales has a say in what they sell.
Engineers are told the “vision” which is just whatever our competitors already do. Then the implement it with one hand tied because of the “process” and the other tied because the product managers don’t really know how to interpret what executives want.
Also, fu-k off and go sell something.

1. CI/CD is ancient and overcomplicated.. technical debt everywhere - years of neglect
2. No one cares about quality and you get punished for raising bugs aka "delaying the release"
3. Any change goes through so many layers of BS... no one up there understand either customers or software
4. Roadmap? so you could point fingers and prove "leaders" they failed?
5. see 4..

I see funny stuff in power... only yesman crowd is promoted, they dont care if ideas make sense, but they must be liked or come from certain groups in company.

Agree, most of my customers are still using 15-year-old legacy stuff from EMC. They won't touch anything Dell created internally. And I'll be showing the door if I ever pitch it. It's always excuses, excuses, excuses from Engineering.

Answers:

Why can't engineering ever release any projects on time?
...
They can, but when priorities change features are added, projects become delayed.

Why is anything you do release full of bugs and half complete?
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Software is notoriously buggy, always comes with errata sheets.
Time to market is very important, so v1.0 is less featured than v1.1 or v2.0

Why are we as a company years and years behind the competition when it comes to full-stack enterprise IT solutions?
...
Fair comment - in some respects, ahead of the competition, in some respects behind.
One of the reasons EMC was put up for sale was that they couldn't keep up with market innovation of that period.

Why can we never see a roadmap with anything on it when requested?
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You can. Contact your product group leads, get a signed NDA. Book an executive briefing. Engage your OEM rep.

Why is there seemingly never any accountability to address failed projects or missed deadlines?
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There is, but it's complicated. KInd of like sales folks who miss numbers, lose customers.

You must be talking about the cyber recovery product.

easy answer.

we are a complex commodity reseller with a robust supply chain, with better than competition 'perception' of service support, and brand identity. we have economies of scale for purchasing power and supply chain to navigate global evolutions... that's the strength, and the fundamental weakness

engineering doesn't really come into the picture, that's Nvidia, that's AMD, that's Intel, that's Foxconn, that's Wistron, maybe EMC SW prior to purchase, drive manufacturers, memory manufacturers. all the source commodities we package together is where the engineering happens, what you're seeing as engineering struggle is 'my name is jeff' struggling at building Legos.

The answer to all of the above is -> Indians.

I have a problem selling the “game-changing” software. We’ve been spending so much time talking about the software which admittedly feels like tu-d but someone up there has a different view.

It isn't the fault of people who work in Engineering. You really think that those people want to do this?

More gas lighting.

The answer is obvious: Dell is a low tier company so they can't pay for top talent.
The good ones quickly move on out of dell.

unfortunately dell tries to gas light it's employees as if they are working for some tech mecca.