Thread regarding Dell Inc. layoffs

@vj This is sooo true.

When is the last time that anyone ki-led themselves there to get a product release out and it actually rocked the world sales wise?

It doesn't matter in the big scheme of things.

I got the WFR a year ago. There's a good chance you are already on a list right now for your business update some weeks down the road. Take this seriously and get your resume dialed in and 100% tuned. Build a document with STAR stories for every line on your resume. Start training classes for skills may have atrophied at Dell. Start now and get one step ahead. Your future self will thank you.

@m3 agreed - its such a great feeling to have that monkey (mortgage) off your back - its one of the main reasons why folks put up with soooooo much in a place like Dell.

@pv This goes beyond increasing efficiency IMHO. The contract I mentioned explicitly states we will have 24x7 support with engineers on American soil. Weekdays we're only staffed from 8 am to 8 pm EST, weekends it's only until 6 pm.

first line managers are powerless. They're asking for more staff but being told to make it work with what you have. Become more efficient is the mantra that they're spewing. Ya, it's not a good working environment.

@nd I know the feeling. We're on violation of at least one contract that I know of besuse of low staffing levels. I pointed this out to our manager, but he's powerless and/or doesn't care, so I no longer care.

Our team is already severely understaffed. We need more people, not fewer, yet management is pushing us to the brink. I doubt they’ll cut headcount further, but if they do, it will signal an even bigger problem than we’re already facing

Guys, make sure you’ve got an exit plan in place in case Dell starts laying off. They’ve been squeezing every bit of resources lately, and they are likely waiting for government approval to buy TikTok. Corporate greed.

@m9
He might be trolling.

@g4 - how many threads are you going to whine about that in? You post the specifics of your raises whining about how you aren't getting yours when any raise >2% at Dell is doing pretty good. You're out here getting 12%, 9%, 8%, etc. Quit whining. Someone is going to figure out who you are - you've given enough intel - and put you on a WFR list

@kx I'm practically hoping for a layoff at this point as the payout from severance package likely be enough to oay off my mortgage.

Recently WFRd myself... folks the job market is cr-p but stick it out for as long as possible especially if yall have commitents like colleges fees and morgages to pay... feel sorry for yall for having to put up with the atmosphere in there mostly... it was terrible and made me sick every morning. There is light at the end of the tunnel and its away from Dell He-l.

I'm an autopilot. I go to work, but my mind is not there anymore.

@g2
It's funny because this seems to be the reply that basically every org receives.

I wonder where they are spending the money, if none of the orgs have the budget to properly run a project.

@gz You got candy? All 3 gir was 3 mire tickets I didn't have the bandwidth to properly handle.

@OP But they gave us a bag of candy on Halloween.

"why should I try to do work that an i7 or i8 is doing?"

I feel this to my very soul. Pretty much all the i6s in my org feel the same way and have bee acting accordingly. At least until the mist recent round of layoffs hit. We went from 6 i8s to just 1 and from 13 i8s to just 4 (6 layed off and 3 more quit due to increased workloads). Now we're all stepping up, not because we care about Dell, but because we can't stand the affects this is snafu is having on our friends' mental and physical health.

Sadly, and I do say this sadly.. I'm tired of being told that I'm up for promotion and that my manager has been pushing for it - which I genuinely do believe - however, this past January I was on the brink of promotion. Manager had an impromptu call with me and asked me if I'd be willing to go into office for an extra 30k. I said yes, obviously lmfao. He said ok perfect, just needed to know so I can tell xyz.

Nothing happened. Our next 1x1 a month later I brought it up and he said he was given a few REQ's he planned to use for promotions, then they basically said "wait, nevermind. we dont have the budget." This has been a yearly thing and so we talked about it for a while and he basically said that he's been adamantly pushing for me and one other person for promotion for 3 years at this point and, straight up said that he's not seeing any positive reinforcement that US employees will be promoted anytime soon. He said that the promotions that are happening are given to those overseas as it's a "bigger bang for the buck" - which is true.

My manager is the best manager I've EVER had. He's incredibly personable and actually takes time to get to know YOU. If we have to work after hours/weekends, he tells us to take our time back and let's us leave/log off early.
My 1x1's with him are always pushing an hour because most of it is chit chat and random non work related things. So yes, I absolutely believe he's been doing his best to get myself promoted.

HOWEVER, after my 1x1 this past Feb or March and was told all of this, my motivation to go "above and beyond" kind of sank. I mean, if promotions aren't in the forseable future for US employees then, why should I try to do work that an i7 or i8 is doing? I'll let the i7's and i8's take on more work or whatever, and I'll do what an i6 is supposed to do.

I can't really complain about raises for the 6 years I've been at Dell though. My first raise was 9%, second was 5.6%, 3rd was normal - 3.5 - 4th was 8%, 5th year was 12% and 2025 raise was 3.9%.

But I want a title change. I want to be an i7. It'd come with more money and at this point, I DO deserve a promotion. My motivation sank even lower once the whole management reorg took place so, idk man... I'm losing the drive or incentive to do GREAT at my job and have a mindset of "i'll do the best as possible for MY job grade, as long as I keep getting a paycheck" kind of thing

Yup.

My org for years at this point, has had no "budget" which to me is comically ironic, and hilarious; considering we are the org that literally protects Dell from hackers and very very literally is the reason

Oh, the VPN's or external firewall goes down and nobody is able to work/login anymore, and nobody is able to get to a datacenter to console in? Everyone who has access to the VPN's and firewalls can't login remotely now? Welp, looks like a pretty big problem huh?! Something that a simple OOB network could have helped with... But nope, no budget!

Then when they DO go down - If the External firewall(s) go down, the VPN's go down and NOBODY can work - guess where the blame and heat goes? To MY org! I mean cmon... Without the VPN's working, quite literally no org at Dell can work - sales included!

But nope, they have "better" things to spend money on apparently. Not my problem though. I'm just a lowly IC so whatever

yep, just working for a paycheck at this point. Not going the extra mile for anything. It's not my company, so I don't really care. I'll ride it out as long as I can. I'm guessing this is pretty much how the majority of people feel. Code has bugs, who cares, ship it. We haven't finished integration testing, who cares, ship it. The UI is ugly and isn't intuitive, who cares, ship it. This is how you bring a company to it's knees.

Tech support here. It’s getting harder to do our jobs as more people leave the team and no one gets replaced. I’m pretty sure we’ve already lost about ten people through PIPs, resignations, and promotions. At this rate, people are going to start walking out from sheer burnout.

Quote of the day: “Team, we have 8 calls holding , grab a call if you’re in AUX6.”

I'm really starting to believe the MD and JC really want us and the company to fail. I can't fathom it any other way other than they purposely want us to fail

@a6 You should see the state of the PowerFlex documentation, i have never seen so many customers complain about completely useless documntation before, its becoming a complete and utter shambles.

Its starting to become a complete mess with our team, last week on Thursday alone, we had 13 abandoned calls on Avaya 0% support lol... That tells me, people have simply given up and are doing as little as possible right now hoping to be just let go and get that redundancy payout. They let the whole Cairo office go and are now beging for people to work the Sundays for overtime pay as apoosed to TIL. The whole thing just stinks of complete an utter bad management form the top down.
Man i miss the VCE / EMC days when we hada buzz around the office and it was enjoyable work..

@d6 We got stripped of resources and then all of our workflow managers got layed off because they were "unnecessary" About 3 weeks later, after a gigantic logjam of tickets, our director managers are doing the workflow management job in addition to their regular duties. Now it's impossible to get a 1x1 because our managers are insanely busy.

The regional manager who told us during our onboarding not to do out of scope tasks got laid off recently.

Since the re-org, 70% of our tasks have been outsourced. Our tools are broken and are no longer being fixed because it’s only a very small number that use them anyway (we got the message from our sociopathic director that we are not worthy of expensive tool repairs (all the support engineers are in India) and to su-k it up. Never in my life have I been told at work that I am a nobody in such a subtle way. Not even when I worked as a cleaner when I was in college.

Back to your question. I was in a team previously that was one of the first ones that were being stripped of resources and our workflow manager treated us like a horse jockey and whipped us up by throwing tickets without asking. Was impossible to push back.

I moved to the current team, the workload was not as intense but the management are worse. No procedures, nothing.

Dell is He-l

Were losing big customers everywhere to competitors, the business feels like its not doing well! Theres support, deployment issues on a daily basis and this is just the beginning of how broken this business has become! Turning this around would need a miracle, its not going to be an easy task! So this is only going to continue to worsen! Hang on tight, the job market isn't great, if you can find work at another company than 100% go! Do not waste ur lifes at Dell or worrying about Dell....Fix your future and move forward as this company does NOT appreciate anyone! We should all show the same level of respect back and unite!

@ac+1k8xcznmb An SVP actuallu told is in a brown bag if people are not happy they need to vote with thier feet.Managers have actually told team if we dont like it leave.

Management: You can say no to unreasonable asks.
Me: I got an unreasonable ask and I said no.
Management three weeks later: Yeah, go ahead and do that task ASAP.

@at - if you've been referred to as a "warm body", management doesn't think you're skilled.

@a5 I always hated the term ‘back fill’ Why not say fill? It sounds like you’re putting someone in a grave. But then since management likes to use terms like warm bodies to refer to skilled employees I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
And you will never hear the word human uttered in our HR offices.

Yeah our manager had basically told us to stay busy and make sure we are logging all of our time properly so we can prove we were all working hard but still missing multiple deadlines per week.

Are you we are talking about the same company, because I sure as he-l haven't seen any morale issues being acknowledge. On the contrary there are people that have been told to su-k it up or look elsewhere.

@a6 Leadership knows that the service level will decline and that quality in the field will suffer. It's the same principle as dramatically slashing the level of customer service and 'generosity' in things like taking product return and issuing credit memos for CSAT situations. Dell knows the changes adversely affect customers, but the idea is that the entire industry is dropping its level of customer service , so customers don't have any leverage or other options. Enshittification is baked into the long term plan.

We’re just rearranging the furniture on the titanic.. still gonna sink no matter where your at.

As someone who's watching the training and documentation groups being slashed, all in the hopes that AI agents will fix things, I'm very concerned that upper management is betting on AI being the salvation. In the interim, we're going to ship products with inadequate training and poor documentation. That'll just lead to increased service costs, especially on the XE line so hopefully, once service costs increase, someone will ask why. Hopefully...

Of course, this all goes back to the analyst from Raymond James asking the first question during the analyst day and pointing out that Dell's been boosting EPS by cutting expenses, not boosting product margins. Hate to break it to the ELT, but you gotta spend money to make money and hollowing out the support functions is a foolhardy choice in the long run.

not to mention no backfills anytime soon