Why can’t they swing the sword once and be done be it?
10 replies (most recent on top)
Piecing together from a friend with a high level contact and what has been said in these forums, this was a very intentional strategy to fu-k morale to save money.
RTO is triple purpose. Commercial real estate is in the sh----r since Covid and wfh. 1) It counts as a liability on the balance sheets unless they can fill the buildings and justify it’s cheaper than renting to shareholders. 2) Local cities have begun to insist they fill the buildings as per their tax break deals. They didn’t enforce during Covid and wfh for a couple of years. But now they want to be sure Dell is actually employing locals not all outsourcing to India. 3) RTO, never ending reorgs and layoffs is a strategy to make it toxic so people leave to save on severance.
On that last point they hired a golfing buddy from Bain for $50 million and he left after a year. But he gave them their money’s worth because he calculated they can save 2 billion in salaries and severance by getting people to quit by being sh---y to employees. This is a pretty new, unusual and dastardly way to go about downsizing. And they didn’t count on the terrible job market forcing people to hunker down.
The read to trickle layoffs is the same financial games as always to make that quarterly report look good. Spending $350+ million on severance in a quarter adds up. Avoiding the warn act so they can make it seem strategic instead of desperate with a bad news story is a bonus. I’m sure if they dump 10k like Intel in a day share price would tank.
You could call it all smart, or evil. Take your pick.
I wish transparency was a value for us
Totally trying to avoid the WARN act. Yet they’ve probably laid off more people than any tech company this year.
In my experience, layoffs never come as a single event. Leadership says "we have revenue of x, cost structure of y, income of z, so we need to reduce cost to get income where we need it", but reducing heads ALWAYS reduces revenue, so it's always a downward spiral, even in the best plans - and Dell does not appear to have any idea of what the plan is here. Really insane. Wall Street usually rewards leadership for layoffs because they like companies reducing costs, but this indiscriminate cutting is not going to help the company.
I always thought they were trying to avoid WARN act requirements
Like most said.
wfr. skeleton crew at HR is backed-up. pause. repeat
now and then throw in a window-maker: 5 days rto being the latest
Don't know the end game here. Certain areas are doing good for sales. Certain areas not so good for sales. The workplace unbearable hypothesis is correct where people will just quit. They can do workforce reduction anytime they want. Making the atmosphere toxic avoids the severance packages. They are getting rid of people and watching overall sales to see when they've overdone it.
Offshoring jobs is also playing into this. I've seen people on calls from outside the U.S. You'd never know where they come from. Be careful wishing from WFH. If you can do it working from home, people making 1/10th of your salary can also do it from their home. I hate it but I see the reality.
They have no idea what they are doing in MOST facets. But they 1000% know what they are doing here. It came out that 5 Day RTO is about “thinning the herd”. That’s why, drip layoffs and sh-t morale all around. I’d say it can’t get worse but I said that the last 4-5 times.
Because if they can make the workplace unbearable they can get people to quit. Which saves them having to pay out severance packages and/or unemployment.
Because they are winging it and really have no idea what they are doing