Dell: Return to office or give up promotions | Hacker News Reader

Dell: Return to office or give up promotions

newsnationnow.com

62 pointsbbzjk751 comments

I was told this before the pandemic. The whole pandemic kind of helped me out in that respect (at least so far).

The problem with most office mandates is that they just require a person be in an office, any office. In my experience, this means it is very possible to be in an office with a bunch of people that do completely different jobs, so all day is spent on the phone. If I need to be on the phone all day anyway, I might as well be at home where it’s quiet, so I can hear people, they can hear me, and there aren’t any distractions.

Forcing people to relocate just to sit alone in a cubicle on a phone all day doesn’t improve productivity, it just makes people upset.

I do think meeting people in person has a lot of value, but office mandates aren’t the only way to handle that.

Yep. Current employer is doing the same. Team member goes into the office 3 days a week, and all our calls are now very noisy with other people in the background. There's only two of us in this location so all our team meetings are video calls anyways. What point is there to going back in at all in that situation?!

There’s no real point, not in a physical science way

It’s all contrived political points; contracts, socialized norms the elders in charge refuse to negotiate.

The stubbornness and selfishness of the gerontocracy, to serve the dying and dead is gross. Some kind of mental illness fueled by their huffing leaded gas and growing up in world war/Cold War paranoia made it so they cannot escape the idea life is 24/7 militarized economic production.

Why just elders? I see modern start ups and companies, ran by 30/40yo C-suite mandating return to the office.

Elders here I think means “the kind of people who care more about personal status than any actual value to the company”, so that means most C-suite asses.

This is always funny to hear and I agree.

I have worked remote for almost 20 years.

Just because remote is new to the masses doesn’t mean remote or hybrid is new.

Some companies started in person.

They are only so efficient in person let alone remote

They learned it from somewhere.

I think a lot of it has to do with justifying real estate holding, which have likely fallen significantly in value since the pandemic, as remote work had increased. Selling at the worst time is likely out of the question, so they try to make it worth holding on to.

Even before the pandemic, I went into the office mostly to work alone at my desk or go into a conference room alone to zoom with someone in another office.

The only benefit I got out of the office was lunches and hallway conversations, which do have some value to be fair.

The place I work did RTO so I spend all day talking to people across the county and exactly 0 people in office. The main coworker I work with is outside DC and we spend a portion of the day on the phone together. Same as before.

This. If employers are asking employees to sacrifice commute and residence flexibility, the least they can do is also sacrifice hiring and team composition flexibility, so that you actually reap the benefits of in-person collaboration.

Our company has two major locations, with redundant datacenters at each site. The colleagues I work with the most are at the other site, so going into the office does me no good. Now TPTB might decide to shut down the other datacenter (BC/DR be damned), but that's a good five years away.

You lost me with your last sentence.

TPTB = The Powers That Be BC = Business Continuity DR = Disaster Recovery

Having talked to many friends at Dell (interns and full time), I have a few observations about this:

1. I know many people on HN hate the idea of RTO, and for good reasons, but one downside I saw of remote was that junior engineers struggled to get mentorship and guidance as well as an in person setting. A lot of the learning junior engineers get is through water cooler talk, informal suggestions, and off the cuff comments, rather than stuff brought up in stand-ups or asynchronous slack messaging

2. Dell already seems to have a culture of trying to avoid promoting junior engineers quickly/for multiple years, through avenues such as the rotation program which ensure you don't get promoted for at least 2 years.

With regard to your second point, that seems to be entirely the fault of Dell - no? If they wanted to encourage junior engineers with promotions, maybe they should, you know, promote them? Rather than inventing silly games and trapping them in loops.

I understand your first point however. Can’t imagine how interns and early engineers are supposed to learn without having a highly available set of mentors to learn from.

I totally agree with what you are saying, My point was that this policy just seems to be another one of those policies to get them to not be promoted. More hoops you may call it

Ah indeed, seems we are in agreement.

I have zero trouble mentoring juniors remotely. These are kids who grew up playing videogames online and it's extremely easy to mentor them via regular teams call. Being unable to do so is a skill issue the part of senior devs to properly leverage modern collaboration tools.

> via regular teams call

I actually find that mentorship happens best in irregular interactions, as the help is needed.

Secondarily, I find that personal connection/rapport is invaluable in delivering feedback, and is possible but more difficult to do via screens.

Then they or you can slack call irregularly...

>irregular interactions

You mean like, randomly messaging me on Teams?

Yep that's one way

Is that on your resume? "Highly skilled in properly leveraging modern collaboration tools."

Wow, sounds impressive, haven’t seen that before, tell me more.

I'm really awesome at Zoom.

RTO it's such an emotional affair that most people just can't think rationally. Exemplar motivated reasoning.

I work in a hybrid mode and it's so obvious to everyone how in person communication is more effective. People will often say "let's discuss this once I get to the office" all the time.

If working in an office actually meant in-person communication, people might be more okay with it

I'm not coming back to an office just to talk to the rest of my team on the computer anyways because they are distributed in different provinces and countries

That's dumb

>I know many people on HN hate the idea of RTO

The six months we were WFH were the worst six months of my career. Nothing got done.

Granted, I am in a specialized field and most of my work requires calibrated equipment in purpose-built labs but so many people just wanted to sit at home and click around on Digikey and complain about SolidWorks being slow on their laptops.

I could never do the kind of engineering that doesn't result in a physical object that exists in the real world. The group photo at the end, standing next to a new thing that nobody else on Earth has ever seen, makes dealing with all of the PMPs worth it.

edit: and software guys need to put on some god damned clothes and come into the office, too. I'm not paid enough to troubleshoot over email or slack the hacked-together nightmare of a virtual environment that "works on my machine" but throws ten thousand errors when set up on a test stand.

I can't relate to the sentiment here. I also do the kind of work that results in physical objects in the real world. Conservatively, 95% of that work can be done with an SSH connection or the postal system. Most of the rest are fine with a webcam to a bench somewhere. The remaining day every 3 months or so I'm fine meeting in-person, but I don't want to organize my life around it.

My experience is that the infrastructure you need to do effective remote work is also the same infrastructure you need to debug issues in the field, so you may as well build it upfront.

How do you measure temperatures on each board revision after it comes back from SMT fully populated to make sure there are no shorts as you do initial system bringup over SSH and a webcam?

I am unaware of any remotely-controlled temperature probes.

Just last month we had a board come in to I&T with a short on the N1V5 rail and due to me, the designer, actually being there I knew it could only be in a handful of locations so I took the thermal camera and swept the board, found a hot component, and then found a solder ball beneath the pins of the IC and sent it back for rework.

I only found it by realizing that specific component almost never fails and never fails short anyways, then knowing that it has a bottom thermal dissipation pad where any excess solder application can squeeze out, and then rotating the microscope to its maximum deflection and peeking underneath the component at an angle of 55-60 degrees. https://imgur.com/a/1hFBNEL

30 minutes. Compared to days of back and forth and waiting online.

Techs don't know the board and the components, that's not their job. Engineers do-- that's their job.

Or is doing that basic and simple engineering work "for the schmucks to dumb to wfh?"

I can see it now. Me sitting at home squinting at a webcam feed shouting "ok move it over to the left, a little more, a little more" debating in slack like a moron with all of the other prima donnas too important to drive in to work as my techs cuss me out for being such a loser.

My techs don't do anything unless I do it first, document it, do it again to check the documentation, and then observe them doing it to make sure my documentation covers everything. And I mean everything, from short tests to the final cleanup of the workstation.

You mail it or come in for those few days you need to verify things. Are you spinning new revs every day or something?

Honestly, I don't mind if you want to work in the office. Maybe it makes your job easier, but what I've found is that for the tasks I do it just adds a commute for no reason.

I agree with your first point.

In my experience, it takes a special kind of junior engineer and a commitment from the company to have them mentored successfully in a remote environment. Whereas an in-person environment has tons of opportunities to learn not just the explicit skills (how to write a for loop on Python, how do deploy our software) but the implicit skills (how to move around the terminal, how to architect a solution in a consistent way). That's to say nothing of the knowledge osmosis that happens when you can overhear conversations about adjacent parts of the application. (Yes, you can make this all explicit and available online, but that is a culture shift.)

There are other ways to deal with these lacks (on-sites, focused on onboarding docs, regular office hours) but they take more effort. Whether they are worth the trade-off (you certainly have access to a wider pool of labor when you hire remote) depends on the company, industry, and job market.

If I worked for Dell I'd hear this as "Return to office or get a job elsewhere for insta-promotion."

Draconian workplace rules just lose your best people, haven't companies learnt this yet?

Lose them to where? Anecdotally, it's almost impossible to find a new job right now even for exceptional employees.

The current market will not last forever and once it turns around we're probably looking at a Great Resignation on steroids given the pent up demand for changing jobs.

> get a job elsewhere

I haven't asked, but they're probably okay with that too.

It is incredible they are so openly saying that promotions are not based on work performance. That certainly gives me no motivation to perform better.

Act your wage wasn't just for minimum wage workers. Promotions have always been about brown nosing and blowing smoke. If you're just really good at your job you will be underpaid and overworked without the promotion.

Do they still get raises? My whole career I was a developer, it's what suited me best and it's what I wanted. A couple of times I considered going for tech lead or architect but those were parts of the job I didn't want to do. And oh hell no to management. If you're telling me I would get to work from home and not be badgered into going into management, I say sign me up.

At functional companies, raises and promotions are both connected to scope of contribution.

Employees accept work-from-home & look for a work-from-home job. New applicants see on-site only and apply elsewhere.

Choices:

1. Hire desperate people who will come in 2. Accept that high-talent staff are unavailable to your company 3. Pay 30% more than the market for on-site staff

I’ve been saying this too.

I would go as far as to suggest that any CEO who stubbornly and credulously insists on RTO from an ideological perspective should be treated with a healthy level of distrust by the company’s shareholders.

Why else would you deliberately choose to reduce your talent pool, be forced to pay more for that talent pool than your competitors, and result in a lower employee NPS, which in turn makes it harder to retain them.

RTO only works when WFH rates are low and the talent pool is forced to accept RTO. However we crossed that rubicon.

Now insisting on it as a CEO just makes you look incompetent.

Most companies only promote once or twice per year. But if you leave, you can get promoted any time of year.

IE promotions and compensation are not performance based so don’t bother doing more than the bare minimum?

It's about the clearest way that they can tell you that they value your presence more than your skill without actually saying it.

[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39728252

Blocked in Europe, here's an archive - https://archive.is/PWZvN

Incoming layoff notices. Stupid decisions are usually explained by a desire to get voluntary resignations.

It shouldn’t be, but this is a pretty honest take and message.

Visibility is different and harder remotely.

Isn't that a given? Out of sight, out of mind.

Once again companies fail to recognise that people will read this as "build skills at dell, then leave".

This sounds like the thing a strong SWE union would prevent. Shame we're all ninja rockstar 1000000000x devbros.

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