• ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

    Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

    Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

    Holy corporate oppression, Batman! That’s a shitty deal no matter which option you choose.

    I’m glad they’ve got themselves into a sticky situation.

    Also, this observation was funny (in a sad way):

    One person said they’d spoken with colleagues who had chosen to go hybrid, and those colleagues reported doing work in mostly empty offices punctuated with video calls with people who were in other mostly empty offices.

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      One major downside of hybrid working really is that if you are having a meeting where even a single person is not there, then the entire meeting may as well be a video call. If you are on a video call, then why do you need to be in the office for it?

      At my job we work with physical objects, so being in office is a requirement at least part of the time, but if I’m just going to be in meetings for most of the day, there is no way I’m going into the office just to sit on video calls all day.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      You mean to tell me, three days a week, they have to:

      • wake up extra hours early
      • pack a lunch or plan to pay for one
      • put on hard pants
      • drive their own vehicle in traffic, with their own gas and wear/tear
      • pay for their own parking.
      • do the exact same work in their designated space
      • drive back home in traffic 9 hours later

      All for the same pay and several hours away from my family, home, or bed?

      No fucking thanks.

      Going remote was the best fucking raise I ever got, and it didn’t cost them a dime.

    • 0x0@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      So you could just got he the office days straight and don’t show up for the rest of the year… interesting… but considering promotions are everything but lately i’d just go remote anyway.

  • UmeU@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    And Dell said “Great, thanks, saved us a ton on severance packages and allowed us to replace our high paid tenured employees with hungry graduates who are prepared to work themselves to death for peanuts”

    • ameancow@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Truth.

      Been job hunting in similar fields for a while and as a middle-aged person, I simply cannot get a callback from any of these companies, then when you actually visit them and see some of their workforce, you rarely see anyone over late-20’s, and it’s all these high-energy, eager-to-please, eager-to-work-for-recognitionbucks, fresh-outta-college kids who can be exploited and turned over rapidly.

      I am job hunting because the previous company I managed was bought out, downsized, and all the senior employees making more than entry level wages were cut. This is happening everywhere.

      More and more technology, overseas outsourcing options, and general service/gig systems for filling job openings has left companies treating workers as disposable as toilet paper.

      This is because almost every business is now part of a huge chain of ownership, and the shareholders at the top, groups of very rich old white dudes, just gather together in their hooded cloaks and look at the bars and graphs every month and decide what investments are to be amputated, and which to be kept. Before going back to their private sex islands.

      • Lets_Eat_Grandma@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        High paying jobs with tons of new graduates have an oversaturated supply problem. It’s no surprise that when people figure out that becoming a software developer is easy street to 150k+++ WFH that there was a huge rush to get those jobs… now that there are TONS and TONS of young junior devs there is no shortage to hire someone for near minimum wage.

        Why pay 400k for a senior developer when you can hire a mid-level for ~100k to be a manager, and 4 juniors for 60k a piece, and augment them with chatgpt to help them learn what they are skill gapped by.

        Plus junior devs are so desperate you can force them to come into the office, something the dev divas ten years ago refused to do back when there was a huge shortage of coders.

        • ameancow@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Absolutely correct, I watched this happen to our tech team before I was also thrown in the chipper.

          And it doesn’t help that a lot of the young people trying to get into coding and tech fields are not what you would call titans of confidence and charisma, these are mostly introverted and thoughtful people who have studied most of their lives under the belief that meritocracy exists, and they can prove themselves in the business world by doing great work and being a good employee.

          Meanwhile glance over at the sales side of the building and there are people there making six figures a year who do next to nothing but party and tell lewd jokes, but are absolutely invulnerable to layoffs and downsizing as long as they can talk to clients and joke about sports with the CEO.

          The disillusionment around the business world is real and unsustainable.

          • LordCrom@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            God my last sales team were annoying. You can hear their bullshit from the floor above. They never shut up.

            • ameancow@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Every job I’ve had I’ve ended up becoming a liaison of sorts between the sales teams and the operational teams because I seem to be the Daywalker, who can walk between worlds and communicate with the techy nerds, take their issues to the loud sales assholes and make it all work.

              It’s not an enjoyable role but it always earned me high marks because nobody else can stomach it.

    • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      who are prepared to work themselves to death for peanuts

      …while having no idea what they are doing

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    This would be a handy way to get rid of half your staff, but the people you chase away are usually the ones you want to keep. As per the Dead-Sea Effect, the ones who will leave are the ones who generally are more able to, who will be your most employable people, and thus your most talented. Usually.

    Making work suck, and letting the best half of the staff bail, seems like stupid and a game show.

    • Etterra@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I read somewhere that convincing people to quit was party of some companies’ plan when demanding return to office, but as you pointed out, they probably lost their top 10% or more in the quality workers group. So do that introvert parasites can have their “corporate culture” (or more critically, justify leading that bigass office building).

  • macrocephalic@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    They work in tech, promotions are achieved by moving employers. Internal mobility is always terrible in tech companies.

    • sudo42@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yup. It’s the same fucked-up psychology corps use for their customers. Like running ads for super discounts for new customers. Existing customers that have never missed a payment? Fuck-em. Instead of giving 1% “thank you” for good customers, corps would rather lose the good customers and pay a premium to find new ones.

      So it goes.

    • orclev@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Very much this. I have never switched employers and not received a sizable salary bump in the process. This isn’t quite “don’t threaten me with a good time” territory, but it’s not far removed from it.

  • tias@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 months ago

    Others said their local offices had closed since the pandemic

    This part is wild. So they closed down the office and then punish the employees for not coming into the office. Tell me this is illegal.

          • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            That would be the dream, but it hasn’t panned out, and my long notice period is hampering me. I’m not going to continue slogging it out here indefinitely, and I don’t need to.

            I don’t need any additional anxiety to discourage me from getting out of this before I just burn out and am in a worse position.

            • verity_kindle@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              I saw a handmade sign in a floating workshop for ships, it stated “Please Resist Entropy”. That has inspired me ever since. It sounds like you are resisting entropy and good for you. Wish you better times and a better job. o7

    • Toribor@corndog.social
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      3 months ago

      ineligible for promotion

      This seems like an empty threat to me. Every promotion I’ve ever gotten internally has come with a negligible pay increase (~4%). The best promotions I’ve gotten have been leaving to take a new job somewhere else (~20-50%).

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        And that 4% just buys you a year before inflation cuts it back down again. Searching for a job from home is easier.

  • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    If this country cared about the environment or workers’ safety, they’d fine companies who make employees work in the office/on site when they could work from home instead.

    • teamevil@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Problem is most of the folks influencing those that make laws also have huge real estate portfolios of commercial real estate.

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Considering that HP is the other choice that most businesses consider, I’d take the Dell 100% of the time. HP’s laptops are complete and utter trash.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      When I got hired at my job where I could write and dictate policy, the first thing I did was write up a new IT Purchasing Policy with a “Banned Manufacturers” section right up top with HP right at #1 and Dell at #2

      • bamboo@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        What’s the issue with Dell? Everyone I know at work with Dell laptops likes them. I’ve used XPS 15 and 13 in the past and they’ve been generally fine. Battery life sucked but I haven’t ever seen an x86 laptop with what I would consider good battery life.

    • palordrolap@kbin.run
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      3 months ago

      That’s called “time to get a new job.”

      Before I came in here, I assumed that’s what “or else” meant, and I’m still not sure it doesn’t mean that.

        • Peffse@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          In the USA, if it is not explicitly written in your job description/contract that you are remote, yes. It also means you can’t apply for unemployment as you were terminated for refusal to perform work duties, even if you are working.

  • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Anyone want to start a company. Work from home. We’ll split profits among ourselves. We can. Build blackjack lottery machines and webhookers

  • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Good.

    In my case, it was pretty effed up and I know some of yall are going to dislike this comment. When covid hit, I was instructed by the CTO to put a plan together to quickly make every employee remote accessible to the organization. Upon completing this project (took roughly 3 weeks since majority of employees were working off laptops and only needed to increase our VPN license count - gotta love Cisco), people were asked to work fully remote and if they needed to come into work, they just needed to send an email for approval from their manager to come into the office the following day.

    When an employee comes into the office, at the entrance they had to either show their vax card or get their temperature checked, if the employee had a vax card, they were allowed to go to their assigned desk to work, if you did not have a vax card and didn’t have a high temperature, you were sent to a designated area of the building to work from, you were allowed to go to your desk to get any belongings you’d need then come back to the designated area.

    After 3 months of this, the company had a new policy, all employees must be vaxxed in order to enter the building, no exceptions. If the employee worked remote, no problem you weren’t required to be vaxxed. The CTO tells me that I need to communicate to the entire IT team that we will now be RTO (returning to office) permanently, this included project managers… IT is a set of departments that majority can easily work remote. A small portion could come into office to do any hands on work but because the hands on work was done within a specific region of the building it would require these employees to be vaxxed and to provide proof of it. So the CTO decided instead of targeting a small handful of IT professionals, he would just get the entire IT team to get vaxxed and come back into office permanently.

    I told the CTO that I don’t plan to get vaxxed, I’d rather ride it out. And that other team members felt the same. The CTO gave me an ultimatum. I told him I will send out an IT wide email but that’s the only command I will obey. Flat out, CTO tells me anyone who doesn’t get vaxxed will be terminated. So I and 4 others got terminated two weeks later.

    And now, companies around the U.S. are getting sued for their employer-imposed vaccine mandates.

    Last laugh, bitch.

    • expr@programming.dev
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      3 months ago

      Glad you got fired. Vaccines should always be mandatory save for legitimate, doctor-validated medical exemptions.

      Anti-vaxxers are fucking stupid and should either be educated properly or, if they still refuse to do their civic duty after being de-programmed of misinformation, punished. You are only allowed to participate in society if you take the necessary steps that you are morally and ethically obligated to do in order to protect it from preventable, transmissible disease. We had eradicated polio until stupid motherfuckers like yourself decided that it would be a good idea to forgo the standard polio vaccine schedule that we’ve had for decades. Now, we saw the first case in 30 years in 2022 because someone selfishly thought that their personal beliefs were more important than the health and livelihood of everyone else.

      • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, me too. In the end it turned out great for me and my family. Literally that job in the Bay allowed us to save even more money allowing us to buy a large property. And if all goes the way we hope, I can eject myself out of the job market and enjoy life with my fam. No more wage slave life.

        Pssst… people were still getting the flu after their vaccines, after multiple vaccines. You know what the flu did to me? Literally, lost of taste. I couldn’t taste salt for about 4 days. Happened twice only, thankfully. I’ll personally take that a million times over.

        Stay salty, brah.

      • Moreless@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        And most likely any job will require proof of a vaccine. OP fucked around and is finding out. But yeah the companies being sued

        • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Nah… after leaving the org in the Bay area, I joined a new org this Jan… it’s no longer the terrorist we thought it was.

      • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I believe it was a blessing. One door shut, another one, a few months later opened. I had to move from Southern California to the Bay… where my salary was a little more than 1.5x the previous salary and this company, a video game developing company, interestingly, didn’t have such requirements in order to work there or come into office (it was like 90% remote work, only came into office to work on projects with my team).

        Nope, they didn’t have the last laugh. Good thing I didn’t sign the NDA either at the time of termination.

        • LordGimp@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          NDA’s are legally unenforcable anyways. You know what’s totally legally enforceable? Shunning plague carriers. Lmao I honestly hope you get out of yout typhoid mary phase before you kill someone you care about, but we all wish bad things happen to bad people.

          • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            You still get infected…

            Wait a minute, are you people under the impression that the vaccine protected you from getting covid and spreading covid?

            Is that what’s happening here?

            Sure call me a plague carrier, but my blood is clean. Yours? haha

            • LordGimp@lemm.ee
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              3 months ago

              That’s how virus carriers work. Blood clean of any way to stop the spread. Lmao gimme that muddy bloody soup full of every antibody known on this planet. My body is full of legions of Rambo mfs looking to fuck up any intruder on sight. Your blood is an open field with a welcome mat and a bottle of wine. My infection is killed off in hours while yours sets up a nice summer home to come back every year.

              You know where clean bloodlines end up? On headstones.

              • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                That’s cool… I rarely get sick though. And for something like the flu? I rather depend on my immune system. Maybe when I’m 60 or 70 years old. Or when I get sick more frequently, I’ll take medication more seriously.

                • Halosheep@lemm.ee
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                  3 months ago

                  Vaccine deniers are a truly interesting breed. Do you just not have a full grasp of biology or are you too busy getting in your head about some shit you made up?

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      getting sued for their employer-imposed vaccine mandates

      The only case I’ve seen succeed is for a company that ignored legitimate religious exceptions. Have you seen any successful cases that support your use case?