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.
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”
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.
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.
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.
I had the misfortune to have to share an office with a bunch of sales morons. I can recommend Bose idiot-cancelling headphones. What a bunch of selfish noisy fuckwombles.
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.
I would like live in this world. We are trying to hire, and it's basically as hard as ever. Senior developers are super hard to get, or even to talk to. Even if you pay above average rates.
There's plenty of "LinkedIn senior" developers, tho. But after 3 years of C they can't explain a static variable or can't define a promise claiming to be js experts.
and this is why we are going to have a surge in enshittification in every piece of software and engineering around. eagerness and high energy does not replace decade of experience and ability to hold your composure against corporate pressure to do shady shit (if anything eagerness to please enable it)
Since the shareholders only care about 6-month projections, they will always choose a shitty, short-term successes with rushed products with patches later or promises of continued bugfixing, than spending more money and time to make something that users approve of and passes all requirements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Covid has more than 10x the mortality rate of common flu
even without vaccine you still have an immune system, but not as ready against covid, and you spread it for a longer period which can be fatal for those around you, especially older people or people with a bad immune system
I don't get what you people have against vaccines. They saved millions of lives over the years and the causation is clear beyond any doubt.
It's not about completely preventing infection, you can still get infected. It's about minimizing the odds of infection and lowering severity when infected, to mitigate transmission as much as possible. It's more about society as a collective and less about the individual. You can ride it out, sure. But if you pass it along to someone who can't, then what?
NDAs are very much legally enforceable lol. A nitable time they aren't, is if there has been illegal activity the NDA is trying to compel you to keep secret.
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?
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.
There's a pretty good chance that every employee facing this offer is in a position where Dell sees them as replaceable. They want people who follow orders and not much more, so if you want to look at it through that filter Dell got what they wanted.
Unless somebody over there at the top is crazy, Dell would have had individual deals with the true innovators, decision makers, movers and shakers internally who are viewed as top tier and irreplaceable.
That’s a horribly deceiving title. They just stayed remote and made themselves ineligible for promotion.
Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture.
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.
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
fair enough, and I'm sure you know what you're doing. I've always felt that I'm in a much, much stronger position saying I'm employeed but I'd prefer to work for you rather than them suspecting that I just need some job, any job ya know
Thanks, it's the culmination of a lot of thought and a previous attempt by my manager and I to rework things to make it better but hasn't really worked out. Onwards and upwards, I'd still intend to find a job during the 3 months notice period before I'm set loose so ideally I won't lose the "tempt me away" factor before I get a new gig.
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%).
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.
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).
So much the better, as far as those executives are concerned.
Let's say you want to cut costs and you know you have momentum and a long lag where your total incompetence won't make a difference to business results in the short term, so cut costs by getting rid of the top talent.
Now if they outright just fire every good person, well that looks obviously stupid, but if those good people just... up and quit... well they are hardly to blame, and don't have to pay out those massive severances. You get your annual bonus which is big, and your big restricted stock payday might be delayed two years, but they know, realistically, they can probably coast a good 3 or 4 years before the game is up. Or if you have a supremely strong 'business brand', you might be able to coast indefinitely as the big shots will never believe that brand isn't good anymore.