r/technology • u/Sea_Guava6513 • Feb 06 '23
Dell to lay off 6,650 workers, or 5% of its workforce Business
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/06/dell-to-lay-off-6650-workers-or-5percent-of-its-workforce.html44
u/Gah_Duma Feb 06 '23
Dell became successful because they were purely build-to-order. Now, along with having computers sitting at retail locations, their website has almost zero customization options for machines, both consumer and business. It's all inventory. Why?
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u/omnicidial Feb 06 '23
They brought in consultants from IBM sometime around 2001 who advised them to stop most of the build to order pcs, fire the entire US factory workforce then move production overseas while also violating the tax and grant agreements they made with multiple governments in the US.
Now they use the US factory buildings as warehouses and they're all staffed with temps.
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u/StepYaGameUp Feb 06 '23 edited Feb 06 '23
Listening to IBM was their first mistake.
Talk about a company that fucks up anything they touch and have no clue how to do stuff right.
“Let us show you how to ruin your business like we did ours!” ought to be IBM’s motto.
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u/pixel_of_moral_decay Feb 06 '23
Investors.
Companies no longer really care about customizing, computers got cheaper. Most offices uses SFF desktops that cost a couple hundred dollars. So that’s the volume of sales. Cheap hardware with little profit margin.
Companies who want custom stuff use supermicro.
Investors seem to be chasing those low profit margins in favor of anything else.
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u/Who_GNU Feb 06 '23
I know they've bought a lot of companies, but having ~130,000 employees seems crazy.
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u/Sea_Guava6513 Feb 06 '23
*in the early aughts HP was in blue chip offices I worked at but Lenovo seems to be the desktop of choice now
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u/GeekSumsMe Feb 07 '23
These tech layoffs are similar to much of the inflation.
The trends are excuses for profiteering by the oligarchs that are now in control.
Record profits across the board from oil companies to food production means that the higher costs are largely a function of companies artificially taking small supply shortages and making them seem larger.
The Tech companies are not laying off junior staff, but a disproportionate number of senior staff who are paid more because they sacrificed years of their lives to build the companies. The CEOs are kicking these people to the curb because they think they can get someone to fill their role for half the cost and benefit with increases to their own bloated salaries.
This might be true over the short term, but not over the long term, but nobody cares about what will actually make peoples lives improve anymore. It is all a game where the only objective is making more.konwt for people who already have more money than they can spend in their lifetime.
We have had an erosion of organized labor, coupled with an attitude that the only function of corporations is to make rich people richer. We let them buy our politicians, on the left and the right, without demanding change.
The bankers are "essential" and "too big to fail" is true to some degree, but especially if you are among the oligarchs.
The system is rigged. It has been rigged before. Regular people fixed it. Economic populism is on the rise, the oligarchs are fighting back with social populism.
The talk about "woke" isn't about M&Ms, the books that have existed in our libraries for decades, the very niche entertainment form of drag queens, etc. None of the people who are scared of this have actually been negatively affected by them. They are responding to a campaign of distraction from the oligarchs on the right.
The oligarchs want to hold on to power and keep the economic growth going to them. They have spent too much money rigging the system to give up now.
There are oligarchs on the left too. Their game is one of distraction. They might even admit that the system needs to change, but they focus attention on bandaids, as opposed to the root cause of the disease.
There are some democrats who know this and have called for meaningful reforms (actually taxing the oligarchs, addressing our broken medical system, breaking up monopolies, encouraging organized labor, increasing minimum pay and leave, addressing child care, putting money into infrastructure which equally benefits everyone, etc). Not enough of them, but at least it is part of the discussion.
The GOP does not present alternative approaches, they ignore the problems altogether. They have not presented any legislation aimed at making all of our lives better. 100% of their energy is devoted to social populism, attacking the other, the "woke".
They are doing this because all they care about is maintaining power and getting more money. They have no interest in making our country better or actually improving the lives of the 95% of us who are not part of their oligarchy.
This was not always true. Trump just showed them that they didn't need to pretend.
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u/rs_yes Feb 07 '23
Hate to break it to you, it's always been a game. It's the fabric of capitalism. It's just now more apparent because we are not children anymore and it impacts our lives directly.
You either play the game to win/get the most out of it, or you find yourself on the losing side of the game.
Thus far, in my opinion, there hasn't been a way to play the game while simultaneously attempting to fix it, which is truly unfortunate for our modern society.
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u/uncondensed Feb 08 '23
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." - Joshua/WOPR (WarGames)
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u/FreezingRobot Feb 06 '23
Doesn't surprise me, and I'm not talking about the fact most tech places are doing layoffs right now. What's most people's main personal computer now? Their phone most of the day, and then maybe their tablet when they're at home in front of the TV. The days of a "family" computer sitting on a desk in the house are mostly over.
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u/Sea_Guava6513 Feb 06 '23
*how right you are ~ rather than updating from a 2014 iMac I put my money on a Samsung Ultra
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u/00tool Feb 07 '23
did you hear about the gforce graphics card demand? those are fir desktops. and we work on laptops and desktops still. Also servers. But youre right about cross segment consumer mass market.
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u/Life-Improvement-886 Feb 06 '23
Their sales tactics are the reason I haven’t purchased any Dell products with the exception of VMWARE for years… they are aggressive and don’t take no for an answer.. every few months a new rep starts the process over again… I now send the email chain I keep on hand that basically says “F#%k Off”..
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u/MoltresRising Feb 07 '23
I was lucky enough that my parents gave me an allowance for a laptop for college back in 2008 (roughly $1,800). I was keeping my options open and while at the mall stopped by the Dell kiosk. Admittedly I was dressed as a high schooler, but when when I asked "What do you have for sale for a kid going to college?" and that stupid fucking Dell salesman said, without asking any questions about what I want, need, or budget: "Nothing that you can afford." I left and have never given them a dime ever since.
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u/SunshineAndSquats Feb 07 '23
Why would you be a dick to an entry level employee just trying to do their job? That’s no different than being nasty to a waiter because the cook fucked up their order. Leave those kids alone and just say no thank you.
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u/Life-Improvement-886 Feb 07 '23
The very point of my post is they are not trained to to take “No Thank You” for an answer… We purchased one of the early EMC Storage products before Dell bought them… nearing EOL the support & pricing model “upgrade” was ridiculous compared to the then “upstart” Pure Storage.. the reps went so far as to try to discredit a VAR we’ve worked with for a decade that never pushed a product we did not need or trust.. Our engineers know their stuff and would call them out had they done so.. I understand reps are trying to make a living.. but I’ve been in this field a long time.. you want me as a customer NEVER assume you know what’s best for my company or you know more about the technology than my engineers…. Long lasting relationships are built on trust, understanding the customer knows their infrastructure and be willing to say NO to the tech “Goliaths” pushing their products on the VARs to sell to their customers.
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u/Life-Improvement-886 Feb 07 '23
Didn’t address “my being a dick”… I was literally hounded by a Dell rep at several events as to why I wasn’t continuing our relationship with Dell. I explained to him that the very tactics they were teaching him were what turned me away… he still didn’t get it and I thought it was just his personality.. until the next rep “appeared”…. Same MO, same approach.. I wrote a letter addressed to their VP to say what they were teaching new reps doesn’t work… clearly fell on deaf ears..
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u/sephrisloth Feb 06 '23
I wondered how Dell is even still in business given nobody buys home computers anymore and those that do are usually enthusiastsor gamers who build their own and the rest mostly buy macs. I guess now that I think of it every damn office in the country is running dell or hp computers though.
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u/ronnieluck Feb 07 '23
Very simple, corporate data / storage / servers. They don't care about the personal consumer market as much. They are an international company as well.
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u/redditronc Feb 06 '23
Well which one is it /s
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u/fahrnfahrnfahrn Feb 07 '23
The comma makes it a restatement. Without it, your comment would be warranted.
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u/taptapper Feb 07 '23
Sales were down because there weren't any fucking chips, and gamers and crypto miners drove up the prices of essential components
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u/ARP_P0150N Feb 06 '23
Company with two COOs lays off 5% of workforce in cost-savings measure.