Dell lays off 12,500 people • Hacker News Board

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#71

Post by laborundrstandr » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #59

laborundrstandr wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can choose 100 months then advocate your position on its merits, if you like. This is a political question, a contest of power and resources, not a math problem. Scaling severance to be proportionate to the average period of unemployment at the time of firing would ensure the company doing the layoff would bear their share of the societal burden of unemployment they are helping to create.

>You can choose 100 months then advocate your position on its merits, if you like You certainly didn't bother to do that, and "2 months is generous because it's above average" might be a lazy argument and perpetuates the status quo, but it's certainly orders of magnitude better than no argument.

Your system of averaging employer input means that exclusively employers comprise a virtual senate for all matters severance and the corresponding employment they create.

Any proposal that considers opinion and interests beyond businesses’ is already more even handed than your proposal.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#72

Post by muwtyhg » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

ysofunny wrote: post #2

kudos for giving out an actual number of humans fired. instead of the usual, de-humanizing percent of employees usually given

The article says this is an estimate based on an "about 10%" figure:

> Implied was that they would be doing this without the help of an undisclosed number of newly former employees. That number has been guesstimated at around ten percent of the workforce – about 12,500 people – as part of an effort to get the overall workforce from 120,000 to below 100,000.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#73

Post by laborundrstandr » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 5:47 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #69

laborundrstandr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presently Dell singularly decides without input from labor or the government

Government has a say by creating legal framework governing how layoffs work.

They opted for at will employment which means they almost universally defer to business in practice.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#74

Post by cheschire » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 5:52 PM UTC

esel2k wrote: post #48

Why do recent layoff often need to attach something with AI? Few companies have even found a solid revenue model or recurring paying customers. I can only guess but saying layoff because of AI sounds better than « layoff » (because of mismanagement)?

Yeah, it probably is an attempt to hide the blood in the water. They tell their competitors they aren't weak, they've just found a way to be more efficient through the use of AI. And sure maybe a couple hundred folks were replaced by some streamlined AI tooling but this is a ridiculous amount of folks to replace with AI, if it were true.

So yeah, AI. Inflation. Overhiring during the pandemic. Supply chain issues. All the usual excuses to never admit mismanagement.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#75

Post by crop_rotation » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 5:56 PM UTC

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #34

US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR. A bunch of MBAs acting as petty dictators hiring and firing at will, driven by nothing more than a few financial indicators and their intuition, i.e. they are making it up as they go, just like Stalin and Mao were doing back then.

This comment matches my experience of two big tech corps. It almost feels exactly like the Soviet bureaucracy described in the book "Red Plenty". The amount of work being done is just far low compared to a small company and the gravy train is huge. The goal is to show activity not results. Nobody wants to talk about results but activity. Internal departments have de facto monopoly over their domains regardless of how shitty they are, and you need to do soviet style bartering to get what you need.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#76

Post by rickydroll » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #42

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #34

US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR. A bunch of MBAs acting as petty dictators hiring and firing at will, driven by nothing more than a few financial indicators and their intuition, i.e. they are making it up as they go, just like Stalin and Mao were doing back then.

>US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR The important difference you're missing is that unlike china or the USSR, there are competitors you can jump ship to (eg. Lenovo or HP), and Dell can't send you to the gulag for disagreeing with them.

But they can deny you severance payments if you say anything bad about them. Not all companies do this, but enough that it makes the analogy to China or the USSR more appropriate

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#77

Post by rsanek » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

kingTug wrote: post #31

Analemma_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech hired way more than any other sector during the pandemic, and is now reverting to the mean. It sucks for us but means little about the broader economy.

I've been hearing this for the last 2 years. How many more layoffs until we touch the baseline?

if you look at the data, big tech employment grew a ton 2019-2022 and has been flat since.

the layoffs are just a way to clean house while remaining roughly the same size.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#78

Post by gamblor956 » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 6:23 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #23

thebeardisred wrote: post #11

Wow, this feels like a middle finger on the way out the door: > Severance for most will likely involve a payout of two months wages plus a week per year served up to a max of 26 weeks A week per year of service?

That's .... pretty damn good, actually. 2 months is already way above "average" and adding weeks per year is ... nice.

US law generally requires either 60 days notice of a mass layoff or 60 days pay in lieu of advance notice.

So 2 months pay for an immediate termination isn't generous, it's legally required.

However, the additional severance 1x week pay/year is generous in comparison to other companies conducting layoffs of this size.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#79

Post by philistine » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 6:24 PM UTC

dauertewigkeit wrote: post #34

US corporations have become so large, they have started to function internally not unlike the fully fledged managed economies of the USSR. A bunch of MBAs acting as petty dictators hiring and firing at will, driven by nothing more than a few financial indicators and their intuition, i.e. they are making it up as they go, just like Stalin and Mao were doing back then.

Remember, in a capitalist democracy the only organization that is not democratic is the corporation.

Re: Dell lays off 12,500 people

#80

Post by gruez » Tue, Aug 06, 2024, 6:24 PM UTC

datavirtue wrote: post #61

Vesting schedules are a damn joke these days. Who stays at a company for five-plus years? People would, but they get run off by extreme boredom, garbage managers and layoffs. I don't consider anything that requires vesting a positive.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t04.htm

The quits rate in May 2024 is 2.1%. If we assume quits are uniformly distributed, then the probability of staying in one job for greater than 5 years is 28.0%. That means 5 years is above-average tenure, but nowhere near enough to justify a statement like "Who stays at a company for five-plus years?". Not everyone is a serial job hopper that changes jobs every year.