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Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

businessinsider.com

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Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#81

Post by Bluecobra »

voytec wrote: post #65
xinayder wrote: post #33

> Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told BI that as more organizations have called workers back to the office, it's become clear that many employees didn't heed warnings that remote work was not here to stay. It's not the employees fault if they trusted the company wouldn't screw up home office, all these companies made employees believe they could have better working c…

Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president of the Society for Human Resource Management, a spokesman for corporations, is full of shit if you read his statements from the employee's perspective. This guy "is not your attorney" to put it politely. RTO is a tool used to cause no-severance departures of workers who are expensive to fire but can be replaced by cheaper workforce, in a way that will go unnoticed to investors duri…

> RTO is a tool used to cause no-severance departures of workers who are expensive to fire but can be replaced by cheaper workforce, in a way that will go unnoticed to investors during the next quarter.

Yep. I seem to recall this happening well before COVID, like at IBM (which was a pioneer for remote work) and Yahoo.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#82

Post by Bluecobra »

runako wrote: post #17
milesskorpen wrote: post #4

It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.

Lots of legit reasons. Some I have seen: - kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office. - kids are age when it's okay for them to walk home from school. - Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office. There are a lot of ways people organize their lives. The cool thing about sales teams is you don't ha…

If you are a divorced parent with shared custody, this can be challenging if you live in another town or even in the same town due to how they draw school boundaries. The child can only take the bus that is tied to the custodial parent's address so the other parent is on the hook for transportation to/from school.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#83

Post by JamesLeonis »

ryandrake wrote: post #9

> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite." I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

There is no data, or I wouldn't have to keep asking for evidence.

Previously [0] [1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247369

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314527

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#84

Post by angmarsbane »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #29
runako wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of legit reasons. Some I have seen: - kids do remote school for whatever reason. This works when parent is at home, but not if parent is at the office. - kids are age when it's okay for them to walk home from school. - Have to be at work at 9, school drop-off starts at 8:35. School is 45 minutes from the office. There are a lot of ways people organize their lives. The cool thing about sales teams is you don't ha…

These are all legitimate but I found my self a bit bewildered that the concept of a school bus is absent entirely from the apparent thought process, given I rode the bus for the vast majority of my primary and secondary schooling

In California the school buses aren't free.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#85

Post by em-bee »

davidashe wrote: post #71
rkharsan64 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with caring for your child. The cause of this situation is insufficient paternal leaves, not having and raising children. If you as an employer provide a leave of just 15 days for the father (I've seen really big companies do this), and just a few months for the mother, don't be surprised if people lose productivity or just straight up leave when they have children. Most EU countries have great…

“There's nothing wrong with caring for your child. The cause of this situation is insufficient paternal leaves, not having and raising children.” Tell me you’ve never been a working parent, without telling me…

i don't get what you are trying to say here.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#86

Post by em-bee »

whatever1 wrote: post #50

Commuting sucks, remote has enormous benefits yada yada, however: The problems (childcare, commuting, etc) that the employees present as huge obstacles, were there before covid and people were managing. The c suites will not break a sweat over these. On the essence of the policy, this is a quiet layoff, same as Amazon's (which further threatens managers with layoffs if they do not enforce the 5day rto for their repor…

they also had plenty of time to make arrangements, consider the cost of childcare vs pay, and negotiate their salary accordingly.

in some places childcare arrangements can only be made once a year, in others they have waiting lists going back years.

i can't imagine most people be able to make long term arrangements over a weekend

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#87

Post by raydev »

milesskorpen wrote: post #4

It's not clear to me how you can be a full-time employee and be doing full-time child care. I understand the need for schedule flexibility, but if going back to the office means you need to find child care it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time on those days.

> it seems to suggest some of these people weren't really working full time

Only if you think it's impossible for people to work while their children are home.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#88

Post by raydev »

jhoechtl wrote: post #25

This one I do not understand. How could you do any meaningful work in Home Office without child care? I mean did they help their kids doing their home work while on job? That was ok during the covid craze but otherwise a no go.

Do you think children of all ages need constant and undivided attention such that the parent is incapable of performing their paid job?

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#89

Post by burningChrome »

sevensor wrote: post #74
burningChrome wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I got into information systems, I spent about a decade in sales. As someone who's been on both sides of the ball, sales teams absolutely do not need to be in the office. Maybe for quarterly or managerial meetings, but the highest performing sales people and teams I knew where given free reign to do their thing as long as they were hitting their quotas. If you weren't hitting your numbers, then yeah, managers w…

I used to sit next to the guy who made cold calls all day long. There was no part of that job he couldn’t have done absolutely anywhere else. Also, massive, massive respect for anybody with the constitution to do that work. It was hour after hour of “no.”

Yeah, it was a tough job and glad I got out. Minimum 65 calls per day is not easy, especially when you know, like you said, most are going to be hang-ups and no's.

The other aspect that was really hard was working your ass off all month to hit your quota, then the first of the month? You get to start all over again. The constant stress and roller coaster of whether you make your numbers every month probably took like 3 years off of my life.

I also worked at places where guys had everything wired. They had their client list and when they ordered and it was a walk in the park every month to hit their numbers, get to President's Club and get that free Hawaiian vacation.

I honestly don't miss anything about it.

Re: Dell's sudden 5-day RTO order leaves parents scrambling to find childcare

#90

Post by EasyMark »

ryandrake wrote: post #9

> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite." I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

Remember when companies were doing just fine on productivity when huge swathes of industries (that could) allowed work from home because of the pandemic and now suddenly we’re asked believe “trust me bro” CEOs more. It’s all about the power play and keeping middle management happy because they won’t stop crying over not being able to call incessant meetings and “walk the floor” lording their power over the underlings.
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