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DISSECTING DELL : THE REAL STORY
(The pleasures of outsourcing)
by Slobotron,
January 2003 ~
(version 0.01, Jan 2003)
(edited by fravia+)
Do I have 'an axe to grind' with Dell? Not at all:
I even have myself a Dell portable. But Dell is a
PC-company famous for its Web-virtuality (there's not a single phisical shop where you
could actually buy a Dell computer) and infamous for its clever advertising methods: everything (almost) on-line, he,
mucho moderno! Look how cheap those "almost-all-included" options are offered there! Yessir! Yet
once you add all those necessary adds-on (bigger hard disk, quicker RAM, etc), the products they offer turn into quite expensive
buys. Moreover 'outsourcing'
is one of those catchy 'globalisation' trends,
supposedly made in order "to serve better the consumer", yet a trend that hides real HELLS not
only for the workers involved, but also for
those very (betrayed) consumers that it should "serve".
This
essay by Slobotron (he offered us the clever
Understanding, Reversing, and Hacking HP Printers as well) is
interesting because it also shreds some light onto the
REAL (low)life in those profit-obsessed IT-corporations. There is a common misconception, in
today's world, and especially in Europe, following
which 'the ("modern") private sector' has less waste and a lot
of economical advantages, vis-a-vis 'the ("obsolete") public sector'.
This is (mostly) simply false, unless for "economical advantages" you mean those of
the slavemasters.
The following "insider information", will also
be useful for
our young readers, thrown in a IT-world that -alas- cares for their (or anyone's else)
development as much as you care for the Gothonic epic-historical poetry.
The interest of this essay is underlined
by some "euro vs. american" observations
that should kindle useful reflections in our readers on both sides of the pond (and elsewhere :-)
What has this to do with searching? A lot more than you would
think... Nemo solus satis sapit. If you just want to limit yourself
to search-specific essays then go and read them, and farewell,
on the other hand,
if you want to understand (and reverse) the world WHERE you are searching, read on.
DISSECTING DELL : THE REAL STORY
Author : Slobotron (slobotronATATATmailDOTDOTDOTru)
Date : December 2002
Location : Holy Europe
Field : Primum Vivere! / Reality Cracking
INTRODUCTION :
In my long and bizarre career i've been employed in many crazy and sometime
ugly jobs.
That now i'm doing computer programming is not a mistake, i just followed a
natural path, nonetheless, in my rebel days of youngness, the path wasn't as
clear
as now, and i was in doubt if i should become a painter, or a musician.
Well...
I ended up being a salesman of hardware parts for a famous retail chain.
Disgusted by the local market i said to myself that the world was big and
beautiful,
why then losing my time selling crappy and buggy motherboards?
I made up my bag and after some interviews i took a flight to my new job at DELL EUROPE.
REVERSING LESSONS :
Primum Vivere !
Things are NOT as they've told you.
Life is not like a DELL commercial.
Analyzing skills need always direct experience,
and we -- as rationalists -- should never fear
entering new, exciting and bizarre, adventures.
Discovering new realities around ourself should be exactly our very
meaning of LIFE.
TOPICS :
- The Welcome-Pack
- Applied Propaganda
- Welcome in our family
- Cubicles
- Customer Handling
- Trained to LIE
- The hidden R&D
- The Corporate Math
- Get the Hell out of Dell
- Dissecting DELL
- DELL = HELL
THE WELCOME PACK
Welcome to DELL !
The company was paying me the flight, a 5-stars hotel up to 2 months,
lunch,
a real-estate agency, and even gave me the tickets for bus and metro...
the usual "relocation package" common to every decent
Korporation.
I barely knew my new job position, as well as my new city.
Anyway, i was quite excited to this new job, the previous one had left me extremely
disgusted, paranoid, depressed, and full of questions about myself and my
future.
Am i sure that this is the right path?
Tough questions, but i was ready to change chapter and start from scratch
again.
The following monday at 9.00 i entered my new company.
My new manager very kindly followed me to the badge-room and in 5 minutes i
was
wearing my lame DELL-badge.
Then we walked the stairs to the 2nd floor, he showed me all the other
hundreds
of "lemmings"... not a very pleasant vision honestly :
You must imagine the scene for me: I had never seen something like this, "cubicles"? Hu?
Only read about that in the
'Dilebrt' comics... and now here, before my very eyes!
Hundreds of amerikan cubicles, each one with a lemming on it, glued to
ugly
earphones like dogs with a collar, talking about bits and bytes with
mysterious
customers that were calling from all around europe.
Noise in the background, a dozen of different languages mixed one over the
other,
in a tumultous, and yet omogeneus, buzz.
Nothing new honestly, i already knew that kind of ambient, but not as big as
that and not as filled with a
so young, wild, and multi-ethnic populace!
Wearing of course a tie and a jacket i felt a bit strange, everyone looked
at me
like when a new manager is arriving, everyone infact was wearing insane
casual t-shirts
or even trunks!
I did not know for sure what you are expected to wear by DELL, after having worked some
months for
IBM in the past,
where the so called "power suite" is absolutely mandatory.
But after all, that must be reflecting the philosophy of the company, i tought by
myself.
Then the "manager" introduced me to my new colleagues.
They were all between 22 and -- maximum -- 28 years old, the typical DELL-employees.
Glued to their monitors, wearing Plantronics ear-phones, connected to
their
ubiquitous Nortel-Telecom phones, and using of course an obsolete desktop
Dell Optiplex with anatomic keyboard and an oily micro$oft mouse.
Every cubicle, a mess !
Piles of IT newsmagazines everywhere, post-its, papers, books,
bloc-notes, pens, pencils, erasers, photos of some tenyears before
sticked to the cublicle, some posters of metal-rockstars, postcards from
the
seychelles,
piles of floppies and some broken mainboards in the trashcans.
Apart that, every employee had a Dell notebook (Inspiron or Latitude Cpi)
wired
to the internet (a 2Gbit bandwith, quite good in those days) and used the
desktop
just for the corporate tools and e-mails.
Someone had also some rack servers on the floor full of rj45 cables spinning
around... maybe
to look 'geekyer' in front of his colleagues?
At 18.00 we went to a nice and expensive french restaurant
where we all got drunk partying the new hired (that was me).
Walking back to my hotel i was quite happy, apart some weird bits of conversation
i had heard from
my new pals,
somethings like "enjoy this days until you can" or "you'll see in the next 3
months"...
It didn't sound like a happy "welcome with us" honestly, but i had other
things
in my mind that night so i didn't care too much.
APPLIED PROPAGANDA
So, that was my first official first day as a DELL employee.
Opening the door with my new flashing badge i already felt
as a member of the family :
On the left, a low-res scan of my photo, on the right, a huge blue
dell logo, in the bottom my name, surname, division, product, job-title,
and employee-number with, also, a mysterious bar-code.
I introduced myself to the secretaries in the entrance, very nice
and fresh girls by the way.
In the hallway, a huge and ugly DELL logo 10m x 4m reigned over the stairs
..
big... loud... and amerikan...(something that you know in advance you'll
hate soon).
My meeting was soon to start but nobody was there .. i decided to get a
coffee and
a sigarette in the smoking room.
There you had them .. dozens of DELLers smoking and whining against customers,
managers, products, faulty-design, bugs, etc.
One said : "hey! are you new here? ", so we started talking, and then he
flooded me
with paranoia against the company, warning me: I should not trust no one...
Damn! i thought, maybe i am wrong, but it seems to me a great
company...
Why the hell all these guys are in a such bad mood against DELL?
The smoke was over, i went back to my pals to start the "Welcome to DELL
EMEA (EMEA = Europe,Middle East,Africa) training".
What a name .. i've been always skeptikal about this amerikan tendency of
using exagerated titles, but who cares .. let's see what happens.
After having waited for all the missing guys, the training started.
We received some brochures with the products we were thought to manage,
the trainer closed the windows and powered off the lights.
Then in the dark he started buzzing about the company history, all the goals
achieved, etc etc,
The usual corporate-initial-brainwashing i tought, but slightly more
disgusting than
the boring meetings I had endured at IBM...
Phrases like "we're the fucking best",
"god bless amerika", "united we
win",
"believe in DELL", and so on... really made me sick.
But i knew my "reversing meetings" stuff, so i started playing myself with the
trainer,
asking some evil questions just to satisfy my reversing ego...
And guess what: i got answers like "what for the others cost 100 we make it
for 80",
"Michael Dell is a genius", "Our servers are breaking the market",
"Compaq's days are numbered" and so on (at least about compaq he seemed to be right).
Note that -- after all -- there wasn't anything different to expect from a Texas
company,
but such phrases were pure brainwashing, I mean,
for god's sake: the trainer himself louded the greatness of
the company
in a manner that even a bigot priest would have needed some training
in order to speak with
such emphasys!
Too bad: apart me, all the other guys around seemed delighted and ready to
be
evangelized... i guess at lunch they all went to the nearest McDonald's
in sign of dell-devotion?
WELCOME IN OUR FAMILY
So, finally i started doing something.
I was introduced to the technical trainers, and shown all the past and
present products.
Having never used Dell products before i had honesty a mixed feeling.
I know, i was young, but these were my first days, anyway now i'm writing
this using an old HP Omnibook 4150, still a rock !
For more than 15 days i was scheduled to meet product-trainings and in the
spare time to
look at the colleagues' work.
15 days? i tought... i was eager to work on something "real" instead of
spending time in training where they teach you what is a chipset and such banalities.
But it was socially funny and i started somehow
to enjoy that company after all.
In the meantime the real-estate agency took me and the other new-hireds
showing us some
apartments and "studio'" (aka T2) starting from the most ugly and unwanted
apartments they had, which of course everyone refused with disdain.
The real estate girl was always whining that the spanish like to have huge
apartments
with the rent bill of a monoroom, that italians wants nice furnitures and
like the
city-centre but dont want to spend too much, that the germans like to have a
house with a garden,
that with all the others she had no problem at all and that we were the only
ones
"hard" to manage.
In the end i took a T2 "studio" at 100m from DELL (and 1km from the
city-centre) for the
cheap sum of +/- 400euros, a brand new T2 with
kitchen,
toilet etc, at 3minutes walking from the company, near tobacconist,
supermarket, etc.
I also bought a byke to byke around and see the city and the surroundings.
The weekend was spent with my new fresh colleagues going to IKEA buying new
fornitures
and to the malls, buying food, beers, and wine.
In the contract, the relocation-package included the relocation of
my fornitures from my previous place, as well, so i instructed my friends to pack
all
my CDs and all my computer and musical stuff to be sent there.
One week and i received the stuff, plus my ancient Vespa 50 special (1971!),
still up and running despite all the odds.
I was happy, definitely, but i still couldnt understand some cryptic
things
my colleagues were saying against everything and everyone..why were they so
frustrated? And why they didn't want to tell me any details?
CUBICLES
So, after almost a month where every evening we had dinner in a
different restaurant, and paid almost nothing for that, finally i started my
job.
Now abruptily all that "dolce vita" was finished.
And for godsake, it was about time, i tought !
I like to party, but i choosed to be there for other reasons
after all.
Basically my position was supposed to be a "high-level tech support
engineering job".
Alas, the reality was quite different, even if still hi-tech.
First of all, the hi-tech position with responsability over top-rating
customers
all over europe was infact nothing else than a kind of call-center/tech support stuff.
The customer were infact the TOP500, but in some "young" countries the
company
hadn't even 500 customers at all... and that meant to manage in some cases even
the last lame
"customer from hell" !
Initially i didnt care, i was totally focused on the new products,
expecially
prototypes of the new upcoming PII 300, raid-arrays, rack-servers, etc.
That was cool ! having in my hand CPUs marked "prototype - xxxxx" or
mainboards labeled
"for lab use only ! s/n xxxxxx", and reading on the IT newsmags "corridor
voices"
about this or that, and having it already up and running on my desk months
before anyone else!
Around me there were other departments, each one with a different grade of
"JOB-ENSLAVING" :
Secretaries (the most enslaved), accounting, pre-sales, sales, training, tech support, etc
We and the sales guys were often wearing tie and jacket, everybody else was
wearing
t-shirts, trunks, or causal stuff, as a kind of corporate "status".
(we ended up wearing trunks too in the end ... for "heating" reasons).
The floor number was also related to the "status" : we and the sales were at
the 2nd
floor (the highest), the others in the 1st, and the secretaries in the
ground floor or even
downstairs (i mean this literally: "under the stairs").
We then started using the corporate database to manage customer accounts and
tech-stuff related to their sales order etc.
The proggie was an ultra lame ASCII database running on TANDEM (now owned by
hp/compaq)
connected to the Irish HQ, its name was (and still is) "CEDPS", an
ugly UNIX appz requiring you to learn bizarre key combinations such as
"alt+shift+f8"
for creating new customer intervention or "alt+ctrl+f4" in order to
insert parts
etc. and
"crtl+shift+u" to have an undo, well, an obsolete piece of junk which crashed
almost
every day, slow as hell, and totally UNwysiwig.. ("what you see is NOT
what you get").
TOP500 customers from all over europe were contacting us officially for
extremely
mission-critical stuff, in reality they were calling sometimes also just to
say "hello!"
because some of them were in constant touch with us everyday, so much that
we
proposed to have a dinner all together and to get drunk bitching against
Dell and partners.
These customers were mainly sys-admins of Oracle, Micro$oft, Nortel
Telecom, Cisco, etc
almost the entire IT world was using Dell servers or desktops or at least
Dell notebooks
so these were the guys that were daily talking with us, and sometime we had
great fun
with them joking about new exploits or their new (and usually ill-conceived)
corporate products.
That was the breezing atmosphere, and i initially loved it.
New products, new customers, new "company culture", new friends, why not?
CUSTOMER HANDLING
Now, the happy part was gone and almost forgot.
The initial months were passed, and at this point i knew almost every
possible bug of our products.
All the tricks to install a special OS, every patch, every bizarre
configuration,
in one word, the servers were running day and night and i was quite bored.
Infact i started spending lot of times writing emails to angry customers,
sending faxes, calling "hot-customers" that meant theoretically
mission-critical
users that paid more $$ for a quick service, in reality often it just took
a good
restart of windoze or a kick in the power supply to fix the issue.
I was smoking sigarettes like hell (as young slaves tend to do) and drinking lots of coffees
surrounded
by the ubiquitous noise of the rack servers.
Winter came, and with it came the snow I love.
Our daily duty was slowly becaming a constant whining about product's faults
and the many insane
design bugs that flawed specifical notebooks, typically the Latitude CPxx family, a real
pain in the ass.
The biggest bug was that the CPU was mounted in a box with 3 screws, so 1
of the edges remained
"unscrewed", that caused the recall of THOUSAND of notebooks that after
some time of normal
use had ceased to live abruptly .. and often the moving of the CPU caused a
burnout of the mainboard
socket or even the burnout of the CPU itself so the field technicians had to
go on-site,
open the notebook, and replace cpu+mainboard+RAM (yes, because the RAMs
were known to be flawed
but it became public only many months later).
Being the TFT also "legacy" the new revision of the mainboard needed the new
IBM TFTs and was
not pin-compatible with the old SAMSUNG, that meant you had to change also the
entire TFT + cables every time.
Not to mention the ugly plastic chassis, that after some time becomes very
unstable, as well
as the keyboards, and random symptoms of "auto-power-off" appeared, related to cheap
design of the mainboard.
I dont like to whine against bugs, after all the Compaq Presarios
were much worse than DELL's notebooks,
but I HAD often to speak and to convince some big IT managers not to RECALL
THOUSANDS of DELL
notebooks (they had a "rent contract" so it was in their right to do it).
That would have meant LOTS of money lost for Dell, but that started to
happen almost every day ..
Frustration and angerness were now the name of the game.
Same for servers, but notebook were really a DISASTER.
Dissatisfaction, united with my manager yelling day and night that some of
the targets were
not meet because HALF of the team was in holiday or "ill".
One word about the management : they gave us hi-tech stuff, quite expensive, prototypes
to test and report, but when you needed a damn screwdriver there wasnt one!
"There's no budget for that, ask it to your colleagues !", they told me.
Damn, i had to take my screwdrivers from home to avoid running 1 hour up
and down
asking around.
There was also a kind of "LAB" but in reality it was full of servers packed
in big boxes,
with cables, HDDs, raid, stack, and NOT a damn screwdriver or a tester,
nor
IDE flat-cables or cross cables.
What the hell is that, i asked? HOW do you guys think we can work safely
without
even the basic tools of the trade?
In the meantime being near Christmas it seemed that every server on earth
needed a kick in the ass
to be up and running.
It's unbelievable how many sys-admins of Fortune 50's companies are
lame and dumb.
Not to mention the ones that after being told step-by-step the right
procedure to follow
have broken down some RAID or lost the data on their tape backups or even
began whining
about some mysterious LOW level formats that nobody ever told them to do in the first time...
Dumbasses now wanted "their MONEY BACK" accusing us of uncapability and
writing
our names in letters full of menaces coming from their lawyers,
promising to sue our ass and the company !
Too bad.
And i'm speaking of guys that introduce themselves as IT-managers of
Oracle or Microsoft..
(infact i discovered, later, that many of them were in reality just OUTSOURCED
companies).
The company was also under a heavy worm virus spreading .. the dumb IT
manager arrived
to shut down the network for some days (good old days... that was the first
Outlook worm!).
Due to their irrational decision of insisting using Exchange Server and IIS3, the network
was already Unstable anyway, and the downtimes were unbelievably high.
They were under contract with M$ and thus OBLIGED to use that, like it or
not (still now, DELL can NOT sell AMD as far as i know, always for obscure or
lobbystical
motivations).
TRAINED TO LIE
Do you remember the famous internet legends about the guy that calls the
tech support
and asks why his coffee-cup-holder isnt working anymore?
If you get back the original tale in ASCII read it well: that guy was
calling DELL.
And to my surprise, i heard in my career in Dell things MUCH more insane
than that.
People trying to insert DVDs inside the floppy drive were not rare, as well
as people
bruteforcing non compatible cards and burning out the mainboads, and many
american businessmen
that complained about the explosion (literally: with fire and smoke) of the
"Dell universal 110/220v"
power supply, inside their notebooks, once connected to european plugs.
Sometimes there were epidemic cases of Philips monitors that really got
burning, with flames
and smoke, while the innocent users were using M$ Office.
Plagues on stocks of defective video cards and mainboards were also not
uncommon.
And, funny too, we had to remplace hundreds of
mainboards,
or CPUs, or RAMs !
Not to mention that some users had a real strange deadly humour... one day I'll
write a book on that :-)
Basically, the junkies in the front-line tech support were just paid to
order the customer
to FORMAT the hdd and reinstall everything from scratch, even step-by-step.
Sometimes even if the customer wasnt just able to PING, the solution
proposed was
always a good old FORMAT C: !
My customers weren't so dumb, but they were all arrogant and not much inclined
to humour.
All they wanted was mainly a replacement of the machine, better if
with a new
model and even better with some money as refund for the "customer satisfaction".
Our duty was of course to debunk point-by-point their arrogant beliefs and
force them to take off their legacy token rings or to buy expensive upgrade
at
insulting prices.
But i was quite evil in forcing the users of always FORMAT just to be sure
that he would
not come back bugging me soon.
Ahhh, the pleasures of the FORMAT.COM and NT Disk-Manager !
Apart that, there was nothing else to laugh.
We were trained to lie, and paid to lie, in fact we were PROFESSIONAL
LIARS.
I started to become a great bastard, at least over the phone.
Listening daily to the ignorance of some of our best customers really
depressed me,
and i began to grow a sadistic fun against every customer i managed, after
all
they really deserved to pay huge bills for the mistakes of their lame (and
invariably arrogant) sysadmins.
Infact i realized that almost every one working there had grow up a similar
sadistic
and evil attitude, the customer conceived as a "friend" (as they keep saying in
the trainings)
was just a cheap sarcastic joke.
Once the customer had paid, anything he may have wanted more had to be billed and
we were pressed by the sales dept to -- strongly -- encourage expensive upgrades
instead
of trying to fix bugs (and there were TONS of unlisted bugs!).
The field engineers (in particular Unisys) were in some cases so LAME that
they
broke functioning parts in front of the customer... that of course was
disgusted
by such a "service" and asked us a full refund.
The most unethic things were the many cases of DOA (Dead on Arrival).
Some customers after having paid the computer via the web, with credit cards,
received their pc via UPS, and discovered that it was dead.
Being a serious company, the customer had to yell with 5-6 front-line
tech support junkies
before getting any minimal attention from DELL.
The action had always been a replacement (in 2 weeks or even 1 MONTH!) with
a recycled/refurbished
product that in many cases had even more nasty issues than the dead one.
You can imagine the frustration of some IT managers yelling that out of 300
Trinitron monitors 30 were
dead or broken, when they received back 30 clearly USED ones (and sometimes
OLDER version, dirty and oily) due
to "mistakes" of the shipping department.
That was insane, the gerarchical structure was extremely burocratic and i
couldnt interface
much with the other rings of the chain.
I was of course in any case partially responsible if customers treated to
sue us for
inadempience or unlawful acts (some went so angry that i still remember
their names :-)
But we were chained to our process, and just that, the management didn't
wanted to let
us losing time in fixing burocratic or mixed issue, theerefore some
technical cases became
a nightmare for months and months due to the extreme segmentation of the
"pyramid process".
(so, in the end if someone was to blame, it was ALWAYS --finally-- the
customer :-)
The tension was high .. as well as lots of coffees and
sigarettes, i was
becoming slowly quite anti-social, hating customers, hating Dell, hating
everything in the IT.
A really negative mood, new prototypes meant now new bugs to report (bugs
that we knew would have never
be fixed) and a deep unsatisfaction, the new servers and notebooks were so
buggy that it's really
unbelievable how could Dell rank so high in the pages of Pc World, Pc
Magazine, etc...
(answer --> they paid for it, as everyone else does in the industry).
In any case, customers never had to be informed about fatal design flaws or
stock of components known
to be fucked-up (typically some stocks of uwscsi hdd from IBM, or the RAMs
from Micron).
So we, the professional liars, had to get up with our best
creativity skills
to invent new excuses or proposing insane and ridicoulus upgrades (or even
--believe it or not-- DOWNgrades).
(note : please don't think this happens only at Dell, HP/Compaq do the same).
THE HIDDEN R&D
How can you fix fatal hardware flaws if the BIOS is made by Phoenix,
the hdd are made by IBM, floppies by Sony, TFT by Samsung, video cards by
ATI, monitors by Sony, or Philips, RAMs by Micron or Infineon, and the
mainboards
by either QUANTA, MITAC, or some other lame taiwanese designers?
So, What's Dell inside a Dell?
Almost NOTHING at all, except the Dell sticker... maybe the chassis and
the power
supply (this too, anyway, outsourced to external companies).
WHO repairs a broken dell under warranty?
In every country they used a different outsoucing agency to send on-site
technicians,
now since 2-3 yers they have a worlwide contract using IBM Global
Service
that at least is a decent choice compared to the barbarians of the old WANG
Global or Unisys.
And WHO repair a broken laptop when you send it to Ireland for repair?
("Collect and Return").
Of course another outsourced company.
Servers, were also mostly made by taiwanese companies using parts made by
EMC or Unisys.
At that point i started understanding the real mantra of that company.
The only european r&d if we can can call such crap "R&D"
was ever made in the irish factory, in
Limerick,
that just assembled in real-time all the buy-in orders coming from the various sales
division.
THAT'S IT! All the rest was a bunch of 5-6 hardware engineers dedicated to
testing new prototypes and used as interface with the taiwanese partners.
And 2-3 trainers, for each nation, that went there every 3 months to get
trained
on new products.
Apart them, a bunch of technical-managers paid to trasnslate the manuals
and
to make some powerpoint slides about r&d investment :-(
Actually I couldn't believe that there was no damned r&d at all.
Especially because i wanted to move as soon
as possible in a position related to r&d, as i was tired of
being
an enslaved engineer.
That meant also that i had NO WAY to get in contact with Phoenix to ask them
about bugs in the firmwares, or with IBM to talk about stocks of faulty HDDs.
The only "way" was to send an email to our Irish HQ which 99% of the
cases replied with
a "we're working on it, thanks, and take care".
I was lucky to be employed "in-house" because nowadays the huge bulk of my
old work
is done by outsourced companies as well, like STREAM international, SYKES,
and other local
junkies like Unisys (Unisys does that also for some HP servers by the way).
Everything now made some sense in my mind.
The trickeries of the sales dept. were now clear and logic, as well as the
evil orders we
received from the management chain.
Many laptops were also exactly the SAME inside : SAME mainboard, same ram,
same hdd,
with the BIOS crippled out IN ORDER TO show a
different model name (but we had a
utility to
change it back, as well as modyfying the s/n).
So there was a laptop designed for the average Joe Smith that costed 1000 euro,
just because
the cpu was a Celeron, and the same one sold for "business
use" that costed
an amazing
4500 euro with a PII on it.! Hey that's 3500 euro difference! The CPU bulk-cost is less
than
300 euro!
Reading "the benchmarks" on Pc Magazines was quite funny :
The articles emphasyzed "how good" the 4500$ was compared to the "cheap
and dirty" 1000$ one.
(hence I warn you... NEVER trust such benchmarks).
THE CORPORATE MATH
Numbers are VERY important in Dell.
Also in any other IT-corpo, but NOT as much as in Dell.
Because in Dell the "enslavement-factor" is strictly linked to an insane
amount of numbers.
You would be excused to imagine that in the corporate
world, developments are based on "meritocracy", as opposed to the
'obsolete' burocratical world.
Wrong.
They're based on numbers, and on weird M$ PowerPoint statistics.
Management doesn't even know who you (or any other) are, nor they are even going to see
your
face.
But they judge you, and eventually promote you, basing on bogus "performance stats" and
other foolish productivity-ratios that use non-sense as main logic. You do not believe this?
It's easy to check.
If you are a reader of the Dilbert cartoons you already know --quite exactly-- what i'm
talking about.
If not, go to www.dilbert.com:
I'm sure that Scott Adams, the Author, has been employed at Dell... but was
too ashamed to admit it.
At one point the management even started makins stats about how many
coffee-breaks we had,
measuring the average ratio of the time we spent with customers or how MANY
emails
we sent, how LONG the email was... they
even (secretly)
recorded everything we said on the phone to make some stats out of that too.
I knew that because a french colleague had and explosion of rage against the
classic
"evil customer from Hell" and shouted his entire vocabulary of blasphemy
in his phone.
The poor, fired the day after, thought that nobody could
have heard his rantings, but in fact they got --and used against him-- the
recordings of
the entire "conversation".
I still
remember that
even the webmaster of the site was fired after publishing on
the web
shots of upcoming prototypes of Intel Cpus that he got from his work
at Dell in Austin/Texas.
Therefore, you knew in advance that telling the customer to "restart the
machine and
call back" was considered GOOD: short call-time, hi-ratio of possible
success, etc.
Instead, trying to really FIX the issue, was BAD: long-time call, low-rate
of possible success, etc.
Once given such absurd parameters, in the end the management just got what they
asked for.
Every possible mission-critical issue started to bounce from each individual, or unit
to
everyone else, in other departments, or back to even the front-line colleagues.
Our stats were magnificient! And the managers raised our salary, the next
quarter,
with a small bonus.
For some time our stats were also ranking in the best-5 of all Dell sites in
Europe, go figure how bad (or good, depends from the point of view) the others were doing.
What a shame.
In the meantime -- it seems impossible -- a huge bulk of the problems had been
actually solved and/or FIXED.
How? Because the front-line junkies trying the hell out of it, in many
cases
forced the problem ridden sysadmins to -- literally -- low-level format the hdd or kick
the server
in the ass, and guess what? It just worked !
(That reinforces my theory about the average sys-admins' incapacity).
A great "enslavement trickery" is related to the concept of
TEAM-WORKING :
Team working was very important, at DELL, in the final performance review, it meant
that
you're not just a little wheel but that you're a FRIENDLY and helpful little wheel.
Therefore teaching again and again
new clueless hireds how to "ping" or "traceroute" was good
teamworking. Which is probably true, BUT, you see,
ignoring their pathetical pleas in order to fix mission-critical issues was not
good.
SPYING on other colleagues was the most important skill for the "teamworking
ratio". Managers simply adore delators and spies.
"A good employee should always know what's going on around him and help the
management
to fix social contrasts or non-positive attitudes in other members of the
team".
"The team shoule be seen as a family, with a common goal, and a focus on the
customer's satisfaction".
Hearing again all such corporate propaganda really makes me puke.
To better enforce the "enslavement" process every 3 months the company
organized a
party (which they called "kick-off").
They claim that these kind of party is useful to improve
socialization
and to foster cameradism and teamworking.
Every Kick-off was organized in a different place rented for the occasion,
where
you can eat and get drunk while watching the managers showing some childish
"PowerPoint slides' tirade"
against Compaq.
Note that management never got drunk, they use such meetings
to
"see who we really are" "outside" the working-hours. They must
have some kind of psycho-drilling for this.
Anyway, these moments can be quite interesting for a reverser.
(Note that it depends from the
IT-corpo: HP organises something like that once a month, while at Sony such things
are absolutely forbidden).
The Kick-Offs are also important for Dell to organize the "Dell
Awards":
ridicoulus (and indecent) meetings where ass-lickers and
spies may win a fake gold medal with a crappy Dell logo on it.
All average employees "win" instead a fake-silver pen,
while disgrunted
employees are not even asked to partecipate.
Every quarter, one by one, we had to comment about
our performance review, that meant admiting our faults and --generally-- contribute to
the spying-process.
For every employee the manager had a kind of "dossier".
Questions like "what you're gonna do here to boost productivity and foster
the teamworking? "
or even "are you sure you got the leadership vision to see the big
picture?".
Disgusting, i was always tempted to shout what i
really thought
of the management and of the company... but only in the final months of my dell-career i
did it.
They try also to sell employees corporate bonds and company stock options.
(i always refused of course).
Stock option are ALWAYS used as a asort of linking bait: they think that once
the employee owns some stock options he'll double his
productivity.
As far as i can judge, if you work for them, the first thing you would do is to SELL
such stocks, but many colleagues took the bait.
Why is such "team-working" SO important for a IT-company?
Well, the theory is
simple: in a classic enterprise there's the LEAD engineer that
knows everything
about the products and is of course INDISPENSABLE for the company.
Being Indispensable he got also some "power".
The lead engineer leads a group of young engineers that are trained to be
independent and
to learn from the LEAD. So far so good. The theory.
In companies like DELL, this never happens.
In DELL, people should NEVER have some "power" unless they are high-ranking
executives (and in that case they have that power for "birth" rights).
There are some kind of LEAD engineers but they're just paid to avoid
contacts with others.
Even highly skilled individuals should be just "average" members of a team,
where
each one can be easily REPLACED, therefore keeping costs lower
than
where fully skilled individuals get their sway and say
(typical case of "democratic mediocricy": who said that private=merit driven?).
Therefore, being TOO MUCH skilled is considered BAD and against the
teamwork
(unless you happen to work 16hrs a day without never asking some compensation).
Only after years of devotion to such Dell dogmas someone could be allowed
to ask
for a promotion and do something better.
For the normal operations, anyone should remain "standard"
and believe
in the corporate mantra.
That wway you know that they can kick you in the ass any day, even
tomorrow,
without thinking twice.
Some months after having been hired i started observing that while
many like me
had been carefully selected, basing on their technological skills,
all the recent
ones were just a bunch of kiddies, eager to work harder, but extremely
low-tech in terms
of knowledge and analytical skills.
In fact they were now selected by managers that would
not know which way to use
a screwdriver or to insert a floppy, so their
"ranking" was now totally based on emphatic factors.
Even after having spent along time with them, they were hard pressed to understand
any advanced networking
or storage stuff.
Therefore the old ones, like me, had to work double to avoid the whole "team" (you
may imagine how "sarcastic" this word began to sound in my ears) losing
deadlines and
productivity-ratio.
Some of them didnt even know how to PING for God's sake. But they were now getting
our same salary!
That was really the last drop from a professional point of view! Enough is
enough !
GET THE HELL OUT OF DELL
In the end of my career at Dell i was so frustrated and angry that i just
needed
to get out of there and take a long holiday, and so i did.
It's unbelievable how much a job can slowly corrupt your ego.
Out of frustration I even arrived at the point of making a screensaver with the logo "DELL =
HELL"!
My productivity went in the guts, but since i knew all the
tricks
to avoid this being noticed by managers (only numbers, not deeds, are kings, remember :-) they
never realized it (another sign of blatant incompetence).
My working place was now -- in every sense -- a PRISON for me, glued to a
monitor
the whole day, writing emails like a rabbit, faxing, phoning, sending
attachments,
shouting, lying, whining, and so on... a HELL!
In one word, i was definetely burn-out. Finally I did not care any more to show it.
The management began slowly to be unsatisfied of my performances as
well as those
of my old-time colleagues (we became some sort of "burn-out team").
It was made clear that we would have not see any future salary raise, nor
could we hope in any promotion to higher jobs.
We were now "locked" in our lame positions, imprisoned in a perverse
loop
of insane statistics and crazy customers.
Our mission then became to get the HELL out of DELL.
Empowered by our 2Gbits connection we started sending CVs day and night to
all
the other competitors that in that period were all envious of the DELL's
success.
Nice move !
We all received replies by Compaq, Oracle, HP, IBM, etc.
In the interviews they were all curious to hear how things are running at
Dell.
And we, as "professional liars" of course took advantage of it, claiming
the most absurd statistical buzzword and taking advantage of their
same (insane) corporate "lingo".
In conclusion, i left for going working in HP, that still now i consider
one of the BEST choices i EVER did in my life.
It's too bad that the HP i knew (aka the REAL HP) has now disappeared.
Carly Fiorina destroyed that company from scratch, imitating many
of the Dell's strategies and attitudes I described here.
My colleagues moved to Oracle, IBM, Compaq, some others went with me to HP as well.
Nowadays we're some happy "humans" again, proud for having left that HELL.
A new life, indeed.
The management at Dell was quite happy of our choice: they were also pushing us
to leave the company by ourselves as soon as possible, they just considered
us
rebel, stubborn and disgruntled employees.
They replaced us with young kiddies, unskilled and low-paid.
Some time later the entire department where I worked was "outsourced" so i dunnow
where the hell they went. But the Hell was where they were anyway.
DISSECTING DELL
If you had the misfortune of buying the book "Direct from Dell" i'm sure
you already understood what kind of junk that
book is after having read the first page .
In some chapters it seems even a kind of DELLish Mein-Kampf...
This guy Michael Dell, that travels around the world against all odds,
evangelizing
the skeptikals, winning over old kings such as Compaq and IBM.
What really makes me nervous is the emphasys that Michael Dell uses in his
book
to describe the "happiness and the joy" of working for Dell.
He describes troops of IT-specialists, all wearing Dell jackets, spreading
happily all
over the
world the "great Dell Religion".
Even Bill Gates' books never matched such a "Gobbelsian" level of propaganda!
Now, reality is much different, as I wrote:
The DELL business model is without doubts a very good
one in this very moment.
And it will probably remain at the top in the next years as well.
Basically any "normal" company CANNOT compete with DELL in the long run:
DELL, has eliminated warehouses and stocks, and COULD offer the lowest prices on
the market and a fast shipping at worldwide level.
The organization is well designed to exploit employees until an
"inevitable" burn-out and then replacing them easily, as if they were numbers
(in fact for Dell they are nothing else).
Normal companies take usually some kind of care of their employees, because they know
that the employees ARE an assett of the company.
DELL does the opposite, in this model you hire only expendable people, usually
young ones, paying lower
salaries.
An employee in the Dell's vision is just a NUMBER that must be easily
replaced
in case of economic downturns.
Doing that, any DELL computer could cost much less, and could also be equipped with
better
components... thus being also superior in the quality-factor. ("Could", because
if you carefully study Dell's offers you will see how the 'added components' costs
will let your bill skyrocket before ordering).
So you have a computer that could cost less than any HP or IBM and that could at
the same time have better
hardware, in one word is FAR superior in any
field.(cost/quality/speed/etc).
The big limitation of this business model is exactly that is good for
the DELL corporate,
but not for any private or home user.
Looking things from a CEO perspective, Michael DELL is a gret CEO, and we
can
say that he kind of "invented" the direct-selling applied to the IT.
Other competitors are then forced to lower their prices and their raw gains
to
compete, thus lowering the final quality of their products (selling junk as
the Compaq Presarios do now for example).
But then, HOW can you beat Dell?
I dunno, those that actually could do it are exactly the taiwanese
company
that MAKE computers for Dell.
If one day they'll decide to clone the Dell structure and use
their own components on
their own,
Dell's days will be numbered.
But until nothing happens, DELL will continue to keep a big share of the market, that's sure.
DELL = HELL
So, That's my story.
I really hope that Dell's competitors will never try to clone Dell's
attitude over
employees, it would mean a new era of woes for every
IT-specialist.
The employee seen as a number inside the complex corporate-pyramid,
something to trash
out, or to outsource, or to swap... as soon as sales are sluggish.
Something very american, but (until recently :-( totally UNeuropean!
Said that, I just hope that after having read my story some of you will
look the IT market from
a different --and sounder-- perspective.
(C) 2002 SLOBOTRON (slobotronATATATmailDOTDOTDOTru)
[Feel free to contact the author for any additional comments]
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