...when it comes to software development?
Engineers may not like it but prove me wrong. Look at the piling graveyard of failed projects and failed products. Is there anyone at Dell who knows how to program?
23 replies (most recent on top)
@ge 100% correct.
SW becomes commodity - you see that at Wall Street - all SW vendors are down
AI writes software 100x faster , competitive advantage will be gone in 3-years and these with massive processing power will lead new way.
That's why all fat cats bet on AI
@gk please tell us how to do it.. you seem like you're in the know.
@ge I second this.
@je It's been this way for years. It's not just one set of people. Anyone who ever had enterprise skill and experience in best-practice processes and software development disciplines has consistently been walked out the door year in and year out. Why? Because Engineering and Executive Leadership have never wanted to be held accountable. They are never fired yet Dell ISG software solutions continue to fail year after year after year. It's a culture of blame others, move the goal post every 6 months, and take zero accountability.
@ht The people who knew this and got visibility on this were walked out. Visibility is anathema to people who lie in slides.
Not a low IQ engineer. Failure to recognize that obfuscation rolls downhill.
Kindly would remind that this site is thelayoff! Almost all of the good engineers and folks who pushed back were hit with WFR. What you have now are the sycophants who demand engineering timelines to be met and the folks who actually know better must comply. The key leaders now know jack sh-t about software complexity and the leaders they walked out tried to highlight it.
There are some very good engineers who only cry out in private. I know firsthand. And the silence of the leaders who want to change is deafening.
Welcome to the rise of Agentic AI slop folks. Take a good look at who is left. And who the shot callers are.
@hk Wrong answers. All excuses. Spoken like a typical low-IQ, low-skilled Dell engineer.
Any project that takes 3 years to complete isn't a project worth doing. The market will have changed long before you get there. For that matter, 1.5 years.
Change is the only constant. If you don't have a process in place that incorporates change into your biweekly sprint cycles, then you are working under a failed engineering organization in today's landscape. Dell has never heard of Agile Methodologies, much less knows anything about how to abide by those principles.
Dell does not know how to properly plan/cost/estimate the work involved in any project. This is why there are so many unfinished features and bugs at the end of each failed project. Dell engineering does not code to meet customer requirements, rather, they code to meet the bare minimum of what they can get away with. They couldn't care less about customer requirements. And customers know it.
Dell Engineering has never heard of the term "velocity" before, nor are they held to completing work commitments in any sprint. Helll, they're never held to committing to anything at all because they don't want to ever be held accountable. That's the biggest problem right there.
I will agree with you on this point - Dell does not do Product Management. Product Management at Dell is a joke compared to other companies.
real eyes realize real lies
There are 2 major reasons for failed projects at Dell and the root cause is tight timelines. When I joined the ODW project, I was told that they have setup a timeline of 3 years to complete the project. But for some reason the whole plan changed and had to be crammed in 1.5 years.
The result of this?
Too many features to be built in too less of a time. So what will people do? Push untested code in production. It's not like it is untested. It is not tested for all the scenarios. In production you encounter every scenario even if they are rare.
And the second thing is the everchanging demands. It leads to multiple reworks and the already piling up work. And some of the reworks are so d-mb like changing naming conventions from MAVERICK to ODW and then back to MAVERICK and then again back to ODW. Why is this even important? Because it's coming from VP. Are these the decisions being taken by VP? Why is it not low priority? There are other changes as well which could have been thought about earlier but the architects couldn't do a lot of thinking earlier because of tight timelines.
Had this went with the original timelines (I am guessing the original timelines were very flexible of around 3 years), it would have been much better. The real issue if the incompetency of managers and product managers who cannot take a stand against quite impossible timelines or they calculate these timelines incorrectly. It would have worked out in 1.5 year timeline if everything was sorted, designs were ready without any unforeseen changes, and there were no issues during development work, but when in the history of software have we seen this happening?
Wind of change
@ge I don't disagree that the bulk of accountability lies with Dell's failed leadership, which they will never own up to; however, they're not the ones designing faulty architecture that isn't enterprise scalable. They're not the ones developing more bugs than working software. They're not the ones releasing half-baked features - passing them off as done - that don't meet customer needs or requirements. They're not the ones who take 3-4 years, sometimes more, to finish one epic.
The fact of the matter is Dell Engineering Leadership and its engineering teams are unskilled, inexperienced, and undisciplined when it comes to developing and/or integrating enterprise software. That's just a fact!
They don't follow best-practice processes. They don't know what "enterprise scalability" even means. Most have never heard of the cloud before. Cloud native is a foreign concept to Dell. That's why we'll never be anything more than a laptop and server parts assembler / reseller. Fact!
Failed projects are not an engineering issue. It’s a leadership issue. I can guarantee that engineers raise the red flags but it’s unheard. When leadership compensation is tied to pushing something out, leaders will push it out to check off the box. It’s a matter of not listening to SME’s and empowering them to make the decisions. Anyone under the SVP level is not empowered at all. We have been conditioned at this point to just let it fail. Our input and experience mean nothing.
that fact that you termed is as 'program' is embarrassing
@dc intentional so that real words with true meaning aren't blanked out by the platform. Perhaps you're the "dummy?"
stock doing great ,keep up the good work
The irony in the spelling
More non layoff information.
@by word on the street is the target is 65k
No, not possible. But it's not just Dell Engineering in ISG or CSG. It's leadership. Leadership at Dell is as stupid as it gets. We actually had an SVP ask what a hypervisor was in a meeting once. OMG!!
The coders have been replaced by Indians from body shops who got a different guy to do their interview for them
No. Not traditionally. Dell is an operations and manufacturing company. Your software engineers came from EMC primarily. Which they keep laying off because the dopes in management that are left think AI can replace them. It’s embarrassing how stupid these people are. They’re good at creating stories, being political and making slides. That’s it.
And yes. There will be continued layoffs.
Thank you for the layoff information.