Thread regarding Wells Fargo & Co. layoffs

20 months later and VDI rollout is now a reality. An unknown number of users will be integrated to VDI March 28th.

VDI is a reduction in both risk and cost. Printing will be nearly non existent. We may even see a few print groups pop up to allow employees to print things out and have it sent to them. Saving items to desktop won’t be allowed - have to keep in network folders or share points. Many businesses are doing this, not just WF. Everything done in the VDI/virtual space is logged. Spent 5 minutes reading an email? It’s logged. Only press the up key to keep your computer from falling asleep? It knows. It’s basically everything except a key logger. Employees are able to be rated/scored on their number totals. Corporations love the details it gives them and many employees have no idea it’s even happening until they are let go for having low productivity totals. It’s the newest fad for business metrics.

VDIs, IP phones, Office 365... what could possibly go wrong?

Exactly! VDI works amazing until it ends up getting Wells Fargoed. At that point it becomes a slow, unstable, half installed pile of trash that halves all productivity. Key feature? Yeah we’ll implement that later……..or will we?

@5ezp, my wife and the majority of the large global bank she works for have worked from home on VDI for over a year and it’s nearly flawless. Prior to COVID, it was used sparingly since most people worked in the office, but the transition to almost exclusive use last March was pretty seamless.

THAT BEING SAID… Do I think WF is capable of duplicating that success? No. No I do not.

@2okp+1bL5CWuV it's a great tool for backup and DR, as well as giving third parties access, but a full deployment is a pipe dream. They think employees are inefficient now, wait until they can't log in because a load balancer is malfunctioning.

With VDI If I were traveling and working from the hotel with my laptop am I able to connect to the vid or there’s times where I’m out of state for vacation but I still need to logon for a few days but I’ll be able to be my personal laptop and log into the VDI

Many companies who moved to VDI have already abandoned it. No redundancy when data lost, total productivity shutdown when there's accessibility issues, etc.

It sounds great, but isn't.

I'm on Technology team and we're extremely frustrated that WF is migrating to VDI given its known issues. WF will migrate away from it eventually w/huge impact or perhaps WF won't be around that long and execs already know it.

@2ywc+1bL5CWuV

Skip to...what?

So much for the flexibility and choice our workplaces supposedly offer. With VDI we can only get work done at a cube or at home if we provide a device. Not in conference rooms, not at the booths and tables they put in, not in the lunch area.

Considering that our amazing tech solutions have lost my home drive multiple times - won't this be awesome when documents simply disappear. At least we will not have so many patches and reboots !!

Several of our peers did this years ago (shocking, I know). We are so far behind that a few of them are already moving away from VDI, if we were smart we’d just skip this phase, and save some time and money, but we aren’t, clearly.

VDI is the best

I have serious doubts that WF tech will be able to implement this for years. Look at the transition away from Skype and EPAR/PAMS. Expect lengthy delays. We have much more pressing concerns.

You are not bringing your laptop.to work. You'll have a keyboard and monitor to access your drive. No more saving on your desktop.

No, you wont be able to take notes on laptops in meeting unless you bring your own (which is ridiculous and inefficient for employees).

If allowed to WFH at all, you'll have to use your own personal laptop.

Disappointed how many say they'll just buy a laptop themselves for work. Not everyone has the budget to do that (nor should they have to). WF sucks! WF wants you to know they suck, so you'll leave.

Other bigger companies use BYOD. The VDI network is very secure in itself and would detect any vulnerable attempts. Say it's true that there will be unmovable/fixed hardware in the office to connect to VDI, we'd lose our mobility to jump from conference rooms to desk etc. But if we have our own BYOD, we could. Make sense?

They have said multiple times you will not bring your own device to work and connect to the network. Your device will be used to connect to a virtual instance from home/coffee shop/airport/etc. in case you haven’t noticed all your my documents folder is already stored onto your h: drive. The only place you can save is there in fact.

BYOD onto a campus? I see no risk in that at all.

Clearly the PM / PO for this project needs to get in front of a user group and develop a FAQ.

We did a poor job with Teams rollout and now they are trying to backpedal with ambassadors to answer questions as a second voluntary job. It isnt working. Please dont do that again

How do VDIs perform for heavy data science and analytics modeling?

Instead of saving on hardware costs, more expensive is the retail space that each corporate personnel occupies. What I am saying is if WFC just go the WFH/virtual model for most, it could save billions in office/lease rental. Now that's a significant cost saving compared to VDI.

Citi staff use their own personal machines to login to their corp network. Similarly, the WFC vision is to do the same, to save on hardware costs. I see some people here posting that they expect to come to office and go sit in a VDI space, which is not true at all. VDI concept is BYOD. If you've got no machine of your own, you're doomed.

There's many ways to implement "VDI". Shop I went to after Wells uses a desktop thin client device by company called 10Zig. They have a 10Zig in every office/cube, users can login to any one with their credentials and their work follows.

As noted you'll have to use personal pc from home, I created a VM guest on my system to connect to work in order to isolate my computer from them. VMware has a free home use license.

Some questions crack me up about vdi's. People, the vdi is not next to your cube, you remote to it using Horizon SW. 10's of thousands are already using vdi's right now, granted most are using WF machines, but there a ton of outside contractors that use their companies laptops and remote in via vera, launch Citrix and away they go. Some are already testing Horizon. There will not be thin clients in the office, unless something has changed in the past few months. You will bring your personal laptop into the office, if it has headphone jack, bingo. Docking stations will be at the desks along with monitors, etc. Just like now. The whole idea is to have 80 percent of the workforce on vdi's as they no longer want to lease laptops. But it's not happening for a while yet, so chill out.
You should be more worried about hubs right now.

It wont even be rolled out to the masses for another year but thelayoff.com has all the answers!

Do you have to have your own laptop when in the office or just sign on? Also what about those locations where they intentionally do not have enough office space for every worker to be in the office? If you dont get a space you dont work that day?

You can use your own device, be at a laptop, phone or tablet (iPad).

@1dni
Yes
No
No
Yes

I was just given a new corporate laptop last week

If my hotel cube of the day has VDI, will that work for the Skype audio and screen sharing for all the meetings with my co-workers, all of whom are not in my location? How is audio done? Do the monitors have speakers in them or does the VDI have speakers? Is there a headphone plugin? They supposedly took away all the phones.

Then CA workers can just come into the office.

I would guess that this whole thing maybe saves the bank maybe $100 million by the time you’re done buying VDI infrastructure, desktops etc. Compare that to the $18 billion in stock buybacks recently announced.

California is possibly the only state that doesn’t let businesses transfer expenses to workers this way and requires reimbursement for employee provided equipment.

@1tqs My wife has VDI at her company and she uses 2 monitors. Should work the same.

Yes everyone will have a VDI “box” available. WFH will either get a box or use your own equipment. VDI can span multiple monitors so you lose nothing. This tech has been around for a decade now. I look forward to it as a full time WFH.

So does this mean that each employee will be assigned a VDI which is equivalent to one laptop or desktop?

The only upside for WF here is a more secure environment.

Productivity for folks like me will drop significantly. We extend our monitors to 2 or 3 monitors. How would this be possible in a VDI environment?

@1cxa+1bL5CWuV every team in WF has a robust Business Resiliency (BCP) Plan. For many, if work is interrupted in one location they have teams in other locations perform the work (US and non-US). Every team has to have multiple strategies for interruptions like technology goes down, people can't make it to work (i.e. weather) or a facility is inaccessible for some reason. Some teams are more critical than others. In some cases work can just stop b/c it isn't a critical function while the particular event is happening. While they chose to do WFH for COVID, there have been many other events since Mar 2020 that plans were enacted for (i.e. MN protests, CA wildfires, TX ice storm, hurricanes, Hong Kong protests). I'd bet most people never realized their plans were enacted for these things and it didn't impact WF as a business one bit.

@1mov+1bL5CWuV you won't bring your own laptop to work. You will work from an assigned cube/office (this will change from time to time) and there will be a VDI box (I can't remember the technical name for it), monitors, keyboard, etc. Personal equipment is for "if" you WFH on an ad-hoc basis.

@1sic+1bL5CWuV when you log in to the VDI it will look, feel and act the same as your laptop. You'll have a desktop and can still access all the programs you do now. Difference is you save files, like taking notes, to your H drive or a team shared drive versus a desktop. I have a company laptop but also have a VDI that I run more time consuming tasks on. It's great. I just plan on buying a cheap Chromebook to keep at home for the purpose of logging in. And, yes, WFH is going to disappear for many. It will be an ad-hoc thing at best. That's not a big secret. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is COVID. Starting around Labor Day (if these new variants don't change things), everyone will be "ordered" back to the office. If WFH is that important for you, my suggestion is to look outside WF. This non-WFH is a moving train none of us can stop. I know I'm looking as 1) I have been WFH for about 10 years and 2) I live over 500 miles from the closest hub. As someone with 25+ years with WF I'm going to get out before the market is flooded with everyone who gets laid off. Rather than sit around waiting for a severance, I'm taking control of my career. I've "been there, done that" with this firm too many times. Time to move on to new adventures.

You will be required to bring your personal laptop to work and work off the vdi from there. Pretty simple.
No, not everyone will have to work off of vdi's, certain groups like traders will keep their work stations/laptops, certain lob's (high risk) also and execs.
The amount of money wf will save by going this route will be massive in the long run. There will be pretty much no on-site support, that will eliminate thousands of jobs throughout the world, IT wise.
I'm not sure about peripherals though, guessing the bank will cover that.
This has nothing to do with WFH, that's another initiative.
Cut costs, period!

So this eliminates wfh, period. What happens if there is a transit strike or weather makes it impossible to come into the office?