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“You would have thought, in view of the week’s events, that Michael Dell would show up at a greet-the-folks gathering here Friday looking like some whiter shade of pale.”
Dell’s troubles are not short-term setbacks. They are systemic, and are the result of a broken corporate culture. As Michael Dell says, we’ll see where they are five years from now. Where do I think Dell will be five years from now? Gone.
IT positions previously thought safe are now under threat due to advances that will allow servers to be based in the U.S. and the admin overseas.
For a while there, working in IT was actually fun. The Golden Age started in the late 1980’s, when personal computers and local area networks started to work their way into corporations and extended through the internet boom of the late 1990’s. The Y2K scare and the bust of the speculative internet stock bubble was the death knell of this Golden Age.
During this Golden Age, IT had a craft aesthetic, with highly skilled, highly paid enthusiasts crafting and maintaining high-custom systems designed to produce significant competitive advantage for the host business.
This craft aesthetic is gone. IT has become industrialized. Anyone who has done a recent help-desk gig understands how Taylorism, the industrial engineering discipline that shaped the factory floor, is being applied in modern-day help-desk call centers.
Large data center aggregators and outsourcing companies are gobbling up IT jobs, especially in software design and engineering, but now in systems administration as well.
Will this outsourcing result in competitive advantage for the businesses that undertake it? I think the jury is out on that one. Service provided by tiered, regimented support systems doesn’t seem to work very well regardless of what continent the employees are located in or what they are being paid. See my post about Dell here. Ask anyone who has ever tried to get a problem solved using helpdesk support provided by EDS, Acxiom, Accenture, or any of the other outsourcing/aggregation companies. The experience is almost uniformly tedious, frustrating, and time-consuming. The original problem goes largely unsolved, and often new problems are introduced by the troubleshooting procedures themselves.
The only people who seem to be pleased with these outsourcing deals are the empty suits that set them up. It’s the customers and customer-facing employees stuck with shitty service and systems who suffer the consequences of these decisions. And of course, if you annoy customers enough, they will take the hint and go away.
“The TV ad said, ‘Whatever you need a PC for, Dell has the one you want for less than you might expect. Right now get this Dell Inspiron notebook featuring an Intel Celeron processor for only 299.’ A website address and a phone number were displayed on the screen at the same time.” There were 23 complaints the laptop was actually 349 online
Some alpha-dog at Dell undoubtedly thought that this was a good idea, and all the delta-dogs he surrounds himself with — people who should have called him on his bullshit and told him that deceiving customers isn’t a good idea — did nothing more than yip meekly along in agreement.
Dell’s head has been up it’s ass for a couple of years now and it’s financial performance reflects that. The website and ordering interfaces are confusing, with more than one deceptive pricing practice, the products themselves are shoddy, with a low-ball, cheap veneer and the service and support suck, suck, suck.
My own personal Dell Hell began in September of 2003, when I bought a Dell M50 refurb from the online Dell store.
I now use Linux exclusively, and prior to buying the Dell, I’d used IBM ThinkPads running Linux and Powerbooks running MacOS. On paper, the Dell looked great in terms of Linux compatibility — all of the onboard devices were supported out of the box, and the machine also featured nVidia graphics, a firewire port, and a trackstick pointing device ala the ThinkPad. What’s not to like?
My first thought when I took the thing out of the box was ‘this thing looks and feels cheap’. But, unlike installing Linux on a ThinkPad, I was able to do a quick default RedHat 9 install that was successful and instantly ready to use, save for the addition of the proprietary nVidia display drivers. So I was moderately pleased with the purchase, despite the low-ball feel and bad aesthetics.
I opted for the refurb because it was cheaper, and also because a three year premium service contract was built into the price. This three year contract promised ‘premium, next-day onsite service’. As a self-employed person with no IT budget to speak of, I need the computers I buy to be reliable, and failing that, to have quick, efficient support.
All was well for about six months. But then the firewire port — one of the small, unpowered ones like you find on a video camera — started to work loose a bit from the motherboard. This in turn created i/o errors and file corruption on the 250 gig firewire drive I was using for a 3d design project I was working on at the time.
A problem? Perhaps for someone else. But I had premium, next-day, onsite support.
Or so I thought. I spent literally hours in hold queues trying to find the proper group to handle my support request. I was bounced between two different groups at least twice. One group would tell me that my machine was the other group’s responsibility and switch me to their queue. When someone finally picked up in the new queue, they told me the same thing and bounced me back to the first group.
I’ve never in all the years that I’ve had a cellphone account exceeded my minutes for the month, except this time. When I say that I spent hours in hold queues, that’s exactly what I mean.
Finally, a good-hearted soul somewhere in the depths of Dell’s phone support system was prescient enough to realize that, even though my machine had a notebook form-factor, I had to go to the precision workstation queue to get support. This angel of mercy then gave me the direct 800 for precision workstation support.
So things should be getting better, right? Well, no. To the credit of the engineer in the precision workstation group who took my call, I didn’t have to take any shit for running Linux or waste a whole lot of time selling her on the fact that the machine was broken at the hardware level and needed parts and a tech dispatched to fix things.
Ten minutes after I got the right person on the phone, my ticket was logged and a tech was dispatched with a new motherboard. Since I logged the ticket on a Saturday, I expected a tech on the following Tuesday, which would be the next business day after the business day following the Saturday the ticket was logged.
Monday came and went. No phonecall. On Tuesday around 10AM I got a call from a tech named ‘Chad’ , or something like that, from a company called Bank Tech. He told me his company was the contractor for Dell support in my area, and would I like to schedule my appointment on Thursday or Friday?
Well, fuck that. I told him that I bought and paid for next-day on-site support, and since this was the next day, I wanted an appointment that afternoon.
I immediately called Dell again on the precision workstation direct 800 and lodged a complaint.
To make a long story short, my punishment for not taking the late appointments I was offered was that I had to wait until Saturday for a tech to appear and install a new motherboard. And this was after making dozens of calls to both Dell and Bank Tech and going through full escalation procedures with both companies.
So, by this time you might think that my troubles would be over, but you’d be wrong.
As it turns out, the tech they sent was a sullen, uncommunicative young man who pulled my machine apart at my kitchen table without the benefit of static protection. And after he was finished jamming a new motherboard into the case, he took the liberty of reconfiguring the video bios settings to suit his visual preference.
But at least it was fixed, right? Wrong. About a week later I realized that, after the new motherboard was installed, the batteries had stopped charging.
I did some troubleshooting and verified that it was a hardware problem, and placed another call to Dell. At least this time I had the right number and didn’t spend a lot of time in a hold queue.
Once again, I got a smart, helpful tech on the phone who instantly acknowledged the problem and dispatched a tech with another new motherboard.
I placed this call on Monday, and you’d think that after all I’d been through the last time, and the copious annotations and documentation on my service record, that things would go a bit more smoothly this time.
So when ‘Chad’ called me again on a Tuesday morning and offered me a Thursday or Friday appointment — two or three days late, respectively — on a next-day contract, I flipped out and let him have it. Plus, this time I had a secret weapon. The Bank Tech District Manager had called me during the escalation process on the last call. My cell phone has caller ID, so I had the DM’s personal cell phone number in my address book.
I called the DM immediately on his personal number and demanded what I’d bought and paid for — a service call later that afternoon. Unfortunately, the DM couldn’t do it, but he *did* agree to have someone there the next day. It wasn’t Chad.
‘Not-Chad’ showed up the next day and replaced the motherboard, again without using any static protection. Afterward the firewire port still worked, and the batteries were charging too.
So, now all’s well and the story is over, right? Wrong.
A month or two later the video started to degrade. I started having problems getting my configurations to work, plus I was starting to get some artifacts on the screen from time to time. In retrospect, it was clear that the video card was starting to die.
It was several months before the video card death throes were final, and as you might imagine, in the meantime I wasn’t anxious to take another trip into Dell Hell, especially for an intermittent problem.
But the card died finally, and I had no video at all, so I had to place the call. Once again, I talked to friendly competent people who acted quickly and decisively to diagnose the problem and dispatch a tech with a fix.
This was another weekend call, so once again, I was expecting a call, probably from Chad, on Monday or Tuesday. And, given my history and the fact that I now had the Bank Tech DM’s direct number, I expected to finally get what I paid for, a next-day service call.
Monday came and went. Nothing. As did Tuesday. Wednesday morning I called Dell again and began to aggressively escalate the process. Dell, in turn, went through the same lame escalation process with Bank Tech. The escalation process took two days and during this time absolutely nothing actually happened to advance the solution of my problem. I didn’t even get a call from Bank Tech, after I was assured hourly by Dell that a tech would be getting in touch within that hour.
By Thursday morning, it was clear, even to Dell, that Bank Tech just wasn’t going to show up. So the Dell customer service rep who was handling my escalation got approval to dispatch another service company — Unisys — to handle my case.
The Unisys tech arrived Friday morning, 3 days later than the service window that I’d purchased. But this guy was a pro. He came with all the proper tools, including a static mat. And because the last two service calls had been botched, he agreed to replace the motherboard, video daughter card *and* the display.
After he was done, the improvement was dramatic. I’m guessing that the video had started to fail soon after the first service was performed with no static protection.
So now all is well that ends well, everything is fixed and works, and life’s great again, right?
Hardly. Soon after the Unisys guy tore down the machine and replaced everything, the pointing device and the keyboard started to go randomly haywire, auto-clicking on things, spontaneously closing windows, etc. The keyboard and pointing device are now sensitive to pressure from my palms on the top of the crappy, cheap, ugly plastic case.
Did I call Dell again? Nah. I live with it because on October 1, this piece of shit will be depreciated out and I’ll be buying another one.
It will probably be a Lenovo ThinkPad or one of Apple’s new Intel Powerbooks running a Linux/MacOS dual-boot. It won’t be a Dell. I’ll never buy another thing from Dell in life. If they offered me a free machine, I’d decline it. I would accept a full refund. But I’d still never buy another Dell product.
If my Dell laptop burst into flames and my bladder was full, I wouldn’t piss on it to put out the fire.
If anyone from Dell is reading this, my service tag is 35XYX11. My express service code is 6889734325. Look up the case in your system and read the whole sad story for yourself.
A male dog will whine and beg in deference to a stronger dog, but will lower its voice into a guttural growl if it thinks it has a fighting chance. Men unconsciously do a similar thing, scientists say.
Ever work for a major corporation, a large company or been in a meeting with people who do? Then you’re probably familiar with canine-like, pack animal dominance hierarchies.
To be fair, if you’ve done an advanced degree or work at a major university, or worked in a large government or non-profit organization, you’re also familiar with pack animal social dynamics.
I was just discussing this with a friend the other day after a brief sojurn into the corporate world to investigate a contracting opportunity, which, incidentally, I decided to pass on.
The primary survival skill in these kinds of settings is identifying the dominant players in the situation, and then securing their favor by telegraphing signals of submission and by mirroring them as closely as possible.
Various sources have documented that males in dominant organizational roles have higher levels of testosterone than males in the sub-dominant roles. I believe it was Robert Ardry who pointed out in The Territorial Imperative
I don’t know what happens to the testosterone levels of women who assume dominant organizational roles, but I do know from personal experience that often women in dominant organizational roles will telegraph very strong and unambiguous dominance signals via demeanor, appearance, and use of language.
This kind of primate behavior is especially poisonous in large, static organizations where internal relationships and in-fighting replace the primary external mission of the organization as the focus of day-to-day activity. These kinds of organizations gradually decline and rot from the inside out by rewarding conformity, consensus and organizational rigidity rather than dissent, innovation, and flexibility. Think auto companies, public utilities, government bureaucracies, large universities, orchestras, the military.
On the other hand, the behaviors seem to be less of an issue in small, dynamic social groupings like business startups, skunk-works, rock bands, and terrorist organizations. Leadership in these kinds of organizations is extremely dynamic and situational.
A small, mobile, intelligent group may have a de jure leader — a leader who holds authority through external agency, as well as numerous situational/de facto leaders — members of the group who, through expertise, or personal quality assume leadership roles in certain closely defined situations.
These small, mobile, intelligent groups are extremely innovative and flexible. They excel at improvisation, and can leverage available resources, often to several levels of magnitude and project a level of influence disproportionate to their size.