Dell - Tech company

[swraith 345]

Anyone hearing news from the inside regarding the next round of layoffs at Dell?  I haven't gotten much information from friends working there. Sounds like they don't know much yet.

Dell Makes Cuts to Boost AI Pivot, Reportedly Laying Off 12,500 Employees | PCMag

[immamac 42832]

had a friend notified Monday that he was impacted. Big bummer all around - I think they fell into the same exact trap that forced them to go private before. 

They have a more conservative approach and a much better reputation for resiliency and capability when deployed at scale than Supermicro and that basically has negative consequence when you are just trying to shove as many H100's as possible in a datacenter. No one gives a shit if it works or not as long as they have them eventually they will work. That's not really how dell does stuff, dell also wouldn't be as dumb as SMCI with exposure. They had 1.8B in inventory (didn't look at this quarters numbers that just released yet) but that's an astronomical amount of exposure for them to have on product they haven't sold and don't have orders for. The majority of that is just GPU's looking for homes. 

It looks like the appetite for GPU's is falling off outside of the major hyperscalers which also hurts dell because they don't really sell to that segment AFAIK.

Gonna be a rough ride for some of these companies that grew like the covid numbers were going to last more than a half cycle. 

[boilerhorn 1371]

Many companies (Dell is a perfect example) have a fairly conservative approach to RAS when deploying at scale.  It keeps them in good graces with the enterprise customers, for certain.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/faulty-nvidia-h100-gpus-and-hbm3-memory-caused-half-of-the-failures-during-llama-3-training-one-failure-every-three-hours-for-metas-16384-gpu-training-cluster

In a prior job, we had a multi-tiered compute datacenter.   Cheap/fast desktop-class computers for jobs we could tolerate redeploying (typically a major automated QA environment where jobs were typically 3 hours or less and easy to restart).  More expensive, enterprise-class servers - slower clock speeds, slower (ECC) DRAM speeds, etc. - for multi-day jobs that may or may not involve some level of interaction along the way.  And, people cost more than the machines and we did not want them to have to wait another 3 days on a restart.  That excludes what the developer had on their desk, etc.

[Celery Man 20929]

Such a crappy market to get laid off into. T&P

[BrazilHorn 6586]

Dell has laid off like 25-27k people in last 18 months. 12.5k this week alone. 
 

Lots of folks hitting streets. 

[swraith 345]

^^are the 12.5k distributed globally or concentrated in the Round Rock area?

[BrazilHorn 6586]

11 minutes ago, swraith said:

^^are the 12.5k distributed globally or concentrated in the Round Rock area?

My understanding globally but a lot of folks in area on LinkedIn 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13506]

3 hours ago, Celery Man said:

Such a crappy market to get laid off into. T&P

Is it though? I'm not saying that someone earning 200K is going to walk into another 200K overnight but there are jobs out there.

Edited August 8 by Nice Guy Eddie

[Celery Man 20929]

Yeah I’m not trying to overstate my understanding of the tech job market or even what kinds of people were likely impacted at Dell but I think it’s pretty competitive right now, maybe especially for jr devs. It seems like any product job getting posted has 100 applicants within an hour.

[gurt 748]

Tech has been pretty terrible since late 2022 imo.  Solid, mid-level devs not finding work for 6-12 months based on some former colleagues of mine.  And if you're in marketing or operations it is even worse

[Blotto 23484]

20 hours ago, immamac said:

had a friend notified Monday that he was impacted. Big bummer all around - I think they fell into the same exact trap that forced them to go private before. 

They have a more conservative approach and a much better reputation for resiliency and capability when deployed at scale than Supermicro and that basically has negative consequence when you are just trying to shove as many H100's as possible in a datacenter. No one gives a shit if it works or not as long as they have them eventually they will work. That's not really how dell does stuff, dell also wouldn't be as dumb as SMCI with exposure. They had 1.8B in inventory (didn't look at this quarters numbers that just released yet) but that's an astronomical amount of exposure for them to have on product they haven't sold and don't have orders for. The majority of that is just GPU's looking for homes. 

It looks like the appetite for GPU's is falling off outside of the major hyperscalers which also hurts dell because they don't really sell to that segment AFAIK.

Gonna be a rough ride for some of these companies that grew like the covid numbers were going to last more than a half cycle. 

Not to mention Dell's revenue numbers have been in decline for 2 years now.