[nolok]

To support your point, this is quite literally a part of a move to decrease them from 120k to 100k employees. Who decided those arbitrary numbers, and that 100k (not 105, not 95) was the goal needed for the best interest of the company, while not even linking it to specific division within it ? Clearly not someone in touch with the day to day and nitty gritty. Not because that number is good (or not), I don't know Dell enough for that. but because that number is too round, too perfect, to be anything else than a spreadsheet result, though displayed in a "Business Intelligence" suite of course. I'm sure the guy even had a great tie.

I understand it makes sense financially and that once companies become that big they are essentially playing two game (what they do game, with the workers, and what they're worth game, with the investors), but this really doesn't help with the dissociation more and more people are feeling between the stock market / modern management of companies by mba on one side, and their "real" every day live on the other.

I'm very lucky to be well off enough to not have to worry about things like that anymore, but I can't imagine the rage you must feel when fired not because you made a mistake, or are bad, or your project failed, or your division is doing poorly, or your company is, but because someone decided the employee ticker must reach that number, and now if it's not done the market will decide it's a failure, so you won the inverse lottery.

[gruez]

> but because that number is too round, too perfect

Because it's an external estimate. From the article:

"That number has been guesstimated at around ten percent of the workforce – about 12,500 people – as part of an effort to get the overall workforce from 120,000 to below 100,000."

>while not even linking it to specific division within

there's no indication that they decided to cut 10% (or whatever) evenly across all divisions. The only thing we do know is that the overall reduction is 10%.