According to insiders on www.ihatedell.net it appear the layoff are from XPS support queues ... a shame as those are the few non-outsourced support people left in Dell :(

Anyway .. even with those additional 250 ppl , they're far far awayt their target ... for some mistery during summer their work force increased by 2500 ... so on what number they'll calculate the 10% is a pure speculation

At one time I really respected Dell, both the man and the company... But based on what Patel-Dell is doing, why doesn't he just make it offical, pull up stakes and move the whole damn company to India?

Today Dell lowered the boom on more than 250 XPS tech support employees. This after Dell had promised it's premium line of computer customers that they would be receiving upgraded support. The XPS line of computers can cost upwards of $10,000.00 for a highly functional gaming machine.

Employees at work at the Dell campus in Nashville were totally surprised when the Staff Management people notified them of their terminations and had them immdiatly escorted from the building by Wackenhut Security. Local media was ordered away from the site so that pictures of surprised and enraged employees could not comment.

Many employees, working in the sweat shop type environment common at most Dell sites, regularly refer to Dell as the "Evil Empire." This because of the tremendous micromanaging carried on by Dell management an example being the fact that employees are limited to 18-24 minutes per week toliet time to go to the bathroom. This Orwellian surveillance is accomplised by employees logging every millisecond of their time at work by using a state of the art telephone logging system.

Rumors are rampant that an additional 250-300 employees will also get the axe at the Nashville Campus this week. These will be the GTS, or Gold Technical Support group. Dell's customers pay an additional premium for Gold Technical Support and have been promised excellent support coverage by paying these increase service warranty prices. How Dell will deliver on these promises and at the same time reduce the staff available to deliver, remains a mystery at this time.

In the meantime, if you call into Dell Technical Support, you will hear, Thank you for Calling Dell, because the American tech center's phones are always being monitored **FROM INDIA** Also you will be asked for your Service Tag number, so have it ready.

What was missing from this article is that the employees that were layed off were only the numbers of the Dell badged employees. Within this month they removed another 30-50 temporary workers without any notice. And from what I hear the rest of the temp workers through Staff Management will be removed by the end of the month.

I do know that it wasn't just XPS techs that were terminated. There were a few departments that were killed along with the cut including their "WPD" department that housed about 20 heads. So I wouldn't be surprised if they continued the trend and removed tech support roles from the Nashville site all together. It would be silly to have a site supervsior for the few heads they have left in Gold support.

n/t

They'll be singing for their supper now then /hat /coat /taxi

Seriously though, I feel really sorry for these folks but I'm not surprised.

My experience of buying a Dell was a nightmare and 3 battered machines letter I told them I'd had enough and went for a machine built in London rather than Limerick, I've never had the peasure of dealing with the US operation but I don't think I'd want to.

I did a search on the web and found I hate dell which is worth a read.