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Train Your Own Replacement
An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo reports on how some employers are asking the workers they're laying off to train their foreign replacements - having them dig their own unemployment graves. 'Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker, according to a new survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers.' It looks like a real dilemma where if you refuse to hire your replacement, you are fired without severance and are ineligible for unemployment benefits, and if you quit, you don't receive severance and are ineligible for unemployment."
This is common practice at my job... I work as a state-licensed privately-run datacenter, to which state gvt agencies outsource their mainframe and other large scale Unix processing.
When we sign a new contract for an agency, we send computer operators and other staff there for a week to get trained by the state employees that are about to get laid off
Well, in Maryland at least, you do receive unemployment benefits if you are fired. Also, you can receive benefits when resigning in leui of being fired. A friend of mine just went through this.
He worked for Lockheed Martin and was going to be fired.
Instead, he resigned and received benefits. No severence though...
How can you not be eligible for unemployment benefits? The US unemployment benefits scheme must be truly screwed up if you can be ineligible just for quitting a job, or refusing to do something degrading like training a replacement.
In most cases if you quit, you cannot get benefits. However, I quit once and received full benefits. The reason was because they wanted to cut my salary by 40% and wanted me to work russian time (midnight to 8am - they were outsourcing to Russia, this was in 2001.) I said I would not accept the changes and if they wouldn't keep my at my current salary and hours, I would quit. They said no, I quit immediately. I layed this out to the unemployment people and they said I was justified in quiting. I am not sure if 'not wanting to train a replacement' would go over quite the same.
Actually bad employer references are kind of a thing of the past. Most employers can only say 2 things if they are called about a former employee...
Yes they worked here and the dates they worked were from X to Y...
That's it. The problem is, employers are afraid of law suits from former employees that might get wind that they were the ones that cost them the job. A former employeer can't even tell them if you quit, were fired, laid off, etc...
Now, employers that know little about the law will probably continue to "spill the beans", and if you use a former manager as a reference, then things change...but that's obvious...
First time was a crusher, guys sent from India, working for an offshore vendor - my primary task was to train them to take over for me, since I was terminated in lieu of them taking over systems support and development. Funny thing was my friend got me the gig there four years earlier but just about all of my training was of the OJT variety, though as a seasoned programmer, it doesn't take me too long to get the underpinnings of the system after I dig a bit. I got another offer, and even though it was for less pay and temporary, gladly took it to escape the burden. One of my team members trained a fellow for six months, thinking that the guy was going back to India. Then he suffered the ultimate insult as the individual got to relocate here and take his work from home position.
Second time I didn't have a job lined up and a team in Mexico took over my function. While I didn't train these folks in person, I was charged with preparing a comprehensive how-to guide that covered every facet of system support and development on that particular application domain. Knowledge transfer was conducted via email and my prepared HTML kit that covered everything from overviews to FAQ on the system. It was easier to stomach, minus the person to person mode.
You do it because as long as you're accepting a paycheck, you're obligated to serve as directed. At least that is the way I was brought up. A honest days work for an honest days pay and all that jazz.
Within a 45 minute drive of my house, I tally >5-10K jobs gone, either to India or handled by immigrant visa worker here in the states. By those numbers, you may be assured that these arn't rinky dink outfits, these are corporate giants in finance, defense industry, semiconductors, etc...
Maybe it's not come to your IT department yet. But the prospect will come soon to the executive management, unless you work for a very small shop, and they will consider it. I served a contract in the summer at a pharmaceutical company and the staff there boasted no way would offshoring and/or outsourcing pervade their organization. A few months into the assignment, senior management there announced a bold new initiative, a partnership with IBM that did indeed involve wholesale migration of their application and systems programming to Indian locales.
Here's a list of firms that have indeed embarked upon campaigns that involved US workers training foreign replacements:
You can read about more companies here that have ex-IT workers that can share the same stories. These arn't satellite systems out on the peripheral horizon, only impacting a small percentage. If anything, I'd say the numbers quoted in the story are way under the mark, given these are core systems like accounts payable, accounts receivable, payroll, financial capture, EDI, MRP, reservation scheduling, accounting, etc...
Yay globalism.
AZspot
Please. . . Most, if not all job descriptions I have ever seen (most had to also be signed, with an extra copy I can have), have including these very valuable words at the end: "Any other assigned tasks".
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Thank god I am safe at Vandelay Industries...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The reason was because they wanted to cut my salary by 40% and wanted me to work russian time (midnight to 8am - they were outsourcing to Russia, this was in 2001.)
This could be construed as constructive dismissal - making unreasonable demands or not paying salary is usually the same as outright firing someone.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Afterall who doesn't have old unused letterhead paper from their old employers lying arround? Not me I always make sure I have plenty.
One just signs it in the name of a manager that's no longer employed there, using a date when he was there. So on the infinitesimally small chance that they actually ring up & check, things will still appear above board.
The h-1b visa is not legally used to lower wages -- only to acquire unique talent that is not available in the domestic labor force. Therefore, if you are training your replacement and your replacement is here on an h-1b visa, you can take action against your employer.
Seastead this.
I may get flamed and modded down for this but I'm going to put forth my honest opinion on this anyway. In my opinion, the shift to employing Indian and other offshore workers is not, in the grand scheme of things, as big a deal as some would have it.
.sig is actually somewhat relevant, at least to the angry majority. taken from dante, it translates: "The only road to paradise begins in hell." hope you're all on that road, headed in the right direction.
I work at a smallish company (around 250 employees including our offshore team) comprised of an engineering group split roughly 50/50 between our Boston-area (Mass., USA) office and our offshore contractors in Bangalore, India. Over the course of the last 2 years we've struggled with, and eventually found, a working balance between onshore and offshore talent. A 50/50 split (for most teams -- some are mostly offshore, and for others we can't find any good candidates outside the states) seems to work out best. More of the seniors/principals/architect roles are onshore, but we have some very senior people from india as well. Some of them come onshore for months at a time. In general they're treated just like regular employees. (In my personal experience I've actually preferred the personalities, dedication and skills of these workers on at least an equal basis with their local counterparts.)
It is a model that does more than allow our young business to keep costs down. If we hadn't moved our callcenter offshore, the increase cost per customer care call might well have bankrupted us, or forced a major extra round of financing we might not have been able to obtain. The whole thing could have tanked and we'd all be out of a job. As it is now, we're enabling a booming middle class in a poverty-stricken 3rd-world country (which in the long view is a very good thing for the world), at the same time that we've gradually improved the quality of our average developer (and CSR rep) and found a stable, economically viable, harmonious balance.
I know this is not the same experience many bitter recently-laid-off engineers have gone through, but it is *my* experience, and a perspective that doesn't get heard much.
I honestly believe there will always be a market for onshore talent. startups will never be able to immediately get a whole operation offshore from the get-go. fledgeling companies will need local people on local hours able to meet face to face at any time. my take is, I'm going to continue to train both on and offshore developers, do the best damn job I can, keep honing my own skills the best I can, and it ALL improves my situation -- and my resume.
working with people all over the world is a phenomenon that's not going to go away. so to the posters who suggest mis-training their potential replacements, I ask, which would you rather be: a whining dishonest saboteur who left a shambles behind in their position? or someone with solid experience working with international teams to create good software? to me the choice is clear.
like anything in life, make the best of it, and of yourself.
ps perhaps in this case my
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
Don't subject the rest of the Slashdot crowd to the talking out of your ass. Employment visas for India are available to Americans as well. It's the companies who don't want to employ Americans in India because they sure as hell will end up raising the wages in India and reducing the cost advantage of offshoring jobs.