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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."
I'm not in the computer industry, but I'm wondering how long it takes to train foreign workers? If your job is so valuable that it takes a few days to train someone to be as competent as you, then how does that reflect upon your job?
Imagine training a foreign physician in what you do. How long would that take? 7-12 years?
And whats worse-in my case the employer lied. "Oh no we're not training them to replace you, we just expect that you will be busy with other projects..." Yeah other projects like looking for work. They paid for it in the end....HAH! And when they asked me back to help "save the company"....I didnt feel much desire to.
Forcing somebody to train their replacement is just absurd.
There needs to be a balance between management power and union power, because this is just absurd.
In my company I have to train my potential replacements every day. The company wants to have the ability to layoff anyone, anytime without worry. In fact they have a big layoff once every few months. I'm getting used to it.
Not that losing ANY jobs is ever good... but a 1% swing in ANYTHING is hardly a trend. And this is far less than 1%.
Don't get pissed when you're asked to train your replacement. Worry when you *arent* asked, because it means management doesnt think you know anything valuable.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Train your replacement well. Tell him you're well aware that he is going to replace you, and that the pitfalls in his (new) position will be the foolish managers who've hired him because he is cheaper than you are, but less skilled. Tell him that as soon as he has enough experience he should immediately look for a new job, as you are now, because ultimately, he (and you) are better off working for someone with some fore-sight.
:)
You can sit together, looking at job sites all day looking for a new job. You will be seen as diligently performing this latest job function of "training". You might even earn some extra kudos from the PHB.
It will be a bonding experience. You'll wander onwards into the job market - and he'll climb the corporate ladder at your old job.
In a few years time, you'll have kept in touch, and can call him up to see if the company he's working at is hiring. He might even be your boss
In the past 7 years, I've known four IT workers who got laid off. One found a job right away, another (myself) in two months, the other two took less than six months.
However, I also know a bunch who quit their jobs for various reasons (to travel in Europe, hated coworkers, the job just sucked, moved back to hometown to be closer to family, got a better offer), and one who was outright fired for inappropriate conduct.
But then, I'm not in California and the southeast market apparently didn't get hit quite as bad as the left coast.
So my experience is quite in contradiction to yours and more in line with the earlier post. See, anecdotal evidence is basically useless, you have to go by the numbers for a discussion like this. The problem is, where to get reliable numbers? Apparently not the article linked to...
Oh well.
Government IS the problem.
no wrong attitude....
:-)
train him WRONG... fricking screw them as hard as they are screwing you.
sorry, but if your boss doenst know your job enough to train your replacement then, you will screw them nicely
just like how I rot13 all the sourcecode I write every night....
it will take them decades to figure it out. espically when I tell them... "what??? It's psudeocode! you are tellimg me you hired someone so unskilled as they dont know what to do with a psudocode file?? I'll gladly help you as a contractor for $200.00 an hour, minimum 10 hour billing."
sorry... but if they want to screw you, feel free to return their favor.... just do it legally...
In my case, I was the local It that they decided that I could write apps, they never specified the language nor bought the tools... and yes I deleted all my self bought tools when I left... I dont want to violate any copyrights...
oh and be sure to call OSHA and BSA and tip them off to unsafe working conditions and suspected software piracy, that is always good for a payback to a company.
do I sound bitter? at least now I have a good job with a good company and they are smart enough to use CVS and buy the tools we need....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You're exactly right on.
In most cases, when your job has no training responsiblity and suddenly gets that resposibility, it's a leverage with which to demand a pay raise or a contract that makes a comittment to keep you around. If they don't give that to you, then you haven't been fired... your old job has ceased to exist and you declined the new one they tried to offer you because it's an unacceptable offer. That's the difference between a logic that disqualifies you from unemployment to one that qualifies you.
I think they're relying on the fear of workers not familiar with the local unemployment laws to not see that they can get their unemployment benefits even if they refuse to train their replacements, and if everybody on a staff refuses to be the trainer than the "send the jobs overseas" plan suddenly gets a whole lot more expensive to the point it tips over...
Or, if you live in Minnesota, there is no such thing as an unjust cause. At first I was puzzled by this "dilemma," because in the Socialist Upper Midwest about the only way you can mess up getting unemployment checks is to be working a job on the sly.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
I wonder what the numbers really are. Personally, I am not affected (but may be one day before too long) but I have a friend who is being sent Silicon Valley East (Bangalore) to train his replacement in September. He doesn't want to train them to do the job badly, because he doesn't want to hurt his long standing customers. Noble, but perhaps somewhat misguided.
Agreed This happened to me in 2001. The overseas "Consulting" outfit that was hired to replace me as an admin/dba received all the training i deemed appropriate. Needless to say after six months of unacceptable downtime on the servers- security breaches- software issues - and piss poor performance (although the stupid CFO and accountants were happy) i had sitting in my lap a very lucrative support contract. Same job - part time- twice the money. Go figure. The world is full of idiots and i'm starting to beleive they are ALL accountant types.
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
The first draft was 60+ pages, and along with describing how to maintain the sytem it also included notes on defects and poor practices that the sysadmins should address (there were quite a few ).
The target audience for the document was someone with roughly my own skills who simply did not have the program-specific knowledge that I have. The document even encouraged the reader to improvise and adapt the notes; this was only one set of examples of how to do things and surely not the best or only way.
Well, shortly before submitting the document I was given someone who not only wasn't my peer, they shouldn't have even had a job doing anything with computers at all. We're talking a programer who said...
"I use the mouse to copy text."
"What's Ctrl-C? Sounds like too much trouble."
"Notepad is a very good editor."
"It's not possible to compare 2 files".
...I could go on for hours, though I'll spare you any more brain dammage.
The new instruction was that I needed to make sure this person could use the document I was writing. We're talking "Take a finger, reach around, stop when it gets moist" simplicity here.
In the mean time, I was to also train this person to do exactly what I did -- in 1 month -- though it took me about 5 years to learn the basics myself (and I've been doing it for 15 years!).
I've encountered both unreasonable and impossible tasks before, so I attacked this one with the same vigor. I spent most of the month training -- smiling -- and going away as often as possible to jump up and down in deep frustration.
Because _this_person_ was my real audience, I threw out most of the original document, and re-wrote it with such gems as "here is how to create a desktop link" and "follow procedures, even if you think you don't have to" (this I've heard was ignored immediately -- 'too much trouble; I don't need to do all that').
The only thing this person had was an H1B visa...and I'm guessing that they were both cheap and loyal (due to the threat of being deported).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I have for a few years tried to make myself redundant. I've automated everything I could. I trained people to do what I do, so they can do it better than me. I've done that out of my own initiative.
My Bosses like that, and I get more interesting Jobs than before.
I guess it's different if you are made to do it, because you probably won't have any more choice.
get 7 free Japanese lessons.
I worked as a contract employee at one point, and after I was done, they decided to add the job as a permanent position. They contracted me back to train the new guy. What joy that was. Had to teach him PERL in about a week. I walked away with more cash in 3 months then he will in a year.
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
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.
The obvious answer is to incorrectly train your replacement. One of my former employers had been doing this one department at a time, having existing employees train their replacements and then dropping the axe on that department.
When it came to my depertment (Bankruptcy) I pleaded with my co-workers to leave some of the finer details out. No one wanted to, so when the time came for us to commit to paper the process we used to submit a bankruptcy claim to the courts, I made sure that I didn't remind anyone of omitted steps.
Sure enough, the axe came down on our department and we were shuffled off to other areas. Our replacements fucked up during the first month, they improperly completed a bankruptcy claim and submitted it to court. It was summarily thrown out, costing the company $50,000 in one day. I felt satisfied when the story drifted back to our location.
Remember boys and girls, if you're expected to train your replacement. Go along with it, but leave out some critical step and make sure that the replacement fucks up.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
IANAL but I bet you could find one to take your case. But do it now before your employer goes bankrupt!
sulli
RTFJ.
Aquire a BAD accent. You have to put up with theirs...
Phone rings. Do not pick it up first ring.
Draaaaaaaaaaaaaaag it out. It will cost your compnay more... Also speeeeeak slooooowly. International calls COST money.
Also remember if your getting up in the middle of the night. THEY can too. That works BOTH ways. Schedule a few key meetings for 3pm YOUR time. They didnt want to call in for the KEY meetings... This has the effect of quading the time it takes to do anything. Because both sides eventually realize they do not want to be up in the middle of the night. So they only do work durring 'normal busness hours'.
Also if YOU have to be there at 11PM your boss should be RIGHT next to you for that KEY meeting. You would be amazed how quickly those meetings stop happening. Make SURE he is there. Otherwise 'that decision just could not be made without him there'. Work your way up the chain. Otherwise you will be roadkill. It is up to you and the people around you.
They don't always tell you that you're training your replacements.
A good friend of mine used to work as a IC designer for one of the large companies in Silicon Valley. Her group was given some ridiculous deadlines that were clearly impossible to meet. To "help" them speed up work on the project, the company brought in a bunch of engineers from one of its overseas sites. The foreign engineers spent several months here, working with my friend's group, getting up to speed on the project. My friends and her co-workers really went out of their way to help make these guys comfortable, taking them on shopping trips, inviting them over on holidays, etc. Little did they know they were training their own replacements. Shortly after the overseas engineers left, my friend's entire group was laid off and the project was moved to the overseas center.
Actually, the folks down at the unemployment office are surprisingly inclined to accept your side of the story when it comes to getting fired or quitting.
I've personally received full unemployment bennies after being fired for not performing my job duties a week after getting a small raise, after quitting and moving to Hawaii to go surfing, and after being fired for attempting to organize labor on a shop floor, among other things.
Don't swallow the FUD. Go for it!!
Is it fascism yet?
Personally I quit when from disgust when the company where I work started mass layoffs. Now they are replacing all the old staff with foreigners and new college graduates. I figure it set them back at least 3 years. There is no knowledge transfer because for every round of layoffs more people leave, and it's very clear that you don't share what you know because it makes you vulnerable.
So lots of people are unemployed. Why not get together and start your own company and outsource your own programming? Your new company should be lean and mean and won't even have to support million dollar dead wood management. I started my own company and about a year later it's really taking off. Plus you'll find lots of Americans are willing to work for just the same as you would pay people in other countries. It's the scariest and the best thing I ever did. I am almost thankful. I would never have been able to spend this much time with my kids if I was still at my desk job. Now I work from home for my own corporation. I pay for everything else first, taxes last, and I set my own hours.
Come up with a Vertical Market app for a few thousand and you only need 10 or so customers a year. Take your old knowledge and start working on the next version. Don't take this shit lying down, beat them at their own game and stomp them into in the mud. Go get a DBA at the local court house at least and start coding.
A minor point. It's not only seat-of-the-pants operations that might ask you not to come in on Monday. It was policy at the large corporation (75k employees) where I worked that anyone leaving to work for a competitor was immediately given a box and asked to pack up while their manager watched. I assume that "it's none of your business where I'm working" was met with the same response.
Almost one in five information technology workers has lost a job or knows someone who lost a job after training a foreign worker
Hmm...so lets see here. 1 in 5 people has either had this happen to them or knows of someone that it's happened to? So if I work in a company with 500 people and 3 of them wind up training thier own replacements (Which, of course, would be very well-known on the company grapevine), then I'm counted as one of the 1 in 5 who have had to "dig their own unemployment graves"? Theoretically, it could just be one really popular guy that was laid off like this and he was known by 1 in 5 IT workers.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but if surveys like this are the best argument that can be raised for how much this is damaging the US economy, then we've got a long way to.
Sabotage is tempting, but from my experience in transition (job moved to a different state). I had to much pride in what I do, and being good at it. The time table set out for me to do training wasn't sufficient for me to do a bang up job anyways.
I did the best I could in any case, because I knew the replacements would be challanged either way, and I didn't have anything against those people. I would have felt bad if I was sabotaging them, as the big evil corp we all worked for was big enough, and international enough, to just roll on. It seems short sighted on my part to create more victims like me. Any how, I'm not that evil.
I have heard tales of great men, who made a cron job that would destroy their computer and source code at 10:00am every monday morning -- unless they were there to stop it.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
You hit nailed it, baby. You nailed it.
Just 80 years have passed since the culmination of the union activism, and now we have come to this. How sad. How very sad.
All I can say is that Slashdotters who want to find what the above poster and I are talking about, you can go to my sig url and follow the link about social democracies. Read....Learn...Think about it all.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I have always argued to have that particular part removed or rewritten as it has always been my arguement that it is a one liner that basically says forget every thing above this and do as you are told.. Often it is not difficult to argue how this point is not needed as you would be more than happy to engage in any reasonable extra duties from time to time :-)
"Carpe Noctem"
Simple solution. Train them but train them badly, very badly. Train them with stuff that sounds plausible but is diametricly opposed to right. What are they going to do, fire you?
@de_machina
They had this unusual policy of laying off ALL of their temporary staff at the end of the year as a way of forcing managers to rethink their hiring and their needs for the next year. So, how did I handle it in late November and early December, when I was told to wrap up my book projects and hand them off to permanent employees, training them in every last detail of how to handle my projects?
I worked my butt off, 50-60 hours per week, making sure that everything was correct, making sure everything worked, making sure that my projects were in good order for management, and for my friends (permanent employees) who would pick them up when I left.
Why? Because I knew they would need writers the following year, and because they paid well! And I got hired back on in early spring, as projects started to heat up.
But that's the old way. Find people who are competent here in the US, pay them well, and expect the best work from them.
I know the parent was modded troll, but i'm biting regardless.
If minimum wage labor is worth so little, then explain why the giant corporations that are fueled by minimum wage labor as so goddamn rich, yet their minimum wage employees are still struggling from paycheck to paycheck...All while CEOs of such companies are practically swimming in cash. If there's any wage that's inflated, it has to be that of a CEO and other top level management positions. Not to mention the benefits these people get....yeah it must be a real killer to offer that dental plan to your employees when you are holding millions in stock options. Get a clue, man...
>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...
That's why you phrase things properly.
Good reference: "Wait a minute. It'll take me a while to find that file. Never really had to worry about it much. Yup. He worked here for 12 years."
Bad reference: "Oh. *HIM*. Yeah, we had *THAT* guy for 12 years."
That being said, references are useless either way, anyways. If you're staying in the same field, there's a good chance you aren't going to be working for a company that benefits your old company. In that case, the old company will be happy to make sure you get a job and that you never bug them again.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If it's of any consolation: the next wave of offshoring will be tougher on the accounting/finance people, as their line of work is usually an overhead cost, highly regulated (and therefore standardized), just begging for offshore outsourcing.br>
Remember: the cost of recovering a train wreck is far more than the cost of the train or its cargo.
Invent your own forms and policies, create a complete and utter fantasy business and have you and a few other train all the new people against that.
Of course I'm not sure what sort of civil or criminal liabilities there are in sabotage...
The real solution here is to just do what you are told, train your replacement. And now that you have no job simply stop buying things. Once the economy crumbles and the US finds itself unable to compete in global economy you can move to India and get a job driving taxis.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I worked for a company that was acquired by another company that had 5000+ Indian programmers. The Indian programmers were all H1B and were here just to take money from the pockets of real Americans. I was kind of the "lone wolf" in the company that was acquired - I was a programmer and pretty much every one else was project managers. I was brought in to write an internal program that would then be used by the project managers to generate revenue on their contracts.
Shortly after the acquisition, I was told that the company was laying me off, and that I would be given a severance package for turning over my code to one of these guys.
So they shipped me and the company loaner workstation up to the new headquarters where I handed over the code and met some of these guys.
All in all, the trip went well, and I got to meet some of the people that were putting people who worked very hard to be able to earn a comfortable wage. Do I sound bitter? Must be the coffee... but I digress...
These guys were working for squat - the highest paid of them made 1/5th as much as me. They didn't have to pay for anything (except food) while they were here -- the company paid their living expenses. So they worked and sent their money back home (you know, out of this country) where I'm sure it was put to good use -- making more companies to steal more jobs from America.
You may be rolling your eyes, or even laughing -- just remember how you feel now when you get the call from your boss.
"I'm sorry, but times are tough and we're going to need to let you go. By the way, let me introduce you to Surgahvlesh Humaramaghashandran. He'll be replacing you, and needs to know everything you know. Don't worry that you can't pronounce his name and he can't pronounce the letter "W". You'll get along fine!"
Yeah, just fine.
My Aged Mum, who doesn't often use vulgarity, has a saying: "There's no use getting into a pissing match with a polecat." You can never raise as much of a stench as a skunk can; why bother trying?
I'd have to say this was a perfect call for "work to rule." Seems to me in this case there's a lot to be said for giving exactly 100 percent--no more, no less. No extra miles need to be walked, nothing helpful needs to be volunteered, no uncompensated extra hours need to be worked. I'd arrive at 8:30 precisely and set the same standards for the immigrant worker as I would for a native-born worker. I would adhere to those as strictly as possible, with no quarter asked and none given. I'd take the prescribed lunch interval alone or with other friends and depart on the dot of 5:30.
The very real angst and distress a person might be feeling is probably best saved for real friends and off-work hours. The few satisfactions here involve preservation of one's own integrity and self-respect while leaving an organization that has laid aside both of those qualities.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
Being faced with the threat of real competition and the prospect of losing your job is a feeling that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. That said, instead of cowering, wake up and do something about the situation:
* Turn fear into motivation. Instead of cowering and waiting for the pink slip, get motivatied.
* Upgrade your skills - particularly your people and business skills.
* Sieze the opportunity to outsource yourself. Start a company. Make your own outsourcing deal: lower your former employer's costs the way you always talk about at lunch and keep the work local!
* Work on plugging your business unit or self into the revenue generation side of the business. Hint: IT is typically a huge cost center that senior management is rarely satisfied with.
-- $G
A dilemma, eh? (No, I'm not from Canada.) The answer is so simple, I'm surprised nobody has thought of this...
All you have to do is teach your replacement all the wrong and worst ways to do things. In the meantime (even if you have to work extra at home to accomplish this), you continue to do all of your work, so it looks like the foreign replacement is getting the hang of things and doing them right, but for less money. Management thinks the cheap labor is ready to take over, and they fire you. Next thing they find out: Big damages. And they, the MANAGEMENT, gets in big trouble with the higher-ups, or with the shareholders, or, if it's a small business, the business loses a lot and could go down. In the meantime, you get your severage package, and before you get fired, you start looking for your new job.
This might seem like a really mean, rude, and nasty thing to do, but think of it this way: The more businesses are damaged by cheap foreign labor, the more they'll be inclined to STOP DESTROYING THE DOMESTIC ECONOMY and hire people over friggen here. And you're getting a job somewhere where hopefully they won't treat you like some kind of garbage.
In the mid-90's I had the opportunity to volunteer with freshmen at junior colleges. Many times the discussion of whether to suffer through the long years of university or take the relatively short (and easy) trek through tech school -- with the advantage of have a job right out of school -- came up. My response then was the same it is now: tech schools train you how to use a tool; universities offer the chance to learn to think. While you won't have a job right out of school, you won't be loosing a job with no where to go when the tools change; and in technology the tools change!
How can you have faith in an education promoted to people who have the time and inclination to watch Day-Time Television wherein they are told they, too, can have a High Paying Job right out of school! Amazing! You can take DTTv'ers and make them MCSE's in two years and they can earn "Big Bucks"...uh, huh. Overinflated salaries earned by minimally skilled inexperienced workers; no wonder companies are dealing with time shifts, language barriers, cultural disconnects -- they were already having to put up with slightly retouched Jerry Springer regulars!
Instead, round out your development with a dash of human life experience. It is amazing how much more you can do with technological tools if you have experience doing that thing first without the technology. Look it -- you can learn all about Gimp but unless you have talent you're still not an artist. Teach an artist how to use digital tools...then you're in for some fun. Say, Maya's been available for how many years now to whosoever wants to grab it? How many tech grads have produced 1/5th what an experienced filmographer has with the same tool, even if the arist began not knowing how to hold the mouse when she began?
Think about it. Learn how to do something, then learn how to do it better with technology. Now, go do the right thing.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
In the USA, where the managerial class seems to be specifically bred to be missing significant portions of their brains, it happens all the time that employees are ordered to train their replacements. Then they are fired or terminated for chickenshit and denied unemployment benefits.
This happened to me when I the small company that I was working for got taken over by its German parent company. The new six-foot eight-inch 30-year-old 'manager' came in and reassigned everyone to really stupid and degrading restructured positions. Then as they complained, each employee was fired.
Then the fuckhead went out of his way to ensure that the fired employees couldn't get unemployment benefits, even when it wouldn't cost the company anything (I looked into this and it was true) and the employees had been working profitably for as many as seven years. He said that Germany was ruined by socialists and now that he was in the US, he could run the place like a 'pure capitalist'. I considered reminding him that just firing people on a whim and then making sure that that couldn't get benefits was not such a good idea in a country where everybody had a gun collection, but I decided that I really didn't need the weird shit that would come from such a comment so easily misunderstood by a foreigner.
Sure enough the viruses, lawsuits, crank calls, and all sorts of nastiness started happening within a few weeks. Then the sales dropped off. Then the stock price went from 66 Euros to 1.5 Euros in a 12 month period (it's bounced back to 4.5 Euros).
Then it was my turn to jump into the tree chipper.
What a nightmare. No wonder people go postal!
One of my clients had fired a programmer on staff for repeated lateness and other behavioral issues. Unfortunately for the client they told the programmer to start looking for a new job, instead of firing her immediately. This gave the programmer enough time to plant several "traps" that wound up costing the site close to 2 million in revenue by the time our group came in finally found all the issues. Things like disabling programs that report when certain customer charges fail, changing charge codes in a database so they fail, changing pricing ... etc. Really obscure changes that were unnoticed in the flow of tens of thousands transactions a day.
... no stink was ever made publicly by the upper management when they found out, since it would have been their asses on the line for not noticing the drop in revenue. Brushed under the carpet which is pretty common in the corporate world.
Funny thing is
As someone who works for a technology company who has a an office in Atlanta. AND whos CEO is on the constant push to move him up there. I beg to differ.
Our office is in Buckhead, and within a 60 mile readius there is nothing cheap in Atlanta nor in most of Georgia.
After doing the cost of living expenses for the quality of life I maintain in Florida, my salary would have to raise 25k a year from its current level so I can live in the same manner I enjoy in Florida.
Granted georgia does have some backwoods areas but it does have its metropolitans as well. I suggest you visit something other than the airport.
And as for the car unions. Hell, I agree with you. Though, I still personally have a hard time buying American cars, as my japanese ones have caused far less trouble than the american counterparts. And trust me, I have owned from just about every major auto manufacturing country.
Also, unions are good. But they also foster whiny bitches. No one says a job has to be fun or interesting, just safe.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Being laid-off without cause generally requires a two weeks notice, or a payment for two weeks of work (although this does differ depending on your location, among other factors.) It is generally considered your work terminates on this date if the notification route is chosen.
When you perform a bad act after receiving the notice of termination, you can still get fired immediatly before your two weeks are up. This can be extremely rare, but is possible if you do something really bad.
This doesn't apply on the two-week payment route - in that case you are already dismissed and have no power in the company. Anything you do after receiving payment would get you fired would be burning your bridges and make it harder for you to get a future job.
My inexperienced replacements in india are being trained by me.
I can't speak to the quality of the software they produce, but my company has unofficially unstated that 'fsck the customers, we can live off of maintenence revenue for several more years'
Then again, the top executives are
- trying to get their stock options which are underwater for 4 years above the strike price
- staring down the expensising of stock options next year
- selling assets off to 'make our numbers look better'
- relying on rental income from our mostly empty due to outsourceing to india campus buildings to make it look like our software sales are not imploding as fast as they really are
- position the company as a candidate for a buyout because very few people work in a country, the USA, with actual labor laws
Anything else?
Words spoken by the VP or higher ups are discarded, their actual actions and press releases around the world (thanks google news) show what is really going on.
Accept the suicide training mission. Train them wrong. Take the severance and your fellow axed coworkers, and compete with the outsourced losers.
--
make install -not war
One of the big issues I had with my [former] employer (when I was placed in the same situation as you) were the terms at which I could still receive my vacation pay. Georgia is a "voluntary" vacation pay state - this means that the employer can choose if you get your earned vacation pay or not. My Vacation Pay is a significant chunk of change (2 weeks salary), and as such I want to make sure I secured it. Fortunately, as they closed down the Atlanta office, my employment fell under Arizona (our headquarters') state employment laws.
In the event that you lose your job to another state, keep in mind that the employers' state laws apply.
Bottom line: If you get laid-off in your state because that [local] office is closing, have your attorney look closely at the laws of your employers' "headquarters" state. It could benefit you greatly.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I have nothing to back this up with (but would be interested in seeing actual numbers) other than my experience, which tells me in some thirty years we've gone from a world of a handful of millionaires to a world with a handful of billionaires. People who made 100k thrity years ago are now making 1mil. I just don't see the same order of magnitude increases on the low end. It's the relative gap that I was refering to in the original post. Who cares if the poor make 15k a year now instead of 2 or 3k, when the wage of the wealthy is increasing 10x, 100x, or even 1000x times. At the same time poor went from paying 15 cents of tax per dollar (on average) to close to 20, and the wealthy went from paying around 30 to around 25 (I don't rememeber the exact numbers, but its the trend that's important anyway). As if the trends weren't sad enough, American's have been fooled into thinking that capitalism is simply working as designed and that the wealthy deserve everything they've earned. What we seem to forget is that we have a right to tax their earnings and disperse the wealth.
Our company, which sold kitchen gadgets, had actually been doing well into the recession, and it surprised a lot of us. Stores in the mall all around us were closing down, and we were doing okay. Then, suddenly, we weren't. Our company tried franchising, and it was a DISASTER, and the owners lost a lot of money. We opened up two "mega-stores" which both flopped.
We had this guy, called a "district manager," which was weird because we only had one district. He was this gung-ho, send-'em-to-seminars kind of guy who was used to his big bonuses every year. Around when things got bad is when he taught himself spreadsheet software, and started whacking away at all costs the spreadsheet told him to without reguard to whther it was actually a good idea or not. He cut staff drastically. The management (including me) protested, and proved how this made a bad problem worse, but this only seemed to make him more determined, and he got sneaky.
He sent this "new guy" to my store, and asked me to train him to become an manager like myself. This guy was just awful. He was arrogant, didn't bathe, and right off the bat told me outright he would have my job. At first I thought, "Yeah, you won't last a week here." I was one of the top three salespeople in the chain as well as assistant manager. Two weeks later, I wrote him up because of some serious infraction, with the intent of letting him go, being the worst employee I had ever trained, but for some reason upper management wouldn't let me fire him. Even though a background check showed he was wanted in a nearby county for theft and appraisal fraud. You guys can see where this was going. Yeah, he WAS my replacement. Later I found out he was going to do my job for minimum wage, which was about half of what I made.
Then the company sent me to a "penalty store," which is a store that is in a terrible spot, doesn't do well, has serious building problems, etc... basically, it was an attempt to make me quit. But I was too stupid to see the writing on the wall, so I got "changed to hourly," which meant a pay cut, no commission, and suddenly my pay was determined by upper management. My hour allotment got smaller and smaller, until "they didn't have hours for me" for a whole month. So I filed unemployement.
The company denied I was laid off, and said I was only a contractor. The deputy who handled the case had them on speakerphone, and at some point they were stalling, she said, "Mr. Walrus, you'll get unemployment. I see this happen all the time, they just don't want to pay the taxes or unemployment." So I got my unemployment and a hard, stinging lesson.
Afterwards, they decided I made it too hard, so they fired all the rest of the staff one by one for the weirdest stuff. Like the top salesman in the chain was fired because a "surprise secret audit" showed the register was missing $10, and so they threatened to put him in jail if he ever tried to claim unemployment. He sued and won.
And the guy who replaced me? Tried to rob them blind. He stole account numbers from all the company's vendors, and made HUGE orders shipped to a Mailbox Etc address. Luckily for the company, one of the vendors tipped them off, and because of the amount of money involved, the police got involved, and set up a sting. He must have gotten wind of it, because before the shipments were sent, he fled town and was never seen again.
At another company, years later, I was at the receiving end. The first day of work was the day the girl I was replacing was told she was being fired in 2 weeks. That was pretty stressful.
I have seen stuff like this in the tech industry when I started in the mid 1990's, too. My second job I was at a QA company where they asked us to document everything we did when testing software. We did, and then they outsourced our jobs to Tucson, where people th
A year ago it seemed to be the case that they needed to advertise the position locally.
:)
I attempted to get an H1B in april last year, and when my potential employer advertised an entry level position - they got over 200 applications. People with 12 years experience applied! I was told it was a non-starter.
I've since entered the USA on a K-1 fiancee visa, and ultimately it's easier to relax when your residency depends on your marriage being successful and not your tech company
The downside is i've had a lot more personal dealings with the INS than if a large corporation had taken care of the process for me. They aren't the most fun people to talk to....
First off, let me say that I've seen unions from both sides of the table. I was a shop steward in an IBEW shop, and saw people one third as experienced as me get paid twice as much as I was simply because they had put in more time. I've also been directly involved in contract negotiations as management. Right now, workers NEED unions! The simple fact is that the pendulum has swung too far in the employer's direction for it to ever equalize back. It's kind of 'stuck' up there. Only organized labor is going to have any chance of ever movig it a little down from it's present high horse. Whether you want to admit it or not, there's safety in numbers! Don't get me wrong, I'm not pro union, I'm PRO WORKER! It's just that management has made a science out od screwing workers. Unions have their problems too: Corruption, nepotism, and deadwood. BUT that said, the plusses (unfortunately) FAR OUTWEIGH any minuses for at least the near future...maybe even longer!
I was hired as a salaried employee by a major communications company that I had been working on & off again as a consultant for. I was hired to consolidate the data centers of several companies they had acquired (obviously, laying off the jobs there) into a much smaller number of datacenters with a unified and well documented design. All of which allowed them to lay off alot of engineers and do the same work with less and actually improved their operations significantly. When I was hired, I was told in advance that I would get severed once my job was complete and I would get a full severance package, which I did. So I worked a year, and came home with almost 2 years salary and had my health benefits for 2 years. Not too shabby for 1 years work.
Once I left, the remaining employees that they wanted to get rid of at the former companies were fired for breaking company rules (P2P, surfing, etc).
This is nothing new though, back in 1989 I was working in IT and developing EIS systems, but at the same time developing systems go get rid of Union brakemen at a major transportation company. They were already replaced by automated switches and mainframes, but they had ancient contracts that paid them to sit in airconditioned boxes along the railroad and do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So the company attornies found a way in the contract to fire them. Gave them the option to take retirement and parachute, smart ones took the money and ran, the ones that stayed got fired. My "job" was to build the systems that enabled the company to fire them. We did the same thing with several floors of clerical jobs. Replaced 2000 warm bodies with 100 bodies and a well designed application tailored to their needs. Those 100 bodies more than quadrupled the efficiency of the work produced by the 2000.
My grandfather was a union buster and was an exec in management, and he ultimately realized the Genie is out of the bottle. Before there were COMPUTERS, you used people to do the job. Computers are a force/work multiplier. The more you use (use effectively and efficiently), the less BODIES you need. It's that simple.
Toss in the ultra low wages paid to third world laborers, give them some computer operator skills, watch out... your job is definitely next.
I might sound paranoid, but I think we are heading to a further stratification of the social structure. There will be the ultra rich, and the ultra poor with more and more distinction between the two. At the same time, the world's governments will merge into one...
I am a student now. But I was working in software industry prior to this. I have a few friends who work on projects outsourced to India. It is not the fault of India or Indians that they are picking up the jobs offered to them. The report in yahoo about "training your own professionals", does not potray a real picture of what actually happens. The so called training is nothing more than handing over of responsibilities . It does not involves any technical training. It involves pointing out the location of the source code, structure of the source code, and the build system. This is all you need to take over a software project. Out of the three tasks it is rare that someone will explain to you the structure of the code. The engineer assigned has to mostly pick it up himself. I am sorry for the job losses that are happening because of outsourcing, and sincerely wish that they do not happen. But it is unfare to write an article which questions the competence of Indian software professionals.
There's this huge broughaha over jobs going overseas. Did anyone care when it was textile jobs going overseas? Not really. How about steel? Manufacturing? Nope. Barely a peep from anything that didn't have the word "union" associated. But now that it's finally worked its way up to white collar jobs, the nation is suddenly endangered.
You know what, folks? Cope! It's part of living in a global economy, whether you like free trade or not. Unless you're totally isolationist, it's something that is just going to have to be dealt with.
I'm not implying that I don't feel for those who've lost jobs, but I've known a LOT of people who have (including my wife, a tech writer, TWICE), and most all of them have found employment if they were, well, employable. Some had to change venues, but to be brutally honest, that was separating wheat from chaff.
Frankly, for the most of us, it's a good wakeup call. I've seen too many people grow cushy in their jobs, and buy houses that, once they get canned, they suddenly can't afford to live in, because nowhere else is paying like middle management job they had for the past 15 years.
$.02, + S&H
I just had the urge to flame myself, so here's the rest of it:
It's very easy to take the analogy between material construction and software construction too far. There are very real differences. But I think it would be helpful to examine it with regard to professional association.
Questions that present themselves are: There are penalties for performing work that should be carried out by a professional engineer if you're not one. We'd have to have those for software, too. But where is the line? If I write a shell script for myself, do I need to get a signed approval from a professional? How about if I publish the script? How about if the published script is incorporated into a larger, critical system? Finding the line here will be tough, but it must be possible. Engineering (and medicine, and law, etc.) have had hundreds of years of experience at finding the line, and software has had none. Perhaps an analogy to professional accounting or law would be helpful here -- I can prepare my own financial statements or represent myself up to a point. But where other stakeholders are involved (a public company, for instance), I must bring in a professional. So, I can write and use my own shell script, but at the point it is to become incorporated into a system that will affect others, it needs to be subjected to approval by a professional (not by me, necessarily, but by the owner of the system), and so on.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
But then what happens to innovation? We can regulate things like building construction because we've been doing it for thousands of years, and we're not talking about a great deal of innovation from one building to the next. We're to the point that to really make something new for creation of a building you need very specialized training.
And, if a building falls over, you probably kill someone.
On the other hand, software creation is getting simpler, not harder. You can pickup enough information from the web and set about mucking around. There is no cost to the software (except your time) and it can be refined again and again without serious consequence.
Software creation is really built on the kids who mess around with their home pcs until they gain a relative level of competence. Forcing some kind of membership requirements would absolutely destroy that line of creation, and of talent.
my $.02
-s