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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."
Sorry, it's not in my job description.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No sense in helping them to look good eh?
I propose a third option:
Train them to do things the wrong way, reap maximum amusement out of your last days at the firm, and laugh as you walk out the door.
Make it painful for the company to fire you.
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?
I don't have to worry about 'training' my replacement.
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.
Let the employers make their mistakes. You're going to get laid off anyway, so you might as well use the time to start looking for a new job instead of whining about having to train your replacement. Unless you're extremely well organized, it's not like your replacement is going to get much out of your training.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
How do you introduce yourself in a situation like that? "Hi Apu, how are ya? They're outsourcing me to...you!"
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
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.
and if they don't train their replacements, they don't get their severance pay. It would suck to be in that position.
Cmon people...Start Training the BOFH way!
BOFH: "In order to make sure that your computer is operating at its full capacity, you must daily feed your monitor water whilst holding down the degauss button".
Trainee over phone:" Sir, this is no problem.." ***BZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzTTttttttttttttt***
BOFH: "Next trainee. I'm going to like being replaced".
Sig it.
Step two: train your trainee to be incompetent.
Step three: laugh at the karmic justice of them firing you for being expensive and getting a useless employee in return.
Step four: read the classified ads and fail to find a new job.
At least both you and the company are screwed.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Fine! But Rasheed is not getting my red stapler!...
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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%.
1) Start working on a business plan 2) Train your replacement as poorly as possible 3) Collect your severance pay, use it as an investment together with an SBA loan 4) Go into business for your self
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...
"1 in 5 lost their job or knew someone who lost their job."
Talk about hear-say. That's hardly indicative of how pervasive the problem really is. How about some hard numbers, instead of a bunch of sappy stories about people committing suicide?
Plus, the story claims that you won't get unemployment or might be fired because of something one woman said she believed when she was told she had to train replacements. That's a load of crap to anyone with any clue on how employment laws work.
If you're worried about the severance or are enticed by the extra carrots they're waving in front of you, well, then, dig your own grave.
If all employees resisted, completely walked out of places that were doing it, refused to train Indian replacements...then maybe these companies would think twice. Instead those that are left simply bow their heads down and think "Gee, too bad for Sally."
But...oh, yeah, that's right. IT is too good to be unionized.
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
Nobody is going to be happy with being asked to train their replacement but sometimes the additional severence is pretty generous. It might afford you the time to find a job you like better. IMHO it is a good idea to do your best to help and not burn any bridges with your employer.
Even if the guy you're training is well qualified, there is probably enough that is peculiar to your company and your job that you could do this. He might know that he's not getting the full story, but he won't know what you're leaving out.
It seems to me that this is really asking for trouble, particularly for higher level jobs where the work isn't easily supervised. The story suggests that there are no counter-incentives to this, and I'm not sure how you could build any in, at least under U.S. labor law.
See what I've been reading.
..work, please consider those of us who haven't had a place of work for any appreciable amount of time.
Not all of us suck at what we do; some of us simply can't find employment.
CVS? Nah, we tried that but it didn't work. We're using visual source safe now.
Ok, first you model everything down each class and method level in UML, then you apply the elaboration bongfizzle according to rational unified process...
We're targeting this release to run on the Longhorn codebase...
I'm sorry, but you must adhere to the *letter* of the EJB spec. That means you cannot use java.io.*, cannot have worker threads, no socket communication, scheduled events, or application lifecycle events.
You absolutely must check in everything before you go home at the end of the day. That way you don't lose anything if your workstation dies. Build failures? No problem, someone will fix it before you get in the next day.
You can start coding as soon as you acquire linux licenses from SCO...
Remain calm! All is well!
Like our acceptance of public masturbation.
someone goes postal on this.
This is insanity and no one wants to lose their job. And to be forced to train your replacement? That's just flat out wrong..
There's a lot of unstable people out there, already under huge stress. Add this to the mix and you're asking for a body count....
It's sad, it's scary but it will happen. Count on it..
Remember the phrase 'slow learner'? well if your on the payroll to teach your replacement, and your worried that mis-training them will get you in to trouble, just remember the phrase 'slow teacher'! you could spend a whole year just teaching someone, very very very slowly and extra extra carefully, every single detail of your system until they kill themselves out of bordem. Then you can get started on the next one ;)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
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...
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.
Knowing someone who has lost a job (eg. friends) would be relatively rare among the set of friends (5-15 people maybe), So the minimum size would be 20% / 15 or a little over 1%. But if it's knowing of someone who has lost a job, you reduce the percentage further. And if you consider some sort of cross-correlation, with multiple people knowing the same person who lost their job, you change the statistic again.
Basically, the statistic they came up with is worthless, and, as you point out, is used in an inflammatory and misleading fashion. I hadn't even thought about it until you brought it up. Thank you.
I'd not refuse to train them, neither would I do a very good JOB of it...
And neither should anyone else.
If your managers (who presumably AREN'T being replaced, knew everything about your job duties and had your skills, THEY'd be doing the training, so there is little chance they'd know.
And, presumably, your replacements won't know, as to need such training, they clearly don't have the skills needed to DO your job...
I'd deliberately leave out as much as I can get away with. It's the company's own fault, if they NEED you to transfer proprietary skills of YOURS to do things that they should have documented, they deserve what they get.
And they deserve to get fucked ANYWAY for the despicable practice of outsourcing.
Corporatism != Free Market
Here's what I don't understand. The article states $136 billion dollars of salary (per year) will be moved outside the US in the next 15 years. Don't these businesses realize that when they stop paying the american people to build their products, that the american people they rely on to BUY their products wont have any money because they pushed all the jobs overseas? What will McDonalds do when McDonalds are all automated and nobody has any money to eat at McDonalds? When a company moves all its staff but executive off shore, aren't they removing that much money in the very market they want to compete in, therefore hurting themselves in the end?
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. ---*
Here's what will happen in reaction to this article.
A lot of people will respond and tell us how angered they are over the injustices that it is being done to their peers. Then, they will move on to the next story, because in America individuality reigns supreme and the media has twisted our common history to the extent that people do not realize that it was trade unions that made possible the establishment of fair labor standards, such as sick pay, vacation time, a 40-hour week, health standards in the workplace, age-limits to enter the workfoce and so forth.
People will complain about the raw deal that they get from corporations, yet fail to understand that they have been co-opted into thinking of trading unions as their enemy.
So long as trade unions are vilified in this country and workers continue to believe that they can beat the system individually if they just continue to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketeable -all good and lofty things but not the solution to this issue- I will remain unimpressed by these stories for two reasons:
1) They contain a pinch of xenophobia, at least most of them do.
2) People are not looking for root causes and fool themselves if they think that foreign workers are not also continuing to make themselves more knowledgeable and their skills more marketable.
It's time to collaborate with your peers with the same passion that you work on open source software: Union Makes Strength
For those of you that fail to understand that life is sacrosact and that profits are not everything,do not bother. History has proven you wrong. Only a short time ago, a worker could not hope to reach his thirty's because his working conditions were so inhumane and miserable.
Know your history, know your past. It will empower you to face the future.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
Tax CREDITS for employers, equal to 1.5 times their payroll that is made up of US citizens or those with permanent residency (ie: "green card") to apply to the corporate tax.
The corporate tax is a farce anyway, it's not REAL revenue to the government, as it is treated as an EXPENSE that comes out of the pockets of other taxpayers who are customers or employees of the corporation.
This would level the playing field because it would INCENTIVIZE companies to use US labor (and all those extra paychecks would easily make up for the tax revenue lost), and it would allow existing companies to play by today's rules if they so choose.
It would also incentivize higher salaries, as the more a company pays their employees, the greater their tax savings!
I really think this is a great idea, but I have no clue as to how to try to get it to someone's attention who can do something about it.
Corporatism != Free Market
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
I know most of us "white collar" folks despise unions, but look at what autoworkers did when Japan and Europe started taking US auto companies to the cleaners, and the Big Three started treating people like shit. They unionized. Then they striked. The motto was: we don't care if you can't do as well if you can't treat us like shit. You won't do business at ALL if you treat us like shit. Unless you want to close shop and go into making floral arrangements, you'll negotiate with us.
Honestly- what would happen if tomorrow, every IT worker simply got up from their keyboard at noon, turned off their cell phone/pager, and didn't come back for the rest of the day? We'd all be instantly fired in favor of people in India? Bullshit. Businesses are weak on the outsourcing front because they can't outsource everything. Strikes make it an all-or-nothing proposition, and contrary to popular belief, they can't just pick someone off the street; it still 'costs' quite a bit to hire someone. Unionizing doesn't make you the boss, but it does even the playing field, because as a single worker, you're rather powerless.
Today, despite HEAVY competition from Europe and Japan, UAW auto workers:
Wouldn't you kill to be able to have most of that? I sure as hell would. Detroit is looking better by the second.
...and I have to say that as much as I have always despised the US auto industry for building incredible crap, they've gotten far better over the years. This is despite major manufacturers actually setting up plants here in the US, because it's cheaper! So much for the argument that worker-friendly policies make you unable to compete in the global market.
Bank of America/Fleet just announced they're laying off 12,500 people. According to a BoA rep, guess what department will be one of the hardest hit? You guessed it- infrastructure, aka, Information Technology. Even better, most layoffs will be in the Northeast, because down in Georgia, land of the 2-year-old-strip-malls, real estate(and workers) are dirt cheap.
Oh, you can also vote for politicians who support striking down at-will employment laws...
Please help metamoderate.
... are missing it. Think about unionizing. And if you do, watch the union bosses and make sure they don't get blackmailed or bribed. That's it for advice. The two choices are watch jobs go away and paycheck shrink or vanish, or keep jobs, build better stuff, keep mo money for yourself and inside the nation where it recirculates and helps the economy as a whole.
You are one of only two or three professions who have the clout-if unionized-to shut the country down business-wise, a *pretty_dang_ snazzy* bargaining chip. And there ain't didlly squat uncle sam or any coalition of corporate bosses could do about it, because YOU CONTROL ALL THE STUFF AND THEY DON'T KNOW HOW.
You could force an end to outsourcing and H1B abuses, you could force "fair trade" over hideous and erroneously termed "free trade" scam billionaire's ripoffs with it's unequal excise taxes between nations (our exports are taxed a lot higher usually by other nations on most products), you could force "safe computing" as a standard on the manufacturers, you could actually stand a chance against the marketing weenies on important technical and engineering aspects..... you could make quality job 1 everywhere, and keep getting paid for it, instead of "ohh, it's shiny now, ship it out!" decisions...
buy a clue, look at the article again...
wall
handwriting
All you need is a union. If you wait, it'll be too late. Snooze ya lose....
I bet just over slashdot you could have several thousand people start a union within a few days....or hours really
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.
The best jobs are available to the best. Therefore, you will have the most choices when you are highly valued by your employer, ergo, the best time to leave your employer is exactly time that it hurts your employer the most.
Always look for new work, always prospect for a better job, and always take it at the moment you are essential to your current employer.
This generally won't happen right away so you don't have to worry about having too many jobs, but you should be planning this from day one of your hire on to any job.
Now you're on your way out, here's what to do:
First make sure your new employer knows that you absolutely cannot leave your current employer out on a limb. Now, take the normal range of notice given in your situation, let's say two weeks. Let your new employer know that you will be able to start at a date that is twice this interval, in this example one month. Further, let your new employer know that you might be able to start earlier if the transition goes well. This usually won't be a problem, the new employer wants you to get started solving his problems right away.
Now, you have two choices depending on how you expect your current employer will react:
1) Wait two weeks and give two weeks notice. If you are working for some seat of the pants operation they may react from emotion and tell you don't bother to come in on monday (see below). Start your new job tommorow.
2) If you are working in a somewhat more proffesional environment, give your employer two weeks notice but let them know you will do whatever it takes to train your replacement. They are now on the spot to hire someone quickly, trust me, it will take two weeks. Now every minute you give to them to train this guy is like a gift, you are doing them a favor, you are a great employeee. Make sure they know you are in transition and that staying this extra time is a compromise but that you are willing to go the extra mile because they have been such a great employer.
Bottom line, you control the situation, you leave on good terms, you have forced your employers hand.
Things to remember:
Employment is a two way street, if you aren't earning money for them (or earning indirectly by saving) then why are they hiring you? Thus, you don't owe your employer anything other than the services he contracted for. It's his problem if he can't make a profit. With that in mind, divorce emotions from your employment activity, if it looks better for you to move right now, then move right now, that's your employer's problem not yours.
Always give notice late on friday afternoon for the same reasons they always fire people late on friday afternoon. You want to give them time to think about any reaction and divorce themselves from any emotional response. Even if your "Employer" is not prone to such a reaction, your managers and coworkers, and you, might be. By giving notice on friday you will have a weekend to relax and reflect on your decision, as will they.
Not directly related, but remember at the exit interview, the correct answer to "Is there anything we cannot tell future employers" the correct response is "you may not tell them anything not allowed by law"
happy job hunting
plurvert
an awful lot of resentment here. What? Is it because they're "foreigners"?. Would you treat them different if they were American? Why? We're on the same planet...right? Stop looking to other people for your security. Nobody owes to you, and nobody's going to give it to you. Let them have the damn job. Do something else. Save your money. Don't run up so much debt. And wear a rubber, for christ's sake!
What?
why doesn't anyone complain to INS that the employment visas are being given to employers who make no attempt to fill jobs locally (*you can get companies on the INS's shit list*)
if someone comes in on a h2b, and you can show they made no attempt to fill that job locally, gripe to INS.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
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.
Think about the future.
Are you going to need anything from this employer?
For example, is it possible that you will be consulting and have a proposal in front of some of these people? That you might need a reference? That a prospective future employer might know your bosses professionally or socially?
Be careful of burning bridges, unless you are willing to get burnt (twice).
Alternatively, can you get something from your boss that will be useful to you? For example, maybe he will allow you to spend some time during the training period looking for a job with the resources you have at work. Or perhaps he'll help you network.
I'm not saying the boss is a nice guy or deserves your loyalty, but you may be able to get a quid pro quo, small as it may be, and that would be better than nothing. At very least look at your self interest in the situation as cold bloodedly as you can manage.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Setting defrag to run on all employees computer at midafternoon. Daily.
Enforce the strictest of password protocols and refuse to let employees write their passwords down. (For security reasons)
Keep all ports open on the firewall. The more ports that are open, the more openings for data to flow through!
To save bandwidth when sending large documents, only type a short message like "Here is the document you requested!". Make sure not to patch Outlook before you do this since patches slow things down.
For security reasons, keep the wireless router locked in a metal cabinet.
Those are just some of the many ways to make sure your training leaves a lasting impression on the company that once helped put food on your table.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
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.
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.
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.
Thank god I am safe at Vandelay Industries...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm pretty sure this must be a late April Fools Joke. I've never seen any evidence anyone working customer support in India has ever been trained by anybody.
@de_machina
Think about it: If you can just quit a job, for any reason, and claim full benefits, you can really pull one over on them. Get hired, work a bit, then quit. When benefits run out, rinse and repeat.
Also, unemployment is intended to be a buffer for if you loose a job unexpectedly. You are working happily one day, fired the next. This is out of your power, and so it is there to help you. Or maybe your boss makes your work conditions unreasonable (like demanding a huge paycut or hours increase) so you quit. It's not intended if you just decide to quit for your own reasons. In that case, you should either have other work lined up or have the money to carry you over.
Homer: You don't quit your job because you don't like it, you just go in and do it really half-assed.
Personally I would consider the moment I was notified that I was being laid off as the time I was laid off. If they want me to continue my normal job for x amount of time then that is fine. If they want me to train a replacement then they can pay me consultant rates. Once you are notified that you are being laid off for no cause, how can you be fired for cause. You are not required to finish up your week or month or whatever, the employer and employee simply agree that is the case but they can't make you do it. As far as unemployment eligibility goes they can't very well fire you once for no cause and then for cause when you refuse to train a replacement. If they want you to train a replacement, tell them you want consultant rates or extended severance and benefits.
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.
Technology Workers need to take a serious look at Unionizing.
As much as a perons's ego wants to deny it, only standing together can we stop our jobs from being lost to slave labour.
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...
Well, whether this is worse or isn't worse, is up to you to decide, but it is a similiar situation I went through.
At a company I had previously worked for, I got promoted/transferred to a new position within the company, the rules at the time, is that you have to hold a position for at least 6 months before being eligible for a transfer. I had transferred positions in under that 6 month period; it was approved by HR for a couple reasons, including that I was going from a medial position that required almost no training (printer operator), and that it was within the same department I was transfering (IT).
Problem was, my new manager was an a--hole, and I was going from a full-time position to a part-time position. I got a dollar raise from going to printer operator to mainframe/network operator, which is complete bulls--t.
So eventually, a full-time position became open, at the same position I was at, so of course, I took it. With taking this job, I never got a raise to the amount that beginning network/mainframe operator were getting paid (about $2 more than I was currently getting paid).
Continuing working the position, hoping my manager/supervisor comes to his senses; there was a little bit of shake-up in the department, and a few operators left, so they were hiring on some more operators to replace them. It came down to me training new people, for my exact same position that got paid more than $2/hr more than me. Although, they didn't force me out of my position, like the companies in the article are doing, it is quite an embarrasment to work and train people who are getting paid a substantial more amount of money more than you.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
I can understand why you're feeling the way you do. I understand why you come to an office you hate, perform meaningless little chores instead of getting your real work done, and ignore... or try to... that little pressure you're feeling in your chest. The one that spikes when you read another email from management that includes the words "sacrifice", "competition", and "tough decisions".
I know that you'd rather not think about it all. You'd rather just get back to doing what you were doing before the axes started dropping, and your division, your department, your team started getting thinned out, and their jobs transferred to the ones who were left. I know that you know what that feeling is, the one you don't think about too often... except in the middle of the night, after you've just had another "what if" discussion with your spouse about finances, trying not to think about the kids asleep down the hall.
I know you're on Monster.com, CareerBuilder, Dice... all of 'em. And I know you haven't had an interview in at least six months.
You have to get up, off of your ass, and make plans. Then COMMIT. Then execute. DO IT. Go out, get the training. If the money's not there to get it, join a LUG, or whatever. Actually make friends (!), network your skills. Learn from each other. Reconcile yourself to the fact that this is going to get worse before it gets better.
But it will get better. For some of us. The ones who planned, committed, executed. The rest are going to be sorry they waited. And don't crab about the Indians too much. Their time in the spotlight is going to be so damnably short, we're all going to be shocked... most of all, them.
And when it's all over, and it will be, in about 3 years, when the economy comes roaring back and suddenly we realize that we're on the verge of losing all the Boomers who made up the majority of the workforce, then they're going to be scrambling for skilled labor. Only there won't be any.
Or not much, that is. There will be the ones who planned...
Believe nothing, not even if I say it, if it violates your sense of reason -- Buddha
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.
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.
Why yes, my login name is rm -R *. It was my mother's maiden name.
Do you not see that? Telling everyone to continue to compete harder and harder and harder is a Ponzi Scheme?
What is EVERYONE works as hard as they possibly can? The bottom half stills gets cut off. That is a game that has no winners, in the end.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
"To make us more successful and allow the reorganization of our North American workforce to match the global business environment, we need to enable our partners for success. We need you to enable them, help them do better. Don't do it _for_ them, but teach them. You know the saying: "give a man a fish...(you know the rest)" This will make us a success."
I was wondering to myself the whole time his mouth was moving, "does he really believe we are this stupid?"
(and yes, he was speaking with a straight face)
GAWD...
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
Well, then on the flipside...if you provide the employee with "bad" training then isn't it remotely possible you provide the company some recourse to sue you? As the other posters have mentioned it's certainly not a good idea to sabotage your former co-workers, even if you've been the one wronged. You risk hurting any potential references you had at that company in addition to opening yourself up for litigation.
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
I disagree with your economic rationalist approach that there are people fundamentally 'worth' $4/hr. Perhaps there are people who are desperate enough to work for that wage, but that doesn't mean since they will bear that wage, they are worth that amount.
Minimum wages are there to prevent workers getting underpaid when desperate for work. The downside is that raising the minimum wage may increase costs to such an extent that workers are laid off, and one could argue getting $5/hr is better than getting $0/hr. However, placing all wage-fixing rights in the hands of the employer, can quickly lead to 'like it or lump it' starvation level wages.
In addition you state 'these people would not make one penny more if there was no minimum wage law'. That may be true, but they could stand to make a lot of pennies less.
M.
M.
No, no, you've mistaken illiteracy for pragmatism. Really, very few here can spell (unless it's a reserved word).
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
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.
What reasonable person is willing to work for $4/hour aside from someone freshly here from Mexico or some similar place who doesn't know any better? Yeah it's a real big problem that employers can't take advantage of people by paying them an unreasonably low wage they cannot live decently off of... If anyone is actually looking to get paid $4 an hour, they ought to move to a third world country with few/no labor laws where they can be treated as they wish.
I never said it was a small task to be a CEO, but look at it this way: these companies that thrive off of minimum wage labor would not be able exist without it. Whats the use of a good CEO without the minimum wage workers to do the grunt work? There is none... I agree their job is hard and important, but I also believe that in far too many cases they are paid too much. They should certainly still be well paid and the deserve it, but it ought to be kept reasonable....look at the airlines....why did the government have to bail them out? oh yeah, so their CEO's could keep their nice fat paychecks rolling in...
Since SBC is working without a contract at the moment people have been calling SBC's DLS tech centers, 877 722 3755 asking workers there to pass on this message that "SBC DSL customers are in the United States and the SBC DSL support work should be too." If you go to 4 yrs of college to be compter or DSL tech and there is no jobs who do they think will buy their product no matter how cheap it is? Management directed employees to reply that "your call has been noted." But DSL employees, who work for contractors, also were warned not to say where they are located, who they work for or to give out any other information. "If any information is given, disciplinary action will take place, this is considered zero tolerance," was the directive from management. Many DSL workers supported CWA's (the SBC union)position because they were going to lose their jobs in a few weeks anyway. Workers at one center told of how they had to train their supervisor, then learned their jobs were going overseas to India. Obviously, SBC doesn't want customers to know that it's shifting jobs overseas, so it's trying to limit any conversation about the subject. The public certainly wants to know, not to mention the DSL workers who are losing their jobs to overseas centers. The CEO of SBC made 53 million last year! I am calling them to tell them if I can't talk to an american I don't want their service. Talk about corporate greed in action!
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
Sure - let the CEOS rake it in as long as we the people can decide how much of their profits we can feed back in to the economy via government programs we deem worthwhile. The problem is, the CEOs continue to pay their salaries by finding ways to pay a lower and lower wage. At the same time, they are also politically controlling the tax rate so that the tax burden is shifting from them to the middle and lower classes. We're all going to quickly be in position where we're all making a lot less, and any relief we're receiving via entitlements is increasingly funded out of percentages of our own paychecks. As far as I can tell, the only real disagreeable part of all this is that we don't get a say - or at least no real say. Think of the peoples ability to raise taxes on the rich as a safety valve. When too much wealth begins to accumulate in the upper echelons, the people can adjust the tax rate to stimulate the circulation of the cash. As the wealth becomes more evenly dispersed, enough people will be happy with their wages and taxes will begin to adjust again. This is why capitalism requires democracy to work correctly. Unfortunatly, without campaign reform this safety valve is broken and the poor will keep getting poorer and the rich, richer. When democracy is broken, capitalism is broken...
"If you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American Way." - Homer J.
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!
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
Companies do not "give you a reference"
Companies will confirm or deny your date of employment, that is it.
Why????
DEFAMATION LAWSUIT!!!!
How does this work?
Glad you asked!
You hire a law firm which specializes in defamation lawsuits. They hire a company which calls your old employer and asks them leading questions about you:
Was she a drunk? Lesbian? Stole pencils? Republican? etc. etc...
Then your lawyer files a defamation lawsuit based on the bullshit that your PHB spewed over the phone..
Result:
You get a few 10s or hundreds of K, your old PHB gets roasted with a blowtorch..
Win Win!
Remember, half the people on /. are like you, the other half are hired by your bosses to post misinformation to keep you in check and in line. These trolls can be recognized by post which say things like:
You are not eligible for unemployment if you do not kiss your companies ass...
The only people who decide what you are eligeble for are at the unemplyment office.
CALL THEM!!!!
God, If, when I was a dumb impressionable kid, I had a nickel for ever time I took some random persons (wrong!!) opinion as fact, rather than ACTUALLY CHECKING with the real authority involved, I'd have like 5 bucks of nickels, plus about 100K in real money.
The saddest part, I guess, is that it is almost impossible to get kids today (no offense meant, seriously, I was one myself once) to listen to advice which empowers them rather than making them whores and bitches of their employers.
Bah.
Then again, I deserve it, cause I never listened to anyone older than me either.
Unions and Governments CREATED the middle-class as we know it.
You may prefer serfdom, and the "good old days". Usual liberatarian fantasy bullsh*t.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So your boss has decided that you either suck at your job or you cost too much for what they get out of you. But you've accumulated plenty of experience. What do you expect from your employers? They need to transfer the knowledge to the new guy, and you're still an employee. Why not get on with it, train the guy up and do a good job of it to get a decent reference for your next job?
Minnesota rules I'm unemployed right now, so I have to go through these... the relavant parts:
2. Partially or Totally Unemployed Through No Fault of Your Own Even with enough wages to qualify for unemployment benefits, the reason for your job separation could disqualify you from receiving benefits. Some reasons are:
Quit without a good reason caused by the employer - Leaving for personal reasons or circumstances, not because it was the employer's fault.
Discharged for misconduct - For actions such as continued, unexcused absences and/or tardiness; breaking company rules; neglect of duties; insubordination; being impaired by drugs or alcohol on the job; fighting; harassment.
Refused a job or failed to apply for a suitable job without "good cause"- For refusing work that was suitable for you based on your work history, training, skills, ability, the pay scale in the local labor market, the distance to the job, and how long you have been out of work.
On strike -When off work because you are a member of the striking union or are participating in the strike by honoring a picket line.
NOTE: If you were not laid off due to lack of work from your last job, a Customer Service Center representative will contact you and your last employer for additional information. If you are disqualified from benefits because of a job separation, you will be mailed a written determination explaining the reason.
I've also heard it from court papers that "if a reasonable person would quit in this situation" Thus you can quit if you are assigned a job that while you can do, is not safe. They might agree that being asked to train your replacement before you are laid off counts, or might not, hard to say. A reasonable person might not quit, but would agree that it is a reasonable thing to do, OTOH, it is a safe job that you are qualified to do. You better be able to prove they were intending to lay your off after this though.
I wouldn't expect unemployment offices to have much sympathy for a company moving your job offshore though. They have some ability to make life hard on companies, but I'm not sure how much (likely very little)
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.
I agree with some of your points. However, this doesn't make much sense:
What do you mean by richer? Richer as weighted by the cost of living? Or as weighted by inflation? Or in absolute terms? Or relative to the most probable income? The distinction is very important as some imply a more equitable situation than others.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
if training is required, theyre not prepared to be your replacement. This is excluding things like familiarizing another sysadmin with the layout of systems within the organization. What i mean is, if you have to say "Now this is what we call linux..." you can tell your employer to go to #$#@
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.
I don't see anyone else mentioning this:
The result of all of this job upheaval is that things don't work any more. Companies have tech support departments, but they don't really offer tech support. Wang and Sanjay can't support a product unless they are supported by the company for which they work, and they aren't.
We are seeing amazing product failures of a kind we never saw before. Products have problems, and the companies don't fix them. They simply aren't maintaining the level of expertise necessary to staying in a highly technical business.
Yeah you're right, let's all be 100% practical. PRIDE is completely meaningless.
at least in australia, you can LEAVE/walk out, and they still have to legally pay you for unused sick days, leave time etc... And it has no bearing on govt benefits at all (here we get cash $352/14days, if your wife works and gets too much, then they cut it proportionately - http://www.centrelink.gov.au/). Also if its real bad, or if you never want to work, you can stay on benefits for decades, or for the rest of your life, but they dont like it, but you can, no one here is tossed out into the street to live like a hobo. But 99% of people do want to work coz $352 is hardly a windfall, unless you live at your parents house and want to fund your .com startup with that ;-)
The only time there is extra payment, is if you are truly made redundent (no training there) and you get paid more so its not an issue, sometimes 2-3 months worth of pay proportioal to your time worked.
But if usa is that way, that they can refuse all payments if you walk out, then DAMN, your business leaders have screwed your country sideways and left the wet stain.
NOTE: to all employees, backup all your work source/docs etc... to your USB keyring or whatever... you never know when next morning your account is locked and you can't log in to even get your emails/contacts. So be prepared.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
How about s/he gain that knowledge the same way I did, through years of painfully prying it out of everyone else in the company. Or figuring it out myself.
______-___--_-__-_---_-----__-_-___-_-_---_-----_
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.
Old Employee "Hello I'm the guy currently doing the job you will be doing."
New Employee "Ok"
Old "See this big 'Do not press' button? Push it once and hour on the hour"
New "Whats it do?"
Old (under breath) "Turns off every server in the building"
New "What? I can't hear you"
Old "Oh it just keeps everything working."
(under breath) "When you don't push it"
New "I see" (inspects button)
Old "Any questions"
New "Yes.. Can I get a job recomenation?"
Old (stunned) "Ummm why would you need that?"
New "Becouse I really don't believe I'll be working here long."
Old "And what makes you think that?"
New guy pushes red button leaves old guy to take blame
New yelling back "Ohh nothing"
I don't actually exist.
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.
Well, I believe most of us dont talk bout 10-15 ppl work shops, we are talking about 200-3000 ppl companies and nasdaq ones.
The CEOS get paid heaps, they get lots of shareoptions (probly useless) and also get lots of perks and stuff paid for them, like their own cell, business lunches (3hrs) etc...
Perhaps CEOs should be paid a portion of profits, so if there are NO profits, they get paid same as joe down stairs at $15/hr. Steve jobs gets $1/year, (dont know how he got around minimum wage laws, maybe he officially works 15min/year)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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 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
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
If someone off-shore wants my lousy job, they can have it. Good luck, pal!
I'm with Marshall Brain, and others, in thinking that we should eventually phase in a basic living wage (not 'welfare'), rather than letting our fellow man starve simply because he's unproductive dead weight.
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Power to the Peaceful
Well, you're already modded as a troll, but I think you could actually be serious.
Has it occured to you that workers get "greedy" because their living costs are so fscking unbelieveably high, not because they think their "lazy asses" deserve to sit in a damn mansion and drive a friggin' SUV? Actually, their Indian counterparts' income (relative to cost level) is probably on par with or better than theirs.
This is exactly why global capitalism cannot work - it's not a level playing field. With the assumption of a level playing field, the theory seems nice and the system beneficial to everyone. But in practise, it's a big drokking candy store for capitalists. They pick the berries from the cake and move on to the next country.
-=- 4ntifa -=-
Then they still need to be trained, duh. Those blocks won't line up on their own.
t
No, sorry to bust your tv fed bubble, but unions and governments helped a great deal. The fact remains that these same hard-working individuals would have created another fucking huge revolution here if the unions and governments didn't get the wake up call to economically enfranchise more people into what we call a middle class. Social security is evil to you to, right? Of course it probably is and so is medicare, universal education, etc etc. No, they are not perfect, but you cannot live in a "relavtively" stabile society without them. By the way, have you ever actually studied Marx aside from 40 years of corporate media telling you it's like saying you believe in the devil? And no, you can't pigeonhole me for a marxist for asking that simple fucking question you fucking brainwashed I'm tired of this cowboy shit when I pay high fucking taxes, because I do, country...I'm tired of it, the ignorance any "good ol' boys" like you. NEG KARMA! Sure, bring it on!.
I just write my code with variables and files named after evil Indian gods, cow parts, and Indian cuss words.
Table-ized A.I.
You should always have your eye on the horizon anyway: if you're asked to train up a new worker, just accept the mission and in the background, start looking for another job: if you find the other job before the training is complete, well that's a problem for your current employer, not for you: they set the wheels in motion.
To refuse to train someone else is really unprofessional: all of these comments about getting one over on the new guy, or refusing to do the job are just more reasons in the mind of your employer to get rid of uncooperative employees and replace them with more professional ones.
Knowing the bits about employment law that I do, I would say that even if it is not in your contract, you're obliged as a general condition of employment to transfer your job function to someone else if asked: that _doesn't_ mean you train someone in how to be a developer, or in a specific language, it just means that you impart the the tactical knowledge you have. In the same way that if your company is going through a quality process (ISO) you'll be asked to document the way you work. If you refuse, it really is grounds for dismissal.
"What? You think I told him to destroy the network? The guy doesn't even speak English--what did you expect?" Yes, it's cruel and unfair--but that's what makes our country great.
Like my company, that has just announced record profits, but is just about to lay off 20% of the IT dept, as a cost cutting excercise. Last year the CEO got paid over 10 times the amount that this excercise will save the company. My heart bleeds for these struggling corporations.
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!
..."programmers need to stop thinking about themselves as some sort of "upper" class."...
A point well made, the practice outlined in the original article along with quite a few other labour issues highlighted on slashdot as affecting IT workers have been and are still common practie in manufacturing.
A few of my ex-colleagues have had to work in China or the old eastern european countries setting up plants to replace the current facilities here in the UK. Two months of hotel living then it's down to the brew, the only upside being that the experience does make it much easier to find alternative employment.
The bottom line is labour is labour, skill, education or even position within a company (remember middle management) offer little or no protection from capital/ownership changes in direction.
They would have to, after the training I would give them...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
Or you could try repeating that bit of blackmail that Kevin Spacey's character managed in American Beauty. Run out of the bosses office with your mascara a bit runny, buttoning up your shirt, making sure someone sees you. Doesn't matter that you both might be beard wearing, pizza eating, coke drinking dorks with 50" waiste lines. A good lawyer should be able to come through for you!
I was laid off last year, along with all my development team in the UK, and I was given the dubious honor of not only training our Pakistani replacements, but coordinating the whole training program.
Unlike the original visionaries who drove the original development, our new management were pure short termists. They didn't listen when we told them that the development practices they were adopting would come back to bite them. Over the preceding year, purely as a result of a management drive to win each new customer by agreeing to anything they wanted, the system had become kludged to hell - by now we were scared of parts of it, and we wrote it. Guess how much good quality documentation existed?
Three people were sent over to London to learn all they could about the system we'd spent 3 years creating. I felt sorry for these three guys, so far from their families, struggling to understand something they had no realistic hope of ever getting to grips with. My job was toast anyway - the writing had been on the wall. We were courteous and friendly to them. We tried to help them understand the system. They failed - it was inevitable. The company didn't allocate very much time for the transfer either - it would have cost too much to keep us much longer, apparently.
I'm now in a much more interesting and visionary organisation, from where I've had the bittersweet pleasure of watching that company slowly die. Don't blame your replacements - they're normally nice and intelligent people, who'll normally feel quite bad about the situation too.
Any system complex and interesting enough to be worthy of your time is going to be very hard, if not impossible, to transfer working knowledge to a completely new bunch of people all in one go.
Especially if your management is already in the mindset of cost cutting at all costs.
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
> CEOs make crucial decisions all the time, decisions that can result in millions gained or
> lost. They are worth every penny providing they do this job well.
If they are to gain a percentage of the millions won through their decisions that's perfectly ok, so long as they also pay for a similar percentage of the millions lost to their incompetence...
Unfortunately the story that managers have such a risky life, risk being fired with no income at no notice etc. is complete nonsense. The closer to the the top you get the less personal risk there is. For a start they have enough capital to cope without any income ever again, which reduces personal risk to 0. Even if they screw up, they get pensions, severance pay etc. etc. in amounts that any of the 1000s who lost their jobs due to their incompetence can only dream about...
So anyway, entrepreneurs i'm ok with earning lots of money as it's their captial that's at stake. Managers risk nothing and thus should be paid like an ordinary professional, not like a successful entrepreneur..
Reminds me of stories about the db programmer who had special hooks in the code to handle cases such as when his name was deleted from the company roles.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It's not a ponzi scheme. It's evolution.
Sucks doesn't it?
Yes, absolutely it sucks for everyone. Just maybe not right away.
In the short term, a few will do well and be happy. In the long term, everyone will suffer. I guess that's OK because we'll all be long gone. The joke's on our descendants. Ha ha, suckers!
The world is full of examples where "best" short term strategy == very bad long term strategy. In my town, the groundwater is radioactive because some company needed to maximize their profit margins a few decades ago. The island nation of Nauru is 90% wasteland because they allowed mining companies to remove almost all of their potassium-rich topsoil for lots of money in the 70's and 80's. They've now burned through all that money, and they have to import all their food and drinking water from Australia by jet because nothing will grow there.
Oh, and here's a gem from today:
Greenland ice cap 'doomed to meltdown'
I'd suggest not planning on passing any waterfront property down through your family, unless you're planning to have them start a shrimp or oyster farm.
Simple - to switch jobs in those industries requires almost zero personal investment.
Often times several years of OJT is required to switch blue colar jobs. Unplanned job changes SUCK for everyone and just because you went to college doesn't change that. Have some respect for the workin' man.
On the other hand, suppose you just got out of school $40,000 in debt as a programmer, and you lose your job after six months, only to find no other jobs available. Are you going to go back to school for another 4 years to become a lawyer or a doctor?
You are confusing working smarter with improving your education. I can assure you that having more degrees does in no way make you a smarter worker. It does however mean that you are more educated.
Suppose you lose your job at age 35-40. Now what do you do? You can't possibly survive until retirement age.
My God, do you actually think losing your job is a permenant affliction? Ever hear of a career change? Of course, all the automotive people were whining the same whine when IT was booming and their industry had plateaued. Now it's IT while healthcare is booming. Next the healthcare people will complain while some other sector booms.
You probably can't afford to go back to college again since you may have family/house/etc.
Now we are getting to the meat of the problem: how people manage money! The real problem with today's economy is that a lot of people live 90 days from bankruptcy. Most of the time it's because of choices they make to have stuff or to do things earlier in life than they should. Here's how to fix the situation:
Step 1: SELL THE HOUSE. If you are upside down on your house, you are probably loaded with debt. Get it over with and realize that you are bankrupt and see an attorney. Time to start over.
Step 2: Sell the Lexus, SUV and Minivan. Stop making $600-900/mo in car payments. Get a late '90s saturn with low miles or something you can afford now that your life has changed.
Step 3: Adjust your lifestyle to fit your income. Live well below your means, not at your means. Take the kids out of Karate, gymnastics, off-season soccer, softball, baseball, basketball and cancel the $5,000 vacation you take every year. Stop eating out all the time while you are at it.
And if you do go back to college it will probably deplete much of your retirement savings - just postponing your financial problems.
Here's the deal: going to school, getting a high paying job with a good 401 K doesn't work. If your value is based on what you know, then when what you know has little value, what happens to your career? Why go down the same road twice?
It sets you up to retire with $150K in the bank after you pay off all the debt from financing junior's college. $150K will pay for maybe half of the bill when you have major health problems. If you want to prosper, work on developing asset income. Start business. Buy income properties. Write a book, screenplay or some music. Learn to work the stock market. Set up an income that isn't dependent on the good graces of an employer.
However, there has to be an outlet for people who spent a fortune on their career only to find that it has ended.
It's called get a new career - the same outlet that is open to the blue collar people who according to you make "zero personal investment in themselves". You could learn a lot from them: they adapt to the times.
-- $G