Slashdot Mirror
Techies Asked To Train Foreign Replacements
Makarand writes "David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Bank of America (BofA) is moving thousands of tech jobs to India and has asked its techies to train their Indian replacements or risk losing severance pay. Although there is nothing in writing that says precisely this, the employees have been made clear about this responsibility in their meetings. BofA is outsourcing tech work to Indian companies whose employees do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid. According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years."
From the article (regarding requiring training to receive severance): ""I know hat's parsing things a bit," Norton acknowledged. "What we ask associates to do as part of getting severance is that they stay on the job until the job is transitioned."
Norton (and BofA) is parsing employees in a more metaphorical sense, cutting them into tiny pieces. It's a violation of a tacit ethic.
Next: ""It's a common practice when your job is being transferred from one person to another that you train the new person," she added. "We expect our people to stay until their jobs are consolidated.""
Yes it is a common practice. What's not so common (though it's seemingly becoming so) is a scenario where the person you're training is transparently there to be trained because they're going to do the job on the cheap. What's not so common is the egregious in-your-face requirement to train someone to replace you when you had not been planning to leave!
I've trained replacements before. And, I KNEW I was expected to finish that work to consider my work satisfactory. But, it's always been when I was moving on. I'd like to be in a place where when faced with being required to train my cheap-suit replacement that I could refuse on principle alone.
It's unfortunate and worse, unethical, to require training your replacement to receive severance. As an aside did you ever wonder why severance packages max out at ten months, e.g., by some algorithm you get X months pay for each year served, with a cap at ten months? Ten months (actually, 300 days) is how long an employee has to file an action on discriminatory practices! Often times training cheaper replacements targets older and higher paid employees.
And finally and most offensive: "But BofA stands out because it acknowledged earlier this year that it understands how much the practice offends its U.S. employees.
Barbara Desoer, BofA's chief technology exec, told BusinessWeek magazine in January that she was aware how much grumbling it caused when workers at the bank's Concord technology center were told they'd have to bring their Indian replacements up to speed before being shown the door."
First of all, the bitch Desoer doesn't deserve the title CTO, she's a fucking hatchet man... she isn't managing technology, she's betraying her work force, I'm guessing for some pretty decent blood money... Fuck her.
So outsourcing and required replacement training is becoming common enough companies begin to admit it. The tipping point is here, they can all claim they do it with the rationale, "everyone ELSE is doing it." Posh!
This is legal but it's unhealthy. The return to the shareholders is short term and long term this practice stands to damage employee morale, and based on the kind of "replacement" results piss off the customers.
A global economy is coming. For some it's a speeding train coming right at them, and they've been tied to the railroad tracks by their employers.
Interesting that the article quotes the figure of half the cost. Five years ago, people were saying Indian companies could do the work for one-tenth the cost. If Indian salaries and other costs increase 20% a year for a few more years, the advantages of outsourcing will have largely disappeared. In the long run, good for India and good for U.S. I.T. workers.
I'll simply repeat another of my comments from the past about this.
1 7/sr=1-2/qid=1149421474/ref=pd_bowtega_2/202-73591 57-8712641?_encoding=UTF8&s=books&v=glance [amazon.co.uk]
I've been amused by many companies over the years who thought they could save a huge bundle of money, when in reality the staff employed in those functions they want to move makes up perhaps 20% of their organisation but makes the most impact. Do people in a foreign country answering your calls, where it is totally obvious they know not even the most basic things about where you live (and you have waste time and money repeating things twenty times), does that sound good and make you want to use that company? I'll quote Joel Spolsky and Pradeep Singh:
"(Here's something Pradeep Singh taught me today: if only 20% of your staff is programmers, and you can save 50% on salary by outsourcing programmers to India, well, how much of a competitive advantage are you really going to get out of that 10% savings?)"
You also have the additionally huge costs of training those new employees, or outsourcing organisations, up in the ways of the organisation, the products, the technology and you also spend huge amounts of wasted time and money on communication. I've known many banks who've had that experience. A poor call centre worker gets the warm ear treatment from a customer in Europe, US, Canada etc. because the website is throwing up errors and he/she can't complete a transaction. A call is logged and there is a series of frantic phone calls and e-mails to the outsourced programming company in India, who needless to say, haven't got the faintest idea what they're talking about. Also (and this happens even in outsourcing companies situated in the same country but in another part) because they are not physically located in the heat of battle, and within on-site reach, they just don't give a shit. They'll do it when they've got time.
"Because they don't actually work for Bank of America," the engineer replied. "They work for Infosys Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, which are both in India. They do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid."
Would anyone like to guess how much time, money, effort and resources is going to be spent trying to communicate with these idiots, and actually get anything done?
In short, you need to have your support functions in your company with you completely, and they need to be as close to your paying customers as you can get. If there is a market in India for your products then by all means get close to your customers and open offices in India (and how many BofA customers are in India?). After all the diasters, and let's face it we know companies everywhere have had total outsourcing disasters, I can't beleiev anyone thinks they're still going to save money like this. Idiot CEOs and boards still have this ridiculously stupid fucking idea that the world is a place separated only by a common language - English. I think even British, American and Australian people can agree that that is most certainly not true. I suggest these idiot board members go and read the number one, definitive guide on running a multinational company properly - as well as making some serious profit.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/18619769
Honestly, if you're counting on your employer (or anybody, for that matter) to look out for your interests and "play nice," you're just asking to get a situation like this dropped in your lap. It doesn't matter what your contract says, and it doesn't matter how nice you think your boss is. If somebody with enough power thinks they can save/make some extra money, expand their own influence, push their own agenda, etc., there are ways around contracts and nice lower managers. After all, if you can't pay your own expenses for a few months without a severance package, you can't afford to fight them in court, now can you?
This is why it really pays to have your own severance package set aside in a savings account. If I was given the choice these people have been given, and I had 3-6 months of expenses in my savings, I'd tell them to, "Train my replacement your own damn selves." I might even do it if I didn't have such savings, depending on how blatantly it was presented to me.
If you plan ahead, you give yourself the power to make a statement like that if it needs to be made (assuming it's worth making).
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
The replacement worker is always trained half ass in a layoff, can you imagine the quality of the training, when its a layoff, your replacement cant even speak english, and they are in India? how stupid
before getting a bullet in the brain.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Now all your personal data, including your ssn, password, and most importantly your cash flow, are coming across the desks of low-paid foreigners. They have no natural loyalties to our country, let alone their clients, and their low pay gives them incentive to abuse their power, to your personal detriment.
I am sure the bank claims it takes reasonable precaution against identity theft....but you just can't protect data from the techies that work on it. And when you can't trust the techs, you can't trust the company.
Just say No.
>This is legal but it's unhealthy. The return to the shareholders is short term and long term this
>practice stands to damage employee morale...
That's one of the problems with the way performance is evaluated now. They're ALWAYS looking for the short term fix, because that's the timeframe used to gauge performance. If you institute a short term policy that looks good NOW, but hoses the country or the company later, by the time that happens, you'll have moved on, and it's someone else's problem. Further, there's absolutely no incentive to introduce stable long term solutions under these conditions, because all the credit for them will go to your successor, as he/she will be at the helm when the your decisions bear fruit. In the meantime, it's your fault for that great big hole in the budget (the cost of putting those solutions in motion).
First of all, many US companies derive disproportionately more revenue abroad than they create jobs abroad--that's an imbalance that must be corrected. From that point of view alone, outsourcing is inevitable.
Second, current employees have a choice: they can drop their pencils immediately and leave without severance pay, or they can do an unpleasant chore with severance pay.
Third, in training their replacements, they might also try to teach their foreign replacements about collective bargaining, US salary levels and benefits, and the kind of profits that their company will be making.
Well, those employees that still know about that sort of thing can. If you're part of the SUV-driving, Bible thumping, Republican voting crowd and don't remember why exactly people used to organize in unions and that sort of thing, then just think of the outsourcing as a free market mechanism for getting rid of inefficiencies--you in this case.
I don't have a BoA account so I have nothing to close, but I wonder how many other techies are going to their local BoA branch and pulling out their money. What a great opportunity for the credit unions. Imagine the advertising campaign: "Your Federal Credit Union, we don't send jobs overseas."
wherever I go, there I am.
In reality, those jobs, outsourced, never QUITE seem to produce the results they think they do.
They always cost more in time, opportunity costs, or actual cash.
Point in fact:
The contract job I'm doing has me writing a Linux system's wrapper library to make their drivers look more normal to Linux developers.
They also have a foreign contractor in India developing a similar interface as a kernel module.
I'm getting about 3 times what this guy's getting paid per hour.
The tasks in question are comparable in effort to do- and the guy's not an idiot.
I'm into testing on an alpha and trying to figure out where the performance bottlenecks are.
He's still not got anything properly working yet.
He started before me by several weeks.
I'm where I am in only 4 weeks of 50 hour work weeks- in another set of the same, it'll
very likely be a releasable product in the case of my work.
Offshoring doesn't always produce the results you think it will- and in many cases it causes
bad will. In a time where companies like Dell, who were one of the first to offshore work,
are publicly bringing the work back into the states because it was actually the same end
cost with better results to outsource it to places in Oklahoma and similar- the PHB types
at BofA are offshoring stuff to India, thinking it'll save them money. Short term, it might.
Long term, it's going to cost them all of that savings and possibly more. I'd not want to
use a bank that thinks it's okay to outsource any of it's functions to a foreign country
that's been known to have it's employees mis-use personal info for personal gain- good
thing I've been working on going elsewhere for my banking needs.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Train them wrong so they will break everything they touch. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
The thing that companies don't realize in foreign outsourcing is the long term impact on their business:
Let's cut off our noses to spite our faces. Let's shoot ourselves in the foot. Heaven forbid we do something with long term positive effects when short term effects will be to put lots of money in the hands of a few at the top so that they can oppress the masses more and become richer.
There truly needs to be legislation restricting the outsourcing of jobs to foreign workers. Otherwise we are going to see bad times ahead for the majority of Americans.
Walking out isn't a good solution, because probably you're just another cog in the big machine. If you refuse to train them, you'll just save them your severance pay without much effect.
/." ?
To really spite them, you should make the effort an train your indian replacement, in a creative way.
Step 1 is to dig all those SOX and ISO-9000 procedures, you have been forced to fill out over the years. Per definition, they describe your work in a reproducible way. These should be the base of any training. Make your replacement memorize them an apply them in harmless cases, where they don't generate too much mayhem. This alone should easily occupy about 3 months worth of training time and prove totally worthless while being the perfect employee by the book.
Step 1a, if above mentioned documentation doesn't have enough volume, take the time and have the trainee update it. This alone should cover another 6 months.
Step 2 have your trainee sign of every thing you've told him, that he learned and understood the procedure. By the end of every day, you shoudl have at least 4 signed papers by your replacement how well you've trained him. Add copies of these signed statements to your daily work log.
Step 3 stop doing any regular work - except for problems that are not easy to fix an will appear again after you've left. The trainees and the managers should get the impression your job is just easy routine. If some manageroid comes with urgent requests, let him know that you don't have time for it, as you have to train the replacement for your severance pay and the replacement isn't ready to perform this yet. If they want it done anyway, get it in written and signed on paper, best with HR also approving that you don't have to train the replacement while doing soem other things. Give a reasonable time frame (eg Rebooting a desktop: 2 work days)
Step 4 is only valid if you get the explicit written order, that you need to stop training your replacement for some time period. Use it to to the fullest.
Step 5 you naturally work only from 9 to 5. Should your trainee be late or has to leave early, complain immediately with HR that he fails to appear. If your trainee has certain time constraints, make sure you make it as hard as possible for him to keep them.
Step 6, do all work under the account of the trainee, best let the trainee do the typing. If something gets messed up, it was him. How do you say in hindi "rm -rf
Step 7, if you can stomach it, always be nice and friendly with your trainee. Try to connect with him, make him feel comfortable. This way, he'll be easier to have him do things that have long term consequences.
With these easy steps, you should be able to cover any time necessary to get the full pay, generate a good enough paper trail to document your outstanding commitment and can do more damage than any other way. If you manage to coordinate these procedure with collegues, you might be able to teach all trainees the same crap while leaving out the importatn stuff. Nothing beats having some poor indian schmucks create 5 documentation copies of the same irrelevant procedure on how backup tapes are stored, while leaving out that the backup job needs to be run manually every day.
But it's one thing when an employee has voluntarily quit his job, or is retiring, to ask him to train his replacement as his last task. That makes sense, and I can't imagine anyone thinking differently.
Neither is the case here. You where not planning on leaving. You are not superfluous, the job you where doing is still going to get done. Only they'll hire some Indian for 1/3rd the price.
That is not standard. Infact in many countries in the world it would be downrigth illegal. Under Norwegian law, for example, you can only fire people if a) they failed to do their job or otherwise to uphold their part of the work-agreement. b) The job they are doing is no longer going to be done and you can't possibly use them in some other position in your company. Or c) Your company is experiencing a lack of business and needs to reduce the workstaff to stay in the black.
"We make a profit now, but we'll make even more of a profit if we fire you and hire an indian to do your job", simply ain't on the list of acceptable excuses.
Requiring you to actively assist in such an undertaking just adds insult to injury.
Yes, I realize americans don't enjoy much, if any, protection against being fired for any reason at all. I'm just saying it's not all that strange to be upset about this -- seeing that in many parts of the world people where upset enough about this kind of shit to make it illegal.
It may not be wrong. But I don't think legality is the point.
Over the longer term, what have these idiotic managers done? They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve. Sure, it's cheaper to have a bunch of lower paid foreigners do this work. But do they really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they've run in to a problem? Will they be able to reason their way through regulations and laws they had nothing to do with?
And ultimately, you know how employment agencies always instruct people to leave your work on good terms? It cuts both ways. If an employer cuts ties with large groups of employees under less than favorable terms, don't expect any good will from the public when the going gets rough.
Frankly, I see this as a huge disconnect between management and the techies who actually make things go. If anyone here owns this stock, I recommend they sell within the next year or so. A company this arrogantly ignorant doesn't deserve your money. Oh, by the way, that's captalism too.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
I would argue that the companies doing the outsourcing aren't bearing the full economic costs of the transition, and that there are other costs that need to be factored in.
First, there is the cost to the employees of finding a new job, which is never fully reflected in severance pay. Severance pay probably only covers the amount of time the employee will be idle. Other costs include retraining the employee to fit the new job (paid by his new employer), the psychological effects of having his job terminated (paid by him, his family, and society at large), the costs of moving if the new job requires it, and the loss of community if he does have to move. This last item is important: while a loss of community has all sorts of ill effects, the expectation of losing it several more times over the course of your work history is even worse. Ask anyone raised by parents who got moved around a lot by the military.
People who expect to move away end up less trusting, less willing to invest in new relationships, less willing to participate in community functions or worry about local issues. There was a time when the rich still had some sort of shared community life with their workers, and it was a time when employers had loyalty to their employees. But now those who own the wealth--and decide how it will be used--are more distanced from the rest of us, and have no stake in that shared community life. So they'll happily move jobs to Outer Ohfuckitstan to earn an extra 1% return on their investment, without regard for the problems these moves cause the wider society.
The country that benefits from the new jobs also receives increased inequality between the well-off and the poor. India's rise has been accompanied by increased tension between wealthy urban areas and poor rural areas. Back when everyone was poor, the rural areas weren't likely to complain about not having electricity, because few did have it, and it's hard to want things you don't see anyone else enjoying. While an increase in the standard of living is wonderful, it is poisonous to a society when extreme inequalities in wealth exist. Of course, by this metric, our own society is very, very unhealthy.
There is another cost that employers do pay, but rarely fully account for when planning an offshoring: the loss of expertise. No matter how well the departing employees train their replacements (and what's their motivation to do a good job?) it will be years before the replacements can match the original expertise. Some of the knowledge lost in transition may never be rediscovered, leading to permanent inefficiencies.
No, I'm not a socialist. But I'm coming to the belief that collective ownership of wealth is a good thing. If Bank of America was owned by its employees, then their salaries would show up on the "income" side of the accounting ledger rather than the "expenses" side, and much of the motivation to outsource would evaporate. Otherwise, there is an inherent conflict of interest between management and labor: management wants to keep costs low, and labor is simply another expense to be minimized.
Additionally, a worker-owned setup is necessarily more efficient. Workers have the greatest incentive to make the company run as efficiently as possible, so management doesn't have to spend its time figuring out how to best motivate the employees. The workers would just tell them. Worker-owned companies are also more concerned with long-term stability, because there is no golden parachute waiting if they can just keep the stock prices from tanking in the next three quarters. There is only the promise of continued employment. Finally, when a few investors own a company, the goal is to maximize their profit. When workers own a company, they still want to maximize their returns, but they can accept a wider variety of payment: a cleaner environment, more free time to spend with their families, improvements in the social fabric of their communities, less stressful working conditions.
In short, collective ownership allows the wealth of a company to serve the many, not the few. So bring it on, free market boy.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
You: "Ok Vishnu, when you write code make sure you never use indents... Managment hates that. And keep everything on same line. Oh and never ever EVER comment your code unless you want to talk about your current mood and what you had for breakfast that morning."
Vishnu: Pardon me, but what kind of Cracker Jack box did you get your programming skills from? I have a PhD in Computer Science from Pune University where my thesis was on Automatic Retargetable Code Generation techniques, and I've contributed kernel code to Debian and OpenBSD. Now you are asking me to sabotage code like some uneducated American code monkey whose sole qualifications during the dot-com boom were that he had a pulse and could read? Please, sir, don't train me. Just take your severance and go.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Sure, it may be insensitive, but it's just good business sense. Or are you a socialist?
Bill O'Reilly, is that you? Sean? Rush?
Jesus, I hate this kind of bullshit. You're either with us or with the enemy. Either you support outsourcing or you're a commie.
So, the author of the parent post is not only a xenophobe but a socialist as well? To reject outsourcing as currently practiced is to reject capitalism in general?
Nice broad brush stroke buddy, but it doesn't fly. Your analysis of situation is based on an idealistic text book "free market" which does not exist in the real world. There are no free markets. There are trading agreements, treaties, immigration laws, manipulated currency valuations, etc. all of which are politicized, contrived and not influenced by magical "invisible hand of the market". These factors render your simplistic analysis and conclusions useless.
It's kind of funny. Back in the sixties, it was the ultra liberals and socialists who were the overly idealistic utopians. Today, it's the no-libertarians who stick their head in the sand when comes to reality. They regurgitate garbage written by the CATO institute then stand back and look at you indignantly as if you are an idiot not to see the gospel truth in their brilliant remarks. If you disagree, you're a commie.
There is another cost that employers do pay, but rarely fully account for when planning an offshoring: the loss of expertise... Some of the knowledge lost in transition may never be rediscovered, leading to permanent inefficiencies.
I think this is the most important thing lost to outsourcing. My father's division was outsourced maybe ten years ago (to another American company), the idea being that the other company handled the same tasks for many other, albeit smaller, institutions and could bring economies of scale to jobs that had always been handled in-house. And in theory, it could work, but in practice, the institution suddenly lost its memory. Most of the division had worked there for ten years, and a sizable number for over twenty -- they knew how to handle the politics of the wider institution, they had friends in every other division that allowed multi-division projects to run smoothly, and they knew where to get fast answers. The new company hired on a few of the of the old division, but you can't boil down the knowledge of a hundred people into three. When the new company hadn't managed to acquire the expertise of the old division after several years, the institution's higher-ups gave up and in-sourced it again, but by then most of the old division had moved on to new jobs, and the expertise the institution lost is still hurting it. The idiot who thought outsourcing was the solution to all (nonexistent) problems was fired, but that only goes so far to comfort all of the people who not only had to find new jobs but had to watch others make a mess out of the old jobs they had been proud to do.
Outsourcing is like delegating simple chores to your 8-year-old kid -- in theory, he could clean the bathroom for $5, freeing you up to do your $xx/hr job, but by the time he's called you up and interrupted your work to ask what cleaner to use on the toilet, where the spare sponges are, and whether he needs to vacuum the bath mat, you would have saved time by just doing it yourself. Eventually, assuming he sticks with it, he'll figure it out and even learn how to handle unexpected events like the sink clogging up without referring to you, but you can't look at the cost/benefit of giving him the chore simply in terms of dollars.