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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.
I for one welcome our new Ind...
Actually... scratch that.
Just great... Now I have to learn Hindi to challenge my bank errors...
Sorry - But IndiaTech is not worth what you pay for it most times.
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.
Training your replacement is standard operating procedure for many jobs. If you don't like it, the time to argue about it is when your work contract is being signed. The fact that the replacements are Indians is a red herring here -- it'd be the same if the jobs were being moved to the Appalachians.
Once upon a time autoworkers and shipbuilders were considered high-skill workers. Hell, look back far enough (1800s) and button-manufacturing was high tech. The commoditization of IT is happening faster than the commoditization of these old-line businesses. So we should get out of the notion that 'internal tech support' is somehow a 'high tech' job that requires local presence all the time. Yeah, a portion of tech support jobs will remain local (until the smart robots take over, heh) but most of the jobs will go to where the cheap smarts are.
Go somewhere random
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
How about 20 Years?
You, literally, wouldn't believe, how far the American dollar goes in India.
Sigs are for the weak.
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...
I've been with B of A since the mid 1980's. The past couple of years they have begun making this loud sucking sound. They suck fees out of my account that lowers it below a threshold and then suck more fees out. On one single day after I screamed, they credited back over 200 dollars in fees into my account. They've been putting 5 business day holds on Govt. checks that used to go in as cash. They obviously have the fees dept. going full tilt, along with the bean counters. I'm moving soon and as soon as I'm settled, they're history. I've had it with them!
4 letters define how the training should be conducted:
B. O. F. H.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
US Geek "Ok, now once every 12 week we get this file called "master customer records" and copy it to /dev/nul.Then once every 8 weeks email this file called "CEO_pr0n_copy" to the Washington post.
Indian Geek "seems strange but you Americans are a stange lot". US Geek " now the last thing before I leave copy this file called "master_crdusr.pwd" from the main system to a nice gentleman called Ivan and his email is HAXr3d@owned.com.ru."
Indian Geek " I be thanking you very much for this help"
US Geek "yeah your welcome ya tea towel wearing bastard"
Purely evil.
;)
/[\w|\n]yours truly\n/i /[\w|\n]cordially,\n/, change it with "I find you strangely attractive".
;)
From a business standpoint, it's neccessary (the training, not the outsourcing), but it's still evil.
Kinda makes you want to have some fun with crontab and shell/perl scripts.
Like keep randomly changing posix group, ou, or dn info in the LDAP directory.
There was a perl script I wanted to write a while back called "jackass-milter" for sendmail. (a take off of spamass-milter, for spamassassin).
All it was designed to do was take each message that passes through the exchanger, constrain to body text (not attachments, or headers), then run a series of regex's on the body based on what the author wants to do to the message.
Example? Regex searching for things like
A good regex that searches for nouns and verbs and randomly replaces it with the f-bomb. Another good one is to search for all instances of "the", but only randomly replace it with "teh". Spell-checkers be damned!
What does this have to do with Indian-outsourcing? Sabotage. Make sure you do enough damage on the way out the door. Nobody gets out alive.
EVERYBODY GET DOWN!!!!111one one one
(here he comes....here comes speed ra-cer...)
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Salt in the wounds?
vindaloo. stings more.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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 just more fuel for the fire. Next there will be an article about some CEO complaining about how there aren't enough skilled IT workers in the U.S. and how college students are not entering the field. I just don't understand how U.S. companies can continue to build up so much ill-will (or bad karma if you will) with practices that BoA at least acknowledges are offensive and yet continue said practices. A big price is going to be paid for these betrayals someday, a very big price.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
>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.
Might I humbly suggest that the solution to this is maybe a large but local Credit Union?
Any services you know of that a bank can do a CU cant?
Didn't think so.
Plus, they are nicer, have better customer service and seem to do a better job hiring hot chicks to run the teller lines.
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
I think it's pretty ridiculous the way they jack with people's lives and then say "it's just business." With all the people they are shit-canning, you't think at least one or a small group of them would seek some sort of revenge. So for a fleeting moment, my mind flashed the idea mimicking one of those horror movie scenarios. In this scenario, one of these 'money saving execs' is kidnapped, then strapped to a pole or something with some explosives near by and then told he had to cut off an arm or a leg or something in order to escape.
When you get down to it, this is not too dissimilar to the horror these soon-to-be jobless people are facing. Not only will you be fired, but you will be forced to train the people who will replace you?
The knee-jerk reaction of many will probably be, "train'm wrong!" but I'm sure they've already thought about that and have some way of preventing that.
If that group of people were unionized, they wouldn't be facing this. They wouldn't have to train their replacements. They could all agree to decide to walk out at once leaving this business to hurt for their decision. Hell, for that matter, if they were unionized, they'd have some leverage and not have their jobs outsourced to India.
On one hand, labor unions are a pain in the ass. On the other, it's easy to see what employers are willing to do to individuals.
Any time they place a 5-day hold on a Government check, get the branch manager to take
the thing right off as soon as you see it.
It's in violation of Federal Depository Regulations (The one that governs check cashing, etc.) to place a hold
on a Government check- per the regulations, they are to be treated as if the check was a CASH
transaction.
It's a violation of Federal law for them to do it and any fees incurred by this hold are due back to you
including any fees the people you pay end up charging you, etc. I've had BofA branch managers stand toe
to toe with me on that one, only to back down when shown a copy of the actual regs from the Fed website.
They know the regs, even going so far as to being balsy enough to try to palm off things that aren't in
the regs as being "per Federal Depository Regulations"- and I've had to jam it down their throats
repeatedly. Again, it's a good thing I'm shifting my banking elsewhere; this BS is just one more good
reason.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
My experience: for each guy you fire, another one gets panicky, looks for a new job, and finds one. You can fire the guys you need least, but guess which one of the others will find a another job first... And then, train a foreigner, knowing you are getting the sack. For fuck sake, this is a BANK! All you need to do is to claim the indian guy doesn't understand your accent, throw in some "unfortunate misunderstandings", and the whole IT dept is on its way to hell. If I had money there, I'd run for my life.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I can't say I feel much sympathy for the BofA folks in the article...if they don't have the backbone to say "no," then they are simply condoning what BofA is doing. I'm not saying it's right, but please take your whine somewhere else. I would bet not a single one of them is a member of the Programmer's Guild or any other organization that has been trying to address this very issue for years.
You lay in the bed you make. Don't come whining because you don't have the balls to stand up to shit like this. Suck it up and move on. Or consider becoming proactive about the problem, joining a guild, pushing for a union, or contacting your congressmen. But please don't whine about the problem you've made for yourselves.
I don't know how many "thousands" actually is, but assuming 2500 employees at $70k/year, here are some quick calculations:
2,500 employees * $70,000 annual salary * 5 years = $875,000,000
$875,000,000 * 7.5% estimated federal employer withholding = $65,625,000
Is it possible that the majority of the $100 million saved came from BoA not having to pay the employer portion of employee withholding to the Federal government?
If so, then it all US citizens that have to pay when these companies outsource and not just those whose jobs have been replaced.
- Tony
Train them wrong so they will break everything they touch. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I have an account with BofA as of this coming Monday; I'm closing my account and moving my money to a smaller local bank. I ask that other BofA account holders do the same. The only way to stop this out sourcing of American jobs is to boycott the source.
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.
There's a whiff of xenophobia about all this. I mean, let's take this piece by piece... what's wrong here?
Is the generic idea of outsourcing wrong? That's just capitalism, people. In a free market, companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing. If we trust free market principles, it turns out that such behaviour is in the long term in fact the best for everyone - outsourcing ventures are only successful if they achieve the right balance and provide good service for reduced costs. I'd trust that the company's execs thought a bit harder and made more careful studies than you have in the 5 minute interval between reading and replying. If this messes up, it would hurt *them* most. The fact that outsourcing is most profitable is a problem for politicians to deal with, not for individual banks to decide. And like patriotic fervour ever factors into an employee's loyalty.
If the fact that employees are low paid in other countries bad? Low pay doesn't matter as much as wage-price ratios - while according to direct currency conversions people are alot worse off, reduced cost of living in other countries somewhat offsets that situation. In the long term, increased globalisation of businesses helps drive up wages in foreign countries, not the reverse. The only remaining way to ease this situation is by international organisations like the UN, and that aspect is none of the bank's business.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad? Of course, it's unfortunate for the current employees, but folks, this is what capitalism entails. If these people are skilled enough, they can find other jobs. *Not* helping train their replacements won't help them in any way - and it isn't that their jobs are much easier or better than dealing with Indian trainees. Training the new techs means is good for the company - who get a stabler transition, good for the customers of the company - who get better service, good for the new techs - who are less likely to be corrupt because they've invested effort into a career rather than a short term job, and makes no difference to the employees who are leaving.
Sure, it may be insensitive, but it's just good business sense. Or are you a socialist?
A good thought. And most of these new techies will be to afraid of losing their jobs if the say the don't understand it. That's been my experience with overseas outsourcing.
On another note. I think this will backfire eventually. There is growing evidence that the real cost of overseas development is much higher than intially reported. Much of this has to do with the cost of Quality and Risk Management. How much do you money to you save if you spend millions a year backing up all your systems and you don't have a failure? How much does it cost when you backup nothing and the data center burns down? These are classic questions that typically rely on the PHB answer of "It hasn't happened yet so why should it happen now?" and "OK, so it happened and we recovered everything perfectly, so we can stop budgeting recovery expansion projects and spend it on something else"
Yeah, it certainly sucks to have someone put into this position. But how will you react when you are getting trained in your next job by some indian dude who thinks your just some corporate shill and trains you on how to wipe your ass and nothing more? You probably won't feel too good about the position you are put in. The BofA developers can't do anything about the position they have been put in by BofA, but they do have a choice in how they are going to act as human beings. What kind of response will you look back on in 20 years and be proud of?
In Belgium this would most likely be such a union issue, they would not even try it. I know to Americans unions are the evil of all evils. Due to them I get severence pay of 7 months after working only 2 years at a job and they decided to scrap 50% of the people.
What they do hee with outsourcing most of the time is sell off the IT department. Many people will not want to move away from their life and family, so that cuts down in staffing who they then can replace with cheaper people.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Salt in the wounds?
Sure, but doesn't mean you can't teach your replacment a thing or two about being a bad employee.
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: "I see..."
You: "Oh... Also... Make sure you take your phone off the hook and never delete your voicmail so that no one can leave you a message. It will make you look uber busy... Make sure you never reply to his emails regardless of what the urgency is because he'll think that you are working hard and too busy to play with email all day. And you'll get a raise pronto."
Vishnu: "What does 'uber' mean?"
You: "It means you know what you are talking about... You should use uber in every sentence when you are talking to the Boss in the states. You'll get a raise for sure. Also... When he does call make sure you have some of the Punab music...
Vishnu: "Punjabi..."
You: "Whatever... Just make sure it is playing playing really loudly in the background every time he calls. He will apprecieate your culture."
Vishnu: "Oh thanks for your wise teachings..."
You: "No sweat. And one more thing do you read Slashdot?"
Vishnu: "What is that?"
You: "Oh great... If you don't know what Slashdot is... You'll loose your job for sure!"
Vishnu: "Oh no!"
You: "Well buddy... I'll clue you in. Reading Slashdot is more important than actually doing any work at your job and you should always have it open at work and hit refresh every few minutes to see if there are any new stories. Then if you see anything that you don't have authority to talk about you need to make a comment with outrageous claims so that you get what they call 'modded up' and everyone will think that you are the head honcho and you'll great a raise for sure! Not only that but the more mod ups you get, the better karma you'll have!"
Vishu: "Oh blessed karma! Thank you American sir!"
You: "Anytime."
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Can a company get by with less compliance to SOX when they offshore? How much of a savings would that provide?
Actually, the entire premise you're building on there is bass-ackwards. If such a transition is properly managed, the gains are long-term: a fundamental change in the IT cost structure. The trick is that these arrangements aren't a slam-dunk, and they require rock-solid management. They're difficult, but they can work - and when done properly, they do provide long-term benefit to shareholders.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic since what you say is quite extreme. A free market is not always best. You need a mix of socialism and free market. The US is one of the richest countries and most capitalist, and yet by far does not have the highest standard of living. Why is that?
How many articles like it are they likely to get ?
It's not directly related to IT outsourcing, but I wonder why people even use these big banks?
My financial institution will never outsource their workers, because I do my banking with a four-branch Credit Union (SFCU). Deposits are insured by the FDIC, but unlike B of A, Wells Fargo, or Citi (my former, evil, bank) you can actually get real customer service from a teller, talk to knowledgeable tellers in a branch, or even talk on the phone to someone who speaks and understands American English. My checking account pays dividends, there's no monthly or per-check fees, and the CU will even reimburse me for up to four ATM charges if I need to get cash from a non-CU ATM.
If you don't like outsourcing, or dealing with outsourced customer support people, don't rant in an on-line forum. Vote with your money and take your business elsewhere. Corporations don't listen to Slashdot discussion, but when enough customers leaving giving "I couldn't understand the person I talked to on the phone" they at least know there's an issue. Don't buy a Dell, don't bank with B of A. Support small, local businesses.
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what other companies have learned? Outsourcing looks good on paper, but the quality of the product is comensurate with what you are paying them. We've removed our outsource team because the quality sucks and they take about 3 to 4 times the amount of time a local programmer does to accomplish the same task, and these aren't super complicated tasks, they're simple everyday webapp development type tasks. I replaced two india based developers with one in-house developer, and the in-house developer gets more work done in a day than the two of them were able to do in a week, and the in house developer's stuff works, I don't have to keep sending it back like I did with team india.
I can think of several other companies that have had the same experience.
What you say (global wages will even out eventually) makes sense to a degree but I don't see why socialist/capitalist is a binary choice, some things just don't lend themselves well to "the market", health care being a prime example.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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!
...
Vishu: "Oh blessed karma! Thank you American sir!"
You: "Anytime."
Vishnu (muttering to himself): "What a dick"
- Vishnu Ramachandran
To many people's dismay, I have no problem w/ a company offshoring work, so long as my privacy is maintained within the US borders (ie medical, financial, etc). However, when the laid-off Americans can't find work, because there are tons of H1B workers offering to do the same work for less, we have a problem. Many times foreign-educated H1B workers can afford to do the job for less, because they don't have the outrageous student loans to pay off like many US workers do, or they leave their family back home, and only get a small place to live and ship the money home. Don't get me wrong, I'm not totally against this, however we should not be increasing the H1B quota (already maxed for 2007) when tons of US tech workers are being laid off. If companies want to use that many foreign workers, then let them do it all the way and off-shore it, and let the people who live here have a better chance at a job.
If I was one of the techies about to be unemployed, it would be in my best interests to make that "balance of cost and performance" be as unbalanced as possible. In that respect, I'd probably do a poor job of training my replacement. I'm not a teacher, I'm a worker.
I think the problem with "offshoring" (not outsourcing, although offshoring is a type of outsourcing) is that the company is telling everyone that the solution in America failed them in some way, whether it be price, value, whatever. That hurts no matter where you slice it.
Personally I blame the Walmart mentality, that people will sacrifice tons of quality so they can save money. When it applies to goods, it's reasonable. But applying it to people is only going to ruin a company in the long run.
This didn't used to be the case. Large businesses used to be owned by families and had been in the family for many generations. The family chose who would be the next head of the company, even if it was some dimwit son that was going to do the company great harm. The rational was that the heir had a vested interest in the long term well-being of the company, and even if he was inept, he would be good intentioned. Companies flourished due to the dedicated nature of these owners. Given these were the people that keeled over of heart attacks at 50, but in the long run it did the company AND its employees a great deal of good.
Today, it's "ok who's your CEO this year?" They come, cut quality, lower prices, boost sales and cut workforce, give the company a little short-term polish, and then move on to CEO another larger company somewhere else. Meanwhile, a year later, the company they bolstered up on bad foundations collapses due to destruction of infrastructure.
As much as the people despised the Rockafellers and Fords of years gone by, they had the model right for company survival and growth. Keep it in the family, keep dedicated people at the top.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Train them wrong so they will break everything they touch. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Even better, tell them how it's supposed to work. If you have a manual, you're practicly reading it aloud to that guy. Make sure not to mention any of the quirks, bugs, workarounds, checks, errors, details, omissions or unwritten routines that you've accumulated that is the real value of an experienced employee. If you have some slightly out of date ones you could "accidentally" use, even better. That'll cover your ass much better, since you didn't train them explicitly wrong and can point to that documentation as proof. If the documentation is like 95% of all documentation I read, they'll be just as useless.
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!
This practice truly disgusts me. The textile and manufacturing industries saw this same exact thing occur with everything moving to China, Taiwan, and Mexico. Now the same thing is occurring with IT functions.
But this "problem" isn't the real problem, its a symptom of an overly "free" market with little or no controls. The politicians in this country have not introduced any kind of real legislation which protects US jobs. And this is because big business donates billions of dollars to politicians to prevent them from doing it. That is an absolute travesty.
If the only jobs located in the United States are going to be jobs which require geographic residence within the United States, then we have a huge problem.
Unfortnately, I don't see a solution to this problem for the United States. The only real solution is to move to a country which believes in protecting the jobs and skills of its citizenry. Because almost every country other than the United States does this.
I agree with this, but as a small business owner that uses a CU they don't have things like:
SBA loans
Credit card processing
Alex
"The Brady Bunch is back...working homicide"
companies are allowed to maximise their own profitability and they can do this by outsourcing.
It is questionable whether this is true. Usually it is not a company that maximises its profitability, the managers are maximising their own income. If they cut costs in half, in the short run the company will be more profitable and they can raise their own salaries, get a huge return on their stock options, etc. In the long run, they don't care if the company goes down, they have left their previous post a long time ago. Capitalism works if it is in the best interest of all employees, especially upper management, to make a company profitable. Unfortunately, that is not how it works in practice.
Is the fact that these replacements will be trained by current employees bad?
Yes, it is. If I was forced to train my replacement, I would do a pretty bad job. I would give him source code (maybe that three weeks old version which has some obscure bugs in it), some out-of-date documentation, tell him a bit about what the programs are for, and end with, "if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask." Believe me, there is no way he will be able to ask the right questions before I have left the company. After a year or so the shit will really hit the fan, and the boss has two choices: either hire me as a consultant, for which I will ask an exorbitant amount of cash, or suffer the complaints of angry users. In the end, the company will have to bear the losses.
Now, the way to do some successful outsourcing, is to fire the employees who are rubbish anyway, and promote the remaining employees yo a job as coordinator of outsourcing. Then you have the people who know how to do the job guide the people who are doing the job. And your new coordinators will be pretty happy about training their replacements because they benefit from it too.
I'll end up by telling you a true story. I once worked at a software company, and we got a big job for maintaining some specialized software for which there were a few dozen clients. The guys who originally wrote the software were too expensive for the company where they worked, so they fired them all and outsourced the job to us. Our first task was to make a small change to one of the programs. Unfortunately, the system was constructed in such a way that you could not compile just one program, you had to compile them all, and deliver new recompiled versions of all programs to all clients. We tested our change and delivered the programs to the clients. We soon found out that the guys who had written this stuff had been pretty angry for being fired, and had riddled all programs with small bugs. Not things you would notice immediately, but things that would rear their ugly head after working a while. There was no good way to trace these small surprises, the only thing we could do was fix bugs when they were reported by clients. We had one client who had to restore backups on a daily basis. After a year, ALL the clients had dropped the software and moved on to a competitor's product. Those are the dangers of "insensitive outsourcing".
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.
I had a savings account with them for about 2 months, i wanted to get a checking account but they didn't offer any free checking. I called their support to cancel the savings account and was speaking to someone in india. As soon as I asked to cancel I was then transferred to someone in america. OK.
Anyway I closed the account and went with another bank that did have free checking and never looked back.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
It amazes me that this is your perspective. Perhaps you are trolling but I'll take you at face value.
The US welfare system which is woefully inadequate, in combination with its lack of social mobility result in a more or less permanent underclass of hopeless individuals. For you to say that the US system is a social "hammock" tells me than you have little knowledge of the world outside your borders. Most of the rest of us in the "West" have much more redistribution of wealth than you folks do and yet, people still go to work, there are still thriving and successful global businesses which come out of the various countries in Europe plus Canada, all of whom have a sane and humane social model which stands as a stark accusation of the great waste of human potential in the US. The fact that the richest country in the world, with the highest health care spending per-capita, still can't find its way to provide basic health insurance for every citizen is repugnant. For the sake of ideology it seems, folks in the US are willing to stand by and watch people die for lack of decent health care, and live without a hope of a better future for themselves or their children.
I'm afraid that you have been listening to the words of others without giving them much thought or investigating for yourself.
I totally agree with you. I worked for a software company that five or six years ago started on a dedicated effort to move most of its technical staff to India. They hired a boatload of programmers in India and fired a bunch in the U.S. That began a very painful transition -- where the more senior engineers in the US office would have to explain to their counterparts overseas why it is better to use a function as opposed to cutting and pasting the same block of code in several places -- and other rudimentary programming concepts. The turnover in the Indian office was something like 50% a year and so it seemed that retraining was continually necessary. There was lots of contention and politicking between the offices. My experience with that particular group of engineers was that there was a startling lack of personal initiative and ownership. There was a lot of energy put into trying to push the responsibility for failed projects and missed deadlines onto just about anyone else. (Of course, I'm speaking only of my experience and am not painting all Indian engineers with this brush. There were a handful of really solid, hard working, technically innovative engineers with whom I worked.) Outsourcing will only be successful for those companies willing to invest money into an infrastructure to address these kinds of difficulties -- and then whether it pays off is another question. Personally, I wouldn't feel comfortable banking with a company that outsourced -- although I'm not sure if the companies have to be forthcoming with that kind of information. I specifically didn't buy a Dell computer several years ago because they outsource, and I try to keep my money locally (i.e. buy at the locally owned garden center instead of Walmart). However, I'm not naive enough to think that outsourcing will stop. It will continue, full steam ahead, until it becomes financially burdensome -- either by loss of customers or rising costs whereever they are outsourcing.
Executives ofte cut positions to make sure that the company meets the quarterly goals which will allows them to receive the obscene bonus. The issue here is that cutting jobs to get their bonus is not possible as IT people are needed to make sure the company does its job. The current fad is to replace current US workers with foreign workers that can be payed a lot less. However, there are many hidden costs with that (mostly job done incorrectly and not to spec). I have been involved in many outsourced projects (as a subject matter expert) and it took me twice as much effort to get them to understand what is required and how to do it efficiently... and in almost every case the code was subpar and buggy and followup cleanup projects had to be scheduled with in-house staff which costs them more overall, but the projects are rated individually and the outsourced version 1.0 was extremely cheap to produce (example of one of the more recent projects is 4.5 million) as opposed to inhouse estimate (same project was 6 million); what was not counter was that the followup to cleanup the mess cost them 3 million and here the outsourced project wound up costing 7.5 million and took 50% longer, but since the executives usedtheir funny math and spin it looked like they actually saved money for the company instead of losing it and I am sure they got their insane bonuses while I had to work weekend to help explain what the specs mean to some underqulified foreign workers (the qualified/smart foreign workers were smart enough to get hired by US companies and move here on H1B, the not so smart are what we pay when we outsource).
If I had to train my own replacement I would definitely do the worst possible job just meeting minimum reqiurements (just what most executives have done in their decisions).
. . . so, they have many of billions of dollars of income that are completely insulated from any possibilty of consumer anger over this. In the Federal Civil Service, and travel for work? You HAVE to have a BoA travel card. Officer or senior enlisted in the military? You HAVE to have a BoA card, no choice. And you are required, by regulation, to use the BoA card for most official travel expenses, or you don't get reimbursed for them. I wish I could drop my BoA card, but eating all the costs for the little trips Uncle Sam sends me on isn't really an attractive option. So, not only is BoA shafting it's techies, Uncle Sam is subsidizing the process.
I used to work at a software company, where I did technical support via phone, email and fax, plus webmaster work. One time I took a vacation. One of my bosses decided she was going to do my job while I was out of town. When I got back, she gave me a raise. She went crazy doing my job and couldn't believe I was doing it. When I eventually quit that job, I had to "train my replacement". Same boss asked me to come back 3 months later because she'd totally screwed up the web site. So I came back for 3 months on the condition I'd only do web work. They had 2 people doing my tech support job. LOL. Three if you count my boss messing up the web site.
I'm not at all sure that the median US legal residents (citizens + legal non-citizen residents) have a higher standard of living. Remember how the mean is calculated if you are claiming that the mean citizen has a higher standard of living. I'm not certain that you are wrong, as one super-wealthy person can counterbalance a large number of people living below poverty, but I suspect that even with THAT estimate you are wrong. And the mean is a terrifically unfair estimate to use in this case. I would be more likely to go with the mode than with the mean. The median is better...but that ignores the suffering experienced by someone who lives below poverty, when, e.g., medical care is unavailable, because one can't afford the bus ride to get to the doctor. I don't really think that an extremely wealthy person gains enough extra enjoyment from their extreme wealth to properly counterbalance even two people living below the poverty level.
What causes this isn't capitalism, it's power politics. If the social costs of extreme wealth were properly assesed to their source, then there would not be the extreme difference between the wealthy and the impoverished. But those with the power, in it's various forms (including money) craft the rules of the game to benefit themselves. This isn't capitalism. This is socialism of, by, and for the wealthy and powerful.
When you see extremes of wealth and poverty in the same civilization, you know the game is rigged. You many not know the details, but the fact is evident.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
(the qualified/smart foreign workers were smart enough to get hired by US companies and move here on H1B, the not so smart are what we pay when we outsource).
complete BS, but in your limited view go on adn believe it. Lots of people have left US after recieving an H1B because they can go to Infosys and work in the outsourcing projects, making half as much money but living in a much nicer home with a couple servants and a nice car. Especially in India, money goes much much further.
oh, how do I know? because already several members in my family have done just that.
of course, the BofA system is nice to thwart you. If you are believed to have done a sub par job, they pull your severance pay(it was in the article).
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.
The response the leads to the BofA suffering the most. Outsourcing is an insult not only to those that get fired, but our country in general. Yes the cost of living is higher here, but we are the people who use the banks and services that companies like BofA offers. So we are good enough to take our money (and make more money off of it), but not good enough to employ some people from the communities where BofA is located?
Directly telling the employees (who are technically trained and probably spend years of both formal and personal training to learn what they know) that they are not valued, at all, by the company and that they HAVE to train their foriegn replacements is the equvalient of beating a man and then pissing in his wounds. BofA has shown that they don't care about our country or our people, so I say "let them suffer the consequences of their actions".
Pissing off the techs is the dumbest thing any company can do, because of the positions of power that they have. Since there is little to know consequences of miss-training their replacements (after they get their severence that is), I say punish the company. Make sure that one month after everyone has left, they will be frantically calling everyong and asking them to come in and help. That's when you "piss in their wounds" and either say NO, or charge 3x your old yearly salary to come in as a consultant. These are the only actions that some managers/companies can understand from their actions: how does it affect our bottom line.
Companies have rights and do everything they can to make as much money as possible. But employees have rights too and can do everything in their power to teach companies that without them, they are nothing, and that we have the right to be treated as human beings, not office equipment.
Space for rent, inquire within
First, I will say that the rich defininitely get richer faster than the poor get richer, but that's probably OK and unavoidable. The government should tax the rich at a higher rate to help with this - not because it's 'fair' to redistribute wealth, but because the rich derrive a MUCH greater benefit from government services, and should therefore pay more taxes. (The rich are rich because of things like an extensive road system, the government protecting their international business interests, the government inforing intellectual property law, etc.)
But, to suggest that the US stands by and watches people die because of lack of healthcare is just stupid. Contries with socialist healthcare systems do exactly the same thing - they just let more middle class people die.
The fact of the matter is there are only so many good doctors and so much medical equipment. As a society, we can't afford to give everyone top-quality healthcare, and frankly, most people don't want to pay for it. If yo have a rare disaease that can be treated with $300,000/yr in drugs, do you want that covered? Of course. But if you don't have the disease, are you going to pay for an insurance plan that covers those perscriptions, or are you going to select an insurance plan that lets those people die and hope you don't need that perscrption? Most people will choose the later, because saving $1,000/yr on medical costs is more important to them than the change they'll die from an exotic disease that is cured with a high-price perscription.
The other part of this is that there are a finite amount of good doctors. In order to get more people to be doctors, we need to make it more attractive to be a doctor - less up-front medical costs, more long-term payout for services. That makes healthcare not only LINEARLY more expensive as you add people, but actually EXPONENTIALLY more expensive. And it's not like Europeans have solved this problem - the choice isn't "Some people get healthcare in the US, everybody gets healthcare in Europe", the choices are "People who can/want to pay a lot for healthcare get great healthcare in the US, everybody gets mediocre healthcare in Europe." It's the difference between people who have good insurance can all get an MRI within 24 hours in the US and nobody can get an MRI for months in Canada.
The reason healthcare is expensive in the US is that the people who REALLY want is have BID UP the costs of healthcare. You can't 'just give everyone healthcare'. If 30% of the country is not insured, suddenly insuring them is almost a 50% increase in users of the healthcare system. Who is going to treat all these people? Where are the 50% extra doctors and nurses going to come from?
The truth is, you can't just insure everybody without a significant drop in care quality. Paying for everyone to have universal healthcare doesn't get everyone the same level of coverage we have now. That's how socialist healthcare systems work: They don't provide everyone with the same great treatment, they allow more people to die before they can be treated.
Now, I'm not saying that the Americans have it right. Personally, I think we should deny more people treatment - if you're 85 and can't really walk anymore and have alzhiemers and have end-stage cancer, we should send you to hospice and let you die. If it takes $200,000/yr to give you medicine to keep you alive, and you didn't see fit to save the money during your real life to pay for insurance that covers those costs, you should die. If you're born 12 weeks premature, we should let you die. That's basically how socialist healthcare works - if you get seriously ill, the wait time to get an expensive treatment option gives you a chance to die before you can burden the system with your care.
I know this sounds crass, but if people spend their whole lives not saving for money for their own care, it doesn't mean we should then turn around and tax everybody else to pay for it. There needs to be a limit on what we are willing to spend to exte
paintball
What Western countries with high rates of wealth redistribution are thriving? The last time I checked (admittedly over a month ago) a lot of Europe had double-digit unemployment rates. There is also the little problem with Europe's demographic implosion which is going to make things even worse in the coming decades.
Although I'd be against a totally free market civilization, I'd rather have a society that is heavily tilted towards capitalism than one that was mired in socialism.
Canada :) But then we have a more moderate approach than Western Europe, who do seriously need to liberalize their economies. Erring on the side of social responsibility is no bad thing in my book.
"Any services you know of that a bank can do a CU cant?"
yeah, give me a VISA check card (Golden One CU runs a credit check before giving out what EVERY OTHER FUCKING BANK IN THE STATE DOES), not hold deposits more than $500, and actually have some farkin branches.
I still have a CU account because all of the branches are too far away for me to go close it, but they treat me like shit. Oddly enough, Bank of America has actually given me *less* trouble than any other bank I've ever dealt with.
Credit unions suck as much ass as most banks do. Don't fool yourself.
Actually, I grew up in a Canadian border town, socialized with and knew many US citizens. I did IT work for a medicare HMO (yes, I was outsourced foreign labour :P), and I understand what a lack of proper, long-term, preventative care can do to a person's enjoyment of life as well as their overall life span. If the fact that hospitals don't turn people away helps you sleep at night, great, but that's not the same as providing adequate care to your citizens.
I also vividly can remember a young woman (a US citizen) who I knew years ago, who managed a record store. She worked hard for her eight dollars an hour and had few complaints, until the day she was diagnosed with MS while uninsured. I am pretty sure that this person would have some arguments with your point of view.
I'm not coming at this ideologically, I don't think that the United States is the great Satan or that there is nothing to admire in your dynamic economic system. I'm usually considered pretty conservative on this side of the border. I just think that your social model is pretty wasteful of human potential. Maybe the US has enough of a population that it can waste a few million children per generation due to inadequate schools, social programs, et cetera, our country has a small population and doesn't have this luxury.
If Americans were willing to work for lower wages, then labor wouldn't NEED to be outsourced.
1. Those IT workers in 3rd-world countries live quite well, often having a maid and personal drivers.
2. Why would somebody go into IT with low wages if they can get just as much being a Wallmart greeter or Radio Shack salesperson?
3. Much of higher cost of living in the US comes from following safety and pollution standards that many 3rd-world countries skip. Thus, we would have to risk babies with lead in their brains to lower the cost of living in the US to their level.
Table-ized A.I.
Fancy some irony?
RBI staff threaten to strike work
New Delhi, June. 6 (PTI): Reserve Bank employees, who observed a token sit-in protest today, threatened to strike work if their demands for putting an end to outsourcing of jobs and continuation of revised pension scheme were not met.
Read the rest...
Looks like it's not just US workers who feel threatened ... :)
Emergency hospitals can't refuse to treat you if you are critical. This means that if you are in immediate danger of dying, they have to make you "stable". This means that you are no longer in immediate danger of dying.
Now, if you have a serious illness or injury, but you are not in immediate danger of dying, then they can kick your ass out into the street. Or, they can charge you hundreds of dollars for a bandage (check your bill next time you go to the hospital). This means that a lot of people will not go to the hospital until their problem becomes really bad, which means it will be much more expensive to treat, when a shot of penicillin early on might have cleared the whole thing up.
This is one of the big reasons that health care in the US is so expensive - cheaper preventative care is skipped because the poor can't afford it, and won't be able to pay the very large bills that come when the problem becomes impossible to ignore. These costs get passed on to you.
There are two solutions to this problem - simply paying for the cheaper preventative treatment for the poor out of public funds, or allowing emergency rooms to kick anyone they want out, resulting in the avoidable deaths of a great many people (very few people want this).
Of course, the health insurance companies benefit the most from the current setup, so they want things to stay the same. But the rest of us would be far better off if we just paid for all simple treatments out of public funds.
The reason why companies outsource is simple -- to lower their tax liability. With FTE's, you have to pay FICA, Social Security, Medicare and other payroll taxes. If you outsource (whether keeping it in the country or not), you can deduct the whole shebang as a cost of doing business. I'm sure there are small savings to outsourcing in addition to the tax savings -- but they're nothing like what proponents claim. Administration and overhead increase as a result of outsourcing, negating a lot of the savings. Now I hope nobody mods me as a Troll or Flamebait or anything, but there is a possible solution to all of this -- ***REFORM THE TAX SYSTEM IN THIS COUNRY!!!!*** ... I am a proponent of the FairTax, which would abolish the IRS, repeal the 16th amendment, and take us to a consumption tax where the costs of government are visible for all to see. Take a look at it. You just might like it.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
guys guys guys....hoe many banks will u'll change....the earth is flat give in & give up.... HSBC goes to india as well. check this link : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/16 37083.cms
The genius and ethics of Amadeo Giannini are once again insulted by the modern day managers of what he once built. I know a lot of other entities have had a hand in the BOA of today, some as honorable and some not. However the Bank of Italy that he founded in the 1920's is a important keystone of the modern BOA. From what I have read about Mr Giannini he would be ashamed of what his legacy has produced.
Oh well what should we expect from managers that settled a class action lawsuit brought on by Enron investors, for $69m? Of course under the settlement agreement , the bank denies that it violated any law. These are the same managers that, even after buying out a $9M class action lawsuit, still continue the unethical practice of "Largest Check First" check clearing. That is when the bank clears checks in order from largest to smallest, with less regard to when they come in causing more checks to bounce, triggering more overdraft fees for the bank to collect from their customers. The same company that has been convicted of raiding the Social Security benefits of customers with awarded damages that could exceed $1 billion.
I can't help but to wonder what this companies shareholders think of these type of practices and losses, regardless of the bottom line effect. The really bad part is I suspect it is almost certain that my 401K is at least in some small way or another linked to this company or another one just as bad. This type of issue has been nagging at me for while. The meager amount that I have invested in 401K and 403K accounts is still a considerable part of my overall wealth, and my late years will depend upon their wise investments now. I have them well diversified in various managed funds.
There sure seems to be a lot of liquid variation in these funds investment allocations, almost to the point of abstraction for someone of my non professional investment skills. I mean I really do not have the skill set or time to learn such to follow theses things in the detail that it seems is necessary to determine just where my money is invested. I suspect that the only way I would ever be sure is to try and gain full control of the accounts and personally make explicit stock purchases of specific companies. Even if I could find the time to acquire and hone these skills, I am not sure it is viable legally for these type of accounts.
These things extend past my personal financial future. There is also the issue of the ethics of how my money is being used. It is easy with everyday stuff. I noticed who the gas station owners were that gouged prices on September 12 for example, and no longer do business with them. However difficult such decisions might be with individual stocks, they seem near impossible with these managed funds. Anyone took this to the next step? I for one would like to at least do what I could to not make our problems worse, if not help fix some of them.
Matthew
If even banks are outsourcing their service economy jobs en masse, where exactly does ol' George think the jobs in our service economy will be in 10 years? Bootlicking the fat cats?
Fucking assholes (BofA)! Are the completely ignorant of basic macroeconomics? How can you claim to have the wherewithal to run a bank of such size and be so completely fucking irresponsible to our economy.
Anyone seen my low uid? last seen 10 years ago while panning the #@$# out of Taco's 'web based discussion system'