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.
I for one welcome our new Ind...
Actually... scratch that.
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'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!
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 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.
Lots of British companies that outsourced to India 5-10 years ago found that it cost more overall because the quality suffered and so much time was spent with managers flying backwards and forwards. Many of those companies returned to the UK because it is cheaper to pay for something to be done properly in the first place that to get a cheap job done that needs twice as much spent on fixing it.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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.
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
"And which bank would you change to?"
Why not join a Credit Union? They offer the same services, tend to be local and regional (which helps the local/regional economies) and in my experience their customer service is far better than that of commercial banks.
Best of all, they are non-profit, which eliminates the greed factor that drives outsourcing.
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
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.
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)
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.
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
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!
I have an apt analogy.
Yesrs ago, I sold auto parts at car dealerships, mainly to body shops. A good-sized local body shop chain was buying parts from us for 5% over cost, delivered. They came to us and said that they were going to switch to someone who would sell them parts at 3% over cost, delivered, unless we could match it. We let them go.
About 18 months later, they came back: "We want to come back to you." Why? Because my company could provide better service. The 3% over company would deliver parts once a day, that's it. If something was missing or wrong or broken, they wouldn't try to find it someplace else and do a second trip that day, they'd just order another one and deliver it when it came in.
So when this body shop chain came back to us, we said, "Okay, but it's 10% over cost now." They agreed.
The moral of this story? Maybe in five or ten years, when US industry figures out that the front-end savings they're getting on offshored labor translates to a higher "total cost of operation," they'll come back to the US labor market. And when that happens, salaries for US tech jobs will rise.
I'm prepared to ride it out.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
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.
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.