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Utility Sets IT Department On Path To Self-destruction
dcblogs writes "Northeast Utilities has told IT employees that it is considering outsourcing IT work to India-based offshore firms, putting as many as 400 IT jobs at risk. The company is saying a final decision has not been made. But Conn. State Rep. and House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, who is trying to prevent or limit the outsourcing move, says it may be a done deal. NU may be prompting its best IT employees to head to the exits. It also creates IT security risks from upset workers. The heads-up to employees in advance of a firm plan is 'kind of mind mindbogglingly stupid,' said David Lewis, who heads a Connecticut-based human resources consulting firm OperationsInc, especially 'since this is IT of all places.' The utility's move makes sense, however, if is it trying to encourage attrition to reduce severance costs."
Because it's worked so well for others in the past.
Just finishing my last trojans and timebombs...now they can fire me.
D.O.A. !!
. . .to re-emphasize how bad of a decision this will become if put into effect. The issues waiting to occur have been well documented many times here, so I won't bother with them in detail. And know I won't take any satisfaction in saying I told you so later . . . well, maybe a little.
Why don't they just outsource to China and cut out the middleman?
Publicly traded utilities should be prohibited from hiring foreign companies to perform these kinds of jobs, in much the same way those companies are also prohibited from hiring foreign attorneys, architects, construction companies, doctors and certified accountants.
Almost all utilities are regulated industries, since they enjoy government-enforced monopolies. They should not be allowed to leverage taxpayer-subsidized market exclusivity in order to engineer the destruction of those same taxpayer's careers.
This applies equally to cable television providers, ISPs, gas and water companies.
Outsourcing IT will only save you money and nothing else. Having a fair amount of experience in IT I already know the challenges faced between the geeks and the normal staff, now throw a thick Indian accent with horrible English on top of that combined with absolutely no skill and computer guided scripts they can't read, you'll be lucky to have a company at all after 2 months. Outsourcing has got so bad that unless I can talk to a Caucasian, with no accent, who is intelligent and well versed in what I want to know, I'll hang up the phone or ask for another person. It's not racism or anything stupid like that, it's purely the fact that 99.9999% out the people who work in these outsourced call centers know absolutely nothing about what they are working on and 98% of the time they can't understand English well enough to understand the problem you want to get across. I say no to outsourcing, it's a cancer to a company, it's make employees hate going to work or having to ask for help, it makes tension grow well at work and it makes everyone hate having to deal with anything.
It just doesn't work.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
As an IT professional, what angers me is mostly management lying and claiming everything's hunky-dory and then blindsiding me with layoffs. When they do it even once, it convinces me that I can't trust them ever again. That's not a problem if I'm one of the ones being shown the door, but companies rarely lay off everybody in a single pass and this creates if anything even worse trust issues with those who're still working. At the very least this behavior will turn me from someone who considers it only professional to give as much notice as possible if I decide to go elsewhere into someone who a) doesn't feel obligated to give any more notice than legally required since the company's shown that's what they'll do and b) is more likely to start looking before he gets caught in the next round of layoffs. Whereas if the heads-up is given, I'm less likely to worry and be looking to jump ship because I know I'll have advance warning next round too.
That no-advance-warning is only a good idea if you can't trust your IT people in the first place. And if you can't trust them, why are you trusting them to run your IT department?
Why would you outsource like this? It would mean:
1) Different timezones - cannot communicate in realtime;
2) Different culture - harder to understand requirements;
3) Language barrier - even in the unlikely event that the developers all speak excellent Indian English, it is *not* the same as Americna English;
4) Lack of face-to-face contact - being able to watch someone communicate, point at the screen, sit in a room together makes for far faster problem resolution;
5) Lack of mutual value - a permanent employee is entirely your investment, and in return works and trains only on your systems, dedicating their work day to understanding what you need, and spending years at your company becoming intimately familiar with your processes;
6) Lack of open-ended requirements - this is one of the most important things of all: all contractors bit you in the ass by working to spec, whereas permanent employees will be there to do whatever you want, when you want it.
In short, paper estimates of monies saved by outsourcing are always - without exception - a crock of shit. Someone wants a hefty bonus, possibly by fooling executives re apparent saving, or possibly because they have an interest in the outsourcing firm. Most likely both.
The segment "NBC tech support in India", from Conan O'Brien's old show, seems topical again: http://www.noob.us/humor/conan-obrien-nbc-tech-support-in-india/
Outsourcing issue aside, isn't pre-emptive notification to your employees the "right" thing to do, at least as far as your employees are concerned?
If it was the other way around and the company provided minimum notice after months and months of planning the switch, everyone would say they were callous for not providing enough notice to their employees.
So, just as a thought, perhaps the company is simply trying to do the right thing (again, overall outsourcing issue aside). Not saying it is necessarily the case, just that it could be a factor in their decision to notify early.
If I was the CEO of a company, and for some reason or other had to outsource the majority of a department, I would hope that I was considerate enough to notify my employees as soon as the situation was reasonably likely to happen.
If they are not saying it in public then they are making hints at it internally by the way the department are managed. Making sure it is going to fail.
I have seen different approaches all ending up in outsourcing.
One is not to hire any people when others leave making everyone more busy so they can't do their job right, then they might hire in external help to fill the gaps which is very inefficient and expensive making it easier.
Another one is making crazy demands in terms of uptime, stability and documentation which becomes very expensive and never gets achieved, only to outsource it to a company with a contract that has much fewer demands and therefore much cheaper to achieve.
And the worst must probably be the one where you actually succeeded in streamlining the entire IT department and making it well documented so it is easy to hand over to India.
It's also not a very bright move when you consider that former offshorers have been pulling their operations back to the U.S. in droves.
Over the course of the last few years, on the international software contract boards, I have more and more seen posts that say such things as "N. America or Europe Only" for hire.
There have been way too many bad experiences with offshoring. The main complaints have been: [A] Overselling (i.e., the person or firm really had little or no experience in the particular specialty involved), [B] inferior work, and [C] incomplete work (project simply abandoned after a couple of initial payments).
When other corporations are changing direction in a big way, why would they choose to do this? Are they unwilling to learn from the mistakes of others?
Note that due to the various interlockings of the various utilities operated by Northeast Utilities, it is next to impossible to know how much people like Bill Quinlan are pulling out of the company, but according to one report, the executives at CL&P (connecuit light & power) get paid 11.2 million. Replacing 400 IT jobs with a contract to India will probably save less than the executive salaries, it is good to be at the top in a modern american company. Bill is a freaking attorney, pulling out about $4 million per year from the rate payers for making such hard nosed decisions as putting 400 americans out of work. Nice guy!
Now they'll have more opportunities to stage events designed to freighten congress into giving more budget to this fake "cyberwarfare" stuff they're hawking.
Seeing as how vital utilities are to our Nation's livelihood and welfare, I can't possibly see any scenario in which outsourcing the IT duties to any Foreign National should be considered anything but a gigantic security risk. It's no secret that any given network on the electric grid can cause widespread outages beyond it's customer base. Congress needs to pass a law requiring all Utilities to employ their own IT departments comprised of US Nationals on US Soil.
Why did this part only make it to page 3?
Of course it does. IMHO, IT shouldn't be outside of a secure environment's walls. Even with "good" IT people, when they can VPN in from home computers and do things, it can compromise the security of the network. When your entire shop is off-shore, there's no one standing guard to make sure things are safe.
The risks are huge. It can range from malware on a workstation, to malicious actions by a 3rd party or employee.
The "what could possibly go wrong" goes from the confines of their office, to ... well ... the whole world.
I'm surprised DHS hasn't said no to this. They're worried about critical infrastructure, including power utilities, being compromised by outside attackers. When all the work is being done by someone other than in-house staff, it's inviting exactly that kind of trouble.
I guess "best case" here is that they're trying to get a bunch of people to quit, so they can get fresh locals in for less pay, screwing the existing staff in the process.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I'm sure the Russians and Chinese would never take advantage of American infrastructure information India.
To any businessmen or entrepreneurs out there. Get ready to move in, a fortune 500 company is about to bite the dust. To stockholders, the backbone of your investment is about to get ripped out and replaced with something on the other side of the fucking planet... just a heads up.
But really though, they will realize it is a terrible idea. Even outsourcing a helpdesk is a bad move unless you really need the money. Hell, I worked in the federal government and the government helpdesk workers were better that the contractors that they got replaced with. That's right something is actually worse than government workers.
There really is a reason why companies make the announcement ahead of time before outsourcing. Really, there is. It's part of the formula. The outsourcing company sells the patsy... client, sorry. Sells the client on the idea that the client tells their employees that they're planning to outsource, so that the employees can then be directed to spend their remaining time in documenting their jobs well enough that an untrained person in a third world country could do the job.
The outsourcing company will insist on this, and the sap, ur... client for God only knows what reason will think this will actually work, and the employees will go "sure, yeah, that's what I'm doing with my remaining time here. Sure. Not spending my entire shift looking for a job in a down economy. No sirree. My job doesn't take any original thought, creativity, or diagnostic skills, it's just a lot of button pushing and answering questions. Here, let me print out ... say ... everything in My Documents. That should stack up real nice."
Five years later, the outsourcing company will assure the chump... what's wrong with this spell checker? CLIENT. The client, that the break-even point is just around the corner, really it is, and will volunteer to help sell this concept to the board. Meanwhile, the victim's argh... client's business has suffered, it's harder to do even the smallest office task, change in any reasonable amount of time is impossible, and employees are saying things like "for God's sake, please don't make me call the helpdesk".
And this will be called Progress.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You have no choice to survive make your time!
You do understand that the US economy is hosed due to all these. NorthEast Utilities moves a bunch of jobs from the US to India to stay competitive... Other do the same.... Congrats US economic value reduced forcing further cutbacks and offshoring and in the end the US economy goes down the tubes. Way to go, ensure the US never gets out of this economic mess.
OK, I hate to say it, but the IT "talent" in India is seriously lacking. My company outsourced some of our support to an IT firm in India. In another move, we outsourced to a domestic agency because we wanted to make sure that native English speakers manned our front line help desks. In what I would call a bait-and-switch, the outsource company then outsourced to an Indian firm. We also have a dozens of contractors from India.
Ten years ago they were pretty good. The average contractor was just as good as some of our best. This is no longer the case. Now we have Java "developers" that don't know that a PowerPC JRE tarball for AIX won't run on Linux on Power. When this is brought to their attention, they send the x86_64 installer. Now of course we have our system JRE installed, but the application requires its own Java stack (mucking with JAVAHOME is not something they know how to do, and since it's not supported by the app vendor, they can't do it).
One of the devs once opened a ticket because the 'ls' command wasn't working. The root cause? His home directory was empty and so 'ls' returned zilch. Now I don't expect that a Java developer know anything about Linux or Unix, but his resume indicated years of Linux/Unix experience.
As for the help desk, well that's a complete joke. They are there essentially to handle first level calls with the understanding that they don't need to troubleshoot difficult problems. They are compensated/graded on the number of support calls they handle so it's in their best interest to "resolve" as many as they can each hour. This means that unless they can fix a problem within five minutes, they will hand it over to second level support.
So in our environment we'd done things like mine the problem queue to see what were the biggest issues. So password resets, full filesystems, failed backups were the main culprits. We fixed those in various ways: central auth, auto resets, logrotate/skulker, backup retries and tiering. As a result, the calls we got all tended to be involved (not difficult, just not easily automatable).
When we ran the help desk, the "first level" support folks would do this process. With the new desk, these jobs are too involved for first level so they go to my team. As a result we get many more calls.
Finally, I didn't want to go here, but their English language skills suck. I'm hardly a gifted speaker, but I do make an effort. We had a conference call last week where we resorted to Gmail chat so we could understand what one developer was saying. It's that bad.
Ten years ago, yes, I would have heartily recommended them. They were more expensive, certainly, but they were quite talented. Now it's a race to the bottom and the firms are taking advantage of that by throwing whatever no-talent ass clown that can say "computer" in the role of an IT developer or admin.
and outsourcing tax
Onsite teams will be there, unless someone can copy and paste with new date...
http://blogs.voanews.com/student-union/2011/02/21/the-cautionary-tale-of-tri-valleys-sham-university/
They trying to decrease costs and increase revenue, plain and simple. Some of the first few ways to do this is to try and coerce some to give up their severance or pension to leave early by leaking this news of this outsourcing effort. I doubt that they'll actually do this, though. The lack of security and liability by having a foreign company maintain a domestic utility provider's IT systems seems staggering. This would, IMO, fall into the purview of federal regulators or even defense in the sense that federal regulators and higher-ups in the military would be concerned for the safety of the nation if this actually happened.
I'm sorry, so now we call companies "mindbogglingly stupid" for being open and honest with their employees?
No, that's not right. We're saying that technologists are so untrustworthy that if we ever get laid off, we'll clearly wreak havoc and destroy the company in our wake?
No, wait. Oh, I've got it. Companies facing hard and unpopular decisions can't win. If they're open and honest about it, they're morons out to ruin morale who deserve to be sabotaged. If they don't say anything they're...lying scum sucking weasels who...um...deserve to be sabotaged?
Look, I don't like the threat of being outsourced, or laid off, or getting a pay cut, or any of the other threats facing workers. Sometimes companies make those decisions. Sometimes the reasons are bad - greed and short-term profiteering. Sometimes the reasons are good - long-term survival being impossible without change. You don't know their reasons here. Neither do I.
But calling a company stupid for talking to it's employees when making hard choices? Call me crazy, but I'll work for that kind of stupid over the slimy "everything's fine" lying weasels every time. Being honest deserves respect, not scorn.
May you get the employer you deserve.
If you do not consider all the risks, then offshoring seems like it might work. The problem is that they don't know who is who and you don't know who is who.
That lack of personal contact means that they might know know that Fred in accounting is a dreamy-eyed idiot, while Alice in HR is pretty sharp.
The service may cost pennies compared to a regular local staff, but they won't solve problems any faster. Never mind the language barriers, the lack of inside organizational knowledge, or the understanding of what the organizational unit does; not being on site will cost BIG in the long run.
The managers that oversee this transition will be promoted out of the company and then they'll leave the sinking ship like rats. I've seen this before --just not with a utility. The managers of this debacle are going to be a interesting case study of how NOT to do this.
And you tear them to shreds.
Don't be shocked next time you get fired with no warning as part of outsourcing: it was entirely your fault.
There are good workers to outsource to in India, and there are crappy Indian workers. Problem is they will switch out these good workers and replace them with crappy ones who they can pay 10x less. What kind of real checks in place are there to prevent this? I have even seen 'good' Indians pretend to be someone else and do FULL phone interviews so the crappy Indian could get the job.
Saying they're considering outsourcing might be seen as a good move to encourage attrition and reduce IT costs... if YOU'RE A COMPLETE MORON.
Consider: When outsourcing is in the air, employees can be easily divided in the following classes by what action they take or don't take.
(a) The professional. He sees the handwriting on the wall, and immediately starts soliciting headhunters and calling in favors to get interviews. He does this RIGHT AWAY because the longer he waits, the more competition he'll have from former co-workers. He will be gone soon.
(b) The Wally. He has been gliding along on inertia over the past several years, has no usable current skills, and no hope of convincing people otherwise. He's doomed. He'll stick around, but whatever help he'll give during transition will be hampered by the fact that he has nothing to contribute. He may slip into another job through sheer luck.
(c) The scaredy cat. He may have useful skills, but is afraid to make the leap into interviewing, so he'll wait until it's way too late to start looking in the vain hope that his master will retain him or maybe call the whole outsourcing thing off. He'll contribute to the best of his ability during the transition in the vain hope that the company will appreciate this (they won't) and find a way to retain him (extremely unlikely).
So other than the increasingly hysterical output from sparsely populated category (c), brain drain commences immediately and tribal knowledge flies off the premises. The company ends up with a much smaller IT department, achieving the goal, (oooh, managerial bonus!) but with the unintended consequence of becoming a much smaller company.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
This is what has always frustrated me about IT people, developers in particular. They are CLUELESS as to the need for professional associations, similar to what doctors and lawyers have. Notice I did not say labor unions, as that model would not work for IT workers. Most programmers think they will always have a job just because they are so smart. This is not always the case - legislation bought by large corporations can make good jobs hard to come by. Its about time our industry matured a bit and formed some well-supported professional associations that can advocate for our best interests.
I work for a fortune 500 company. As part of a cost saving initiative, IT was outsourced to well known IT management company. As these things typically are, they were horrible at any IT function. I am not sure if they just hired anyone off the street who know how to type on a keyboard. Their performance was abysmal in every aspect. It only took 2 years and countless sev breaches for management to see how bad of a idea this was and "in source" all the jobs again.
I haven't read so much total fail in one tree of comments since the early 2012 Bitcoin stories. Perhaps we should consider basic economics in schools.
Because there are absolutely zero terrorists in a country with more than a billion people.
Oops.
Guess the nuclear power plant just went critical!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's a great idea. After all, we do not need jobs in our country. We can all claim benefits, right? We do not need to feed our kids, right?
you're focused on the short term goal of better service, and completely ignoring the long term goal of better service for less. Competition drives down costs and forces the players (IT employees) to up their game. Hostess did this with twinkies. They shut the company down, throw everything to the wind, and when they come back labor costs are a fraction what they were and the workers work twice as hard. Sure, you lose a little productivity, but you more than make it back with lower labor costs and exempt employees.
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Due to the government regulation, utilities are quite different. Their profit is a percentage of their approved costs. Being an average utility or the best run in the world does not change that. Nor do I see where the unhappy utility customers will go if they do not like their monopoly.
you're just counting the individual costs. If you were a billionaire and owned tonnes of stock and companies you'd see the benefit. Just the saving from all the extra competition alone is billions and billions a year. I've read that there are close to 300,000 H1-B immigrants in America alone (they're not sent back when the Visa expires). Think about what 300,000 extra workers do to an industries wages? How about 1.2 million (which was the next planned increase until those bombs in Boston derailed the immigration bill). As a billionaire, you pocket all that.
Outsourcing isn't about cost savings, it's about pitting labor against itself. Works too.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Are they trying to increase the cost I don't get it? In all seriousness they should just take 2/3's of the money they are spending now to their IT budget, yeah let's count 1 2/3's the cost they're not saving money, and have a big Bon fire. Then let everyone keep their jobs. Huge waste of time and money, I've never seen it work.
Outsourcing doesn't save money.
Let me restate this clearly...
Outsourcing COSTS more than you've ever spent on IT before.
It costs money to randomly, rapidly turn-over negligent, non-talented, non-inteligent, non-motivated workers with the same name as previous workers, which won't do anything but sit there day in and day out, complaining about the workload that they themselves cause due to their own ineptitude.
I've seen it in multiple companies... The outsourcing company rakes in money hand over fist, all while telling you things will get better, until you decide to take the business elsewhere, to an even shadier, worse outsourcing company, finally, when the wheels are about to fall off of everything, you'll be bringing things back in, and having to pay more per person than you did with the outsourcing companies, but these talents will be able to get things up and running again.
You, your managers, your boards will look foolish and inept, and the IT workers that you excitedly rushed out the door will be laughing their asses off at your problems as you try to keep from falling apart.
Good luck with your impending IT crash... You're GONNA NEED IT (pun intended)
This is the trend i come to see here in slashdot.
If there's outsourcing of manual labor skilled or unskilled, it's good overall for society more so with automating everything possible.
IT outsourcing? Capital no.
karma or whatever, there sure is a quick change in the trend of opinions here when it's the IT derriere that's is to be replaced.
Time and time again, management thinks "anybody" can do IT. So wrong. Somehow they're always ready to cut IT jobs but not their own middle management.....
If labor can be had for less overseas, then it is beholden on management to look overseas for labor. Only regulation could prevent them from doing so, and currently the political climate in the US is anti-regulation.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Hey, better finding out about it while you're still collecting a paycheck than getting escorted to the exit on your last payday.
What you call "stupid" for the utility is of some benefit to the workers, and when it comes down to it, I care a lot more about them.
Regarding the utility? I have plumb run out of shits to give as far as they're concerned. Any management that stupid is bound for bad end anyway. Who wants to bet that the CEO and the board walk away with nice golden parachutes? Because that's how you roll when you're on top, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I work with people from india, because they provide support for several technologies in my every day work. I work doing outsourcing IT support, so I'll not speak about that topic because I have work thanks to that model. But let me tell you this: your company is making a big mistake.
1. I'm tired to fight with bad support because they don't know what they are doing.
2. They usually expect the problem to be solved by other teams all the time, even when they are the only group supporting the technology.
3. They are very good having big scores in evaluations, but that doesn't reflect their every day work at all.
4. Their English sucks.
I think that is a problem with their culture, not with the individuals: The people that does the work, is in the bottom of their social class structure and don't have the skills to work on it. In brief, the people who knows don't work on the problems, because they have people below them to work on it. So, you get a mediocre support all the time, without interacting with the skilled people.
This. Because they are monopolies, most utilities set rates by handing someone in their state their financial statements, and the state sets a rate to give them a reasonable profit. They have no motive to push down costs.
We had this at the last company I was at. They gave us 4 months notice with a large severance payment dependent on training our replacements.
Some people found work and left early. Some people tried to leave early and get the severance (for the most part they reneged on that when it turned out Infosys didn't actually have the replacements ready yet).
If you are over 50- do not wait for the severance. Many people over 50 have not found new jobs yet.
They don't OWE you a job. They are being nice to give you notice.
You do not OWE them your work. It's not your problem if they don't have a replacement for you.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wages in india and china are rising rapidly.
Wages in the U.S. are stagnant to actually falling ($62,000 in 2007 to $61,000 in 2012 for the same quintile).
I give it eight years. At that point, it won't make financial sense to use indians. However, it will be almost impossible to rebuild an IT department from scratch.
So I guess it will have to be a local outsourcing company that takes over (like EDS, etc.).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Simple solution which may stop this move. Require workers who are using any state or nationally critical service or utility to only use workers who are US Citizens or Permanent Residents and be able to pass an appropriate background check.
I'd like to know how many of those companies who "can't find qualified people" are jumping on recruiting these folks.
Probably none.
These out of work folks will hear the same old same old: not a good fit into the company culture, wrong skills, "not good enough", skills out of date, etc ...
Because we all know that a social networking site or an advertising app (the ones that BS you into thinking they're showing you only your "interests" when they're just pushing who pays them on you) are way more advanced than anything a utility would ever have!
Yeah, someone with a BS Nuclear Engineering is just too stupid to work for Silicon Valley! They need JavaScript Engineers - BS JavaScript Engineering is just way more intense than anything in Nuclear Engineering!
I had to read the headline three times before I realised the article was not about a certain Ubuntu desktop environment.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
That was my reaction when I saw the article. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimpowell/2013/08/01/how-did-rich-connecticut-morph-into-one-of-americas-worst-performing-economies/ , Connecticut dug itself a cozy little fiscal hole. Now the proverbial chickens from a whole host of public welfare schemes and public-sector union bloat are coming home to roost.
Here are the problems outsourcing to India in particular incurs, as those of us who have seen it done again and again since the early 90s know:
1. data *will* be stolen and sold for spamming and marketing and data mining
2. no way to ascertain true credentials or abilities of any person, paper diploma/cert mills are rampant
3. no real legal venue for theft, non-performance, copyright and patent violation, shoddy product or workmanship
4. any disputes will immediately trigger the cultural response of obstructionism, picayune arbitration, and malicious compliance
5. supposed "experts" regurgitate "white paper" knowledge but have no experience or ability in practical application
6. if any project gets done at all, it will be at three times the projected duration with two times the people.
In short, those who outsource to India deserve what they get. And what they will get is expensive failure.
I can understand people being upset over the whole outsourcing thing. However, that aside, if they are actually employing a bunch of people who are willing to do something malicious over threat of losing their job then they should get rid of them anyway. and anyone caught doing or planning had better be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law as they are just as if not more dangerous than the outsourcing.
Really, the silver bullet for this nonsense is to get rid of the income taxes. All of them.
Outsourcing to India or anywhere-but-here gets the operations out from under a 35% corporate income tax, a 15.3% payroll tax for their help, etc. That's a lotta $$$, and the gov't is incentivizing it all with the tax system. Abolish the income taxes, pass the Fair Tax, and run the country on a sales tax instead. Prosperity will be ours.
In my experience,
A small group of highly skilled, motivated and well managed CCIE types are leaps and bounds more productive, effective and flexible then 100 off shore low paid unmotivated and unengaged contractors. Thats a bit more difficult to measure by business or accounting standards, which is why they usually in-source it back after a few years....they will learn the hard way that you have to pay no matter what....pay for quality workers upfront or pay later for a huge mess you will have when you large complex network is a giant cluster.
Utilities are regulated. If outsourcing is permitted, it probably won't be after this. On the otherhand, if outsourcing saves the utility a lot of money, then what's to stop the regulators from either decreasing the rates or at least not allowing rate increases for the forseable future?
All in all, if you are a regulated industry it doesn't seem to make sense to upset those that actually regulate you.
IT is much easier to offshore than manufacturing. With IT there is no physical stuff to move. No shipping, no customs, just zap files back and forth.
What cannot be offshored, will be inshored - done by foreign visa worker.
BTW: people keep confusing offshoring with outsources - they are different things and have nothing to do with one-another. You can offshore without outsourcing, you can outsource without offshoring.
So when the shit hits the fan, and nothing works at all, there will be no question of who is to blame.
Why is Snark Required?
Oh oh oh! I can tell a story!
I'm part of the support dept of a big cloud-service company. As a result, I'm supposed to help customers with their problems with our service. Two weeks ago, I ran into a request from a customer about white listing our IP addresses. Turns out they outsourced their IT department to one of the big outsources, with "Sam", senior network engineer with 20 years of experience, in charge of the problem. Here's what I ran into:
* guy doesn't read documentation I send him
* guy doesn't listen to what I tell him about our infrastructure
* guy demands we put him in touch with our network engineers because he doesn't like talking to anyone put network engineers
* guy spends a week demanding to talk to our network engineers, and ignores everything we send his way.
* guy suddenly asks a question we answered a week ago, and is finally good to with his whitelisting project.
* guy makes change to his VPN, and end-users on VPN suddenly can't reach our service. But his users on their regular internal network are fine. Guy demands again to speak to a network engineer on our side.
* guy spends a week asking for a network engineer on our side, without doing a single investigation on his side.
* Today, guy suddenly gets an epiphany that there might be some configuration on his side that might cause packets to not be delivered to his VPN users.
* problem suddenly gets fixed.
So after two weeks of Mr. Senior Networking Engineer with 20 years of experience doing diddly squat to resolve something that was obviously a configuration issue, making all kinds of stupid demands, asking questions that either were nonsensical or already answered and escalating the issue to the c-suite on all sides, it turns out that he didn't check his own configuration. Not fucking once. I was ready to fly over to where ever he was hiding and cattle-prod him into doing some work.
In the meantime, yeah, I'm going to enjoy tomorrow's call.
This story, combined with pretty much 90% of my other experiences with outsourcing IT to India, has me convinced that this is probably the single worst thing a company can do. On the upside, I'm pretty sure I have little competition from Indian outsourcers.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
If they are outsourcing to save money, then they want bottom dollar help. I doubt they'd pay 1.5x or 2.x to get an equivalent level to what they had. I remember one company that went to a new winders centric system that merely stopped when things went wrong, rather than have something check a timestamp or a file creation date, they hired an indian firm to monitor it.
Angry Customer: My electricity is not working!
Hello my good friend! This is Ranj...errrr...Larry from Northeast Utilities. Have you tried doing the needful and unplugging and plugging it back in?
Please to be doing that sir and I am certain power will be most restoring!
What happens when the Indians in India need to reboot all the computers as well as the hardware system controllers after a major power outage caused by an ice storm or hurricane? Remember, this is a power company. The executives or janitors left in the power company don't know what a Big Red Switch (BRS) is. It's also possible the Indians don't know either, but they're in India. Travel costs weren't in the contract, so they won't send someone thousands of miles to fix the problem. But the power company has increased it's profits.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Watching it happen at a utility local to me, they did a big project upgrading their Oracle Customer Care and Billing system last year, and implementing a matching meter data management product, now they have a new Board of Directors and will be converting both software systems to new solutions, while at the same time reducing their IT staff by 20%, with a lot of outsourcing (some of their stuff was already outsourced with contractors/consultants working on site to manage systems and databases). Knowing some of the comparative utility companies that the accounting firm used as a baseline for the headcount and software recommendations, I'm expecting some major issues in a couple of years.
whte_rbt.obj
Works so well to others in past? Have those idiot decision makers ever needed to deal with it ptoblems themselfs? Corporation i worked has outsources its it support services... HIghlights from last 3 years: - Installing 30 cm patch cable to crossover cabin took 8 months... God knows why... - Broken computers gets replaced withing 2-3 weeks... ok i work in manufacturing side so no biggie, i can wait... - Any changes/corrections to those stupid excell spreadsheets we are forced to use takes months usually.. yeah lets outsource it, more byrocracy, more red tape, less utility... I think main problem is that who ever answers the support call at that time, docent know our systems. We have no dedicated support staff. Still remember the time i could just call inhouse IT support and things would be fixed in couple hours, even if it was about computer being totally broken. They just pulled new one on shelf and configured.. not anymore...
That installs Truecrypt, encrypts all disks, changes ALL passwords including the Truecrypt passwords with random-generated ones and then shuts down everything.
Good luck with figuring out the responsible behind that timebomb.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
when they made the decision to outsource. What do you think they are going to get?
Else why would every freaking time you bring up India's ..fuck you we have it do what you can do assholes
wo...it costly, windows 8 was failed, right? www.tcsindustry.com
To administer all these new IT people in India, they will need to hire like 100 middle-managers whose salary is roughly the same as the 400 IT employees. This is going to work out just fine..
Please DON'T. We have enough idiots in high paying jobs as it is.
I had similar bad support when I had to ring an American support line (from the UK) for a Backup Exec on netware issue.
Him : "Press the start button"
Me : "There is no start button, it's a netware server?"
Him : "Do you have a windows key on the keyboard? What happens when you press it?"
Me: "I'm pressing it . Nothing. Exactly what I'd expect with a machine that doesn't have windows installed on it. Its a NETWARE SERVER."
Him. "Is it installed on an NT server?"
The American support guy couldnt even get the idea of a computer without windows installed.
Lots of Western programmers and IT workers convince themselves that their jobs and their industry are safe because of the low quality of outsourced IT from India. I think this is dangerously complacent.
First of all there are many, many incompetent programmers working in the US and Europe. Do you think that all the snippets on TheDailyWTF were written by Indians? Do you think the numerous examples of crappy, bug-ridden production software, going back to the start of software as an industry, are all done by Indians? Huge, wasteful, disastrous public IT projects, many cancelled at huge expense without any working deliverables, all cocked up by Indians?
Secondly, even if many outsourcers in India do provide low quality work, this isn't always going to be the case. There is no inherent reason why an Indian should be less good at programming than an American. Many Indians working in the US (not to be ambiguous, people with Indian nationality who went to high school there, not American-born people of Indian origin) are extremely successful and well-regarded by their peers. There might be some factors which have historically meant that the US produces more extremely talented programmers than other countries, including many Western European countries. However, these advantages will all erode in time. The top tier of Indian technical education is world-class. India is doing huge amounts of cutting-edge research in math, CS, all the things that feed down to more balanced and clueful hackers. India's middle class is expanding and many more Indians will soon have the benefit of good colleges. There are lots of Indians who have either studied or worked in the US and have been exposed to US IT culture and working practices returning to India to set up businesses and teach. The huge amount of IT workers, even though many might be doing drudge work, means that India will develop its own culture. All these people are keen to develop themselves to become more knowledgeable and better paid. People make fun of clueless Indians on technical forums, but they are forgetting that these were for the most part young kids or people with none or very limited education, trying to emulate their better paid peers by teaching themselves to program in their spare time. Their US analogues are in general not on these forums asking even stupid questions, they are playing console games and doing drugs. The companies involved are also aware that they are getting the cheapest share of technical work done in the West, and are keen to develop their companies and workers so that they can compete with more skilled and higher paid domestic workers than currently.
There are some innate disadvantages to outsourcing (workers are less loyal, etc.), and of having IT workers on the other side of the world to their clients. But the main reason that outsourcing resulted in crappy work in the past was probably because the clients involved either didn't know good work from crappy work, or were only prepared to pay for crappy work. While this was the case, it made business sense for outsourcers to provide crappy work at low cost. As management of outsourcing projects gets better and demands quality, the work provided will get much better.
You shouldn't imagine that good coding is some big secret that the US and Western Europe will keep to itself and leverage against the superior numbers of Third World workers. Various Eastern European countries have gained a reputation for having the best coders in the world. 25 years ago no-one in those countries had a computer at home or in their high school. They got to the top just based on a solid mathematical and scientific tradition, decent education, and a lot of hungry young people (metaphorically and in some cases literally hungry). India, China and Brazil can and will do the same.
If you are not world-famous in your field (think the inventor of a language) and you think that your unique skills will keep you in a high-paying job for life (or that your industry is precious to your government and will be protected from foreign competition) you are deluding yourself. This is what you want to happen and not necessarily what will happen.
I'd LOVE to see the sales people sell anything without any employees making goods to sell.
But you see them axing the manufacturing staff first to gain short-term revenue and the executives never seem to get that they need product being made to sell to get money in. You see, the problem here is that they aren't obviously bringing in revenue: only sales and marketing does that. Especially to an executive, who may have much more in common with marketing than engineering.
So the OP is right: they don't see IT as revenue creating, nor even as revenue enabling (and if IT fails to get their PC working, it's proof that IT sucks at their job, but if a marketing push fails, a) it can't be proven to have failed, b) it is likely "due to a hostile market unforseen by the projections".
IT and making things only appear when its failed to go properly and it is obvious it has failed too.
Add into that that you can do without making stuff or IT for some months before you run out of money, whilst they never attempt to run without middle-to-senior management and the executives, which could last them years, if not forever (at reduced efficiency).
Lastly every step in management when it's "management" in that post are concentrated on moving on up the ladder to the top, and nobody is interested in moving "down", therefore the higher level posts are never removed because not only do the ones below that level want to have somewhere to go, those above believe that everyone should be trying to move up. Therefore higher tier jobs are required for people to move into, whereas everyone "capable" is trying to get out of the worker-level jobs, hence they're not wanted.
And lastly, though the higher you go, the fewer people there are able to get into that post, there are more people below wanting long-term to own that position and those most directly able to get in there get more influential the higher you go.
... oh wait...
Recently tried to have a database transferred from a client that we have who are supported by a leading global IT company with DBAs in India. They had issues transferring the file via sftp. I suggested compressing and splitting the file, and the response was "It is a database dump, which you cannot split." The really sad part is that in the email, I suggested using 7zip for the process.
After 4 weeks they gave up and the local office couriered the file to us on a hard disk!
One of the biggest banks in the world has done this and they continue to make money (their share price is going back to pre-2008 levels).
All this anti outsource nonsense is hysteria which finds its natural home in the complaints of the people most affected by the changes.
We have seen a reduction of living standards of people in most Western countries (bar Germany perhaps, who bring lots of foreign IT workers to the country *hint*) because simply put it is completely unsustainable that in a global economy Western technicians have a lavish lifestyle sustained by debt while their counterparts elsewhere have paltry incomes in spite of them saving more money instead of incurring in sparling out of control personal debt.
Sorry folks, but your "American Dream" nonsense of buy today and pay it later was completely unsustainable, specially when other countries are churning out thousands of technicians and Engineers perfectly capable of providing technical support (all this bullshit about they not being qualified is patent nonsense: if your companies can't find the talented people it is because they are not looking very hard).
Unbridled consumerism is the fat that needs to be trimmed from the Western worker, unless you are hopping that your counterparts elsewhere follow the same path, which may happen, but would be unsustainable, so something has got to give: either most new jobs go elsewhere (India, China, Singapore, Philippines, Mexico, you name it) or your standards of living are diminished (which in hindsight isn't a bad thing: you don't need to overeat so much, so many gadgets, or such inefficient cars).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... running a company and living up to those lofty ideals when faced with a balance sheet showing diminishing profits.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Be interesting to see how they get through their newly-mandated CIP cybersecurity review with outsourced and offshored IS/IT.
sPh
Yeah all these decisions are made by clueless execs, lawyers and accountants, but come on - a regulated utility? The inertia of civil service with even less accountability. Their IT is a cube farm of drones that stretches to the horizon where everyone's worked hard to do the same job the same way for the last 25 years.
Three years ago I learned through the grapevine that I was going to be laid off. It was supposed to be kept secret from me but drinking buddies in HR and Accounting tipped me off.
So how did I react? I spent the week documenting all of my responsibilities, so when they were dropped into my colleagues (and fellow professionals) laps it would not be too much of burden on them. Then on the day I was to be laid off I showed up early so I could "have the conversation" and make a discreet exit.
We need to be better gatekeepers of our profession. The idea that IT professionals are sociopaths that will destroy infrastructure unless they're coddled really damages all of us. It's on us to prove we're valuable colleagues and professionals, and not dangerous rogue agents who need to be marginalized (and then easily commoditized).
About 6 months ago, I worked for a large US company. They sent out an email saying that over the course of the next year, most of the programming staff would be outsourced to an Indian company. They claimed that existing employees would be rebadged over to the outsourcing firm, but most people know that means that you have to accept a 10% pay cut or you will be shown the door. That announcement had several consequences: 1) The business units that were supported by IT rapidly tried to hire their star programmers into the business units to get them out of the IT umbrella to avoid them being outsourced 2) All programmers updated their resumes on all the job search sites 3) All of the best programmers quickly found employment somewhere else 4) IT support got so bad that the outsourcing project got put on hold because the remaining staff couldn't handle the work (it was already a bad situation with the classic 10% of the people doing 90% of the work and the 10% were the first to leave). I was one of the lucky ones who got out quick. The city we are it only has a handful of programming jobs outside of the company, so once everyone was clued in, the market was quickly flooded and it became really hard to find a position with equivalent pay without relocating. Management at the company has now said they have no plans to restart the outsourcing project, but no one really believes them. Since most of the top tier talent in the city knows to stay away, they will most likely be forced into outsourcing at some point just so they can get any staff at all.
On a gamble that it would be good. Try to find out your last day, and start looking for a job that starts the day afterwards.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Was it really necessary to abbreviate those two words?
"those who're still working"
Why does a Utility company that provides electric and gas services need 400 IT people? That makes no sense.
Cheaper workers, which is all they care about.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I have grave doubts about the outsourcing of IT for many reasons.
Business Reasons
1. How much willbe saved as a percentage of total NU Revenues? NU Operating Revenue in 2012 was
6.273 Billion. I do not believe the saving in outsourcing IT will be more than
0.1% of the revenues. When combined with the risk to IT systems at CL&P,
would reducing the electric bill of a customer by 0.1% be worth it? My inside
information says the savings are minimal.
2. Many"retirements" are really layoffs.
One whole group in NU IT (finance) was abolished and the people
"retired".. The employeestaffing levels of IT are already down significantly from the date the merger
was announced..
3. If the Norhtstar Customer System was moved to the NUCustomer Systems (CL&P, WEMCO) the savings of outsourcing costs and
maintenance would be significant.
4. Convex has been recently moved to the NU campus (in a hardened building) to comply with US government
requirements. Will the outsourcing of ITinfrastructure at NU impact the work at Convex?
Convex controls the electric grid for Connecticut.
Technical Reasons
1. When Yankee Gas left NU they outsourced Customer Service IT to IBM. When
Yankee Gas returned to NU we found out that IBM had not performed proper tuning
of the Customer Service databases, and were thus significantly overcharging YG
for IT services, primarily mainframe charges. IBM agreed and refunded YG and NU
multimillion dollars. The potential for this happening again is significant.
2. One of the big challenges for IT in a multi-state utility is following the
rules and laws of the different jurisdictions. The old NU, with CL&P and
WMECO had a new CSS system that follows the rules of CT and MA. Northstar, on
the other hand, has a very old CSS system and which only to deal with one regulatory
environment. Both systems will be outsourced. If Northtsar company was moved to
the NU system the cost for CL&P would decrease as the outsourcing could be
spread over more operating companies and the maintenance cost would only be on
one system.
3. NU apparently is going to outsource to two vendors. This would create many
problems. Most IT systems have significant interfaces with other systems. CSS
had major interfaces on the mainframe with:
1. Meter Reading.
2. General Ledger
3. Graphical Information System
4. Trouble Call (for emergency restoration)
5. CL-P.com
6. Purchasing
7. Stores
8. Accounts payable (to pay vendors)
9. Large Power billing (for customers with special contracts)
10. Work Order (installation of lines, poles etc)
11. Street Lights ( inventory for billing).
12. Sundry Billing ( Billing done for work done for customers - install
streetlight in parking lot).
13. Third Party Generation. To pay those vendors who supply generation to
customers.
Non Mainframe
1. Desktop environment
2. Internal servers (GIS etc),
3. Networking
4. Phone systems (including automatic number identification that loads your
account on a CSRs screen when you call CL&P.)
How would interfaces be handled? In addition, with two vendors, there are many
potentials for finger pointing on any problem that must be solved.
4. Security of Customer information. Given the large number of interfaces will
the CL&P customer information be stored in multiple files and databases
spread over the two vendors? This doubles the risk of inadvertent exposure of
customer information, and presents twice as many targets for those with
malicious intent.
5. Communication to vendors.
CL&P has had a data center and call center that are located together, and
the with backup generators. The facility had redundant communications with all
important NU facilities with high speed fiber optic backed by microwave. How
will NU guarantee communications with the multiple vendors sites in storm and
emergency situations? Even if NU retains th
I think one thing to take into account is this employer is being honest with their employees. That creates trust in other departments. It allows the employer to engage in activities which might look threatening and just say "we don't intend to replace you". I think it is a great thing they are being honest.
By being honest they are going to allow IT to plan the transition. They can have their IT workers who assist the transition receive nice severance while those who leave immediately don't. In other words they can create an environment where there isn't a backlash because people are being treated fairly.
How about we outsource all HR jobs and see how many people complain? Or better yet outsource the CEO's.
Everyone is replaceable regardless of how awesome their IT talents are. Without an advocate(i.e. union) you are just cannon fodder.
Here is an easy way for the hacks in the government to raise money and create US jobs; an outsource tariff...
Love it. Just love it. Huge, grand military and after many more of these deals - and they're coming - we can just be shut off.
I do level II support at one of the largest financial companies on Earth and they outsource 100% of their Level I (Help Desk) to India. They (Indians) largely seem incompetent of accomplishing even the simplest tasks and constantly give erroneous information to employees, about the best they can manage is resetting a password and apologizing repeatedly. I know there are some companies in the US that provide Level II outsourcing but that again is all being handled by American workers (usually 1099 contractors).
The real problem with IT departments in the US is Business Management. Though most IT Management are just toadies protecting their own ass. Business/Administration don't respect and don't understand how to leverage IT departments as resources. So they believe from past "experiences" like Y2K that IT people are alarmists and don't know what they are doing. While the opposite is true. IT Departments based upon employees of said companies save the business countless millions a year in large companies. Having worked for FirstEnergy as a contractor and employee and being treated less than human as an IT employee all I have to say is... The customers, remaining employees, and business partners should get ready for an experience and service so far sub-par to what they have experience from an overworked and understaffed employee base IT staff. The damage done with this move will keep IT talent in the future from going to work there in the future. To this Utility just remember your most important resource is your employees when your customers start complaining direct them to your Executive's.
I know some people who make a living off fixing faulty code that companies send them. These companies hired India-based IT-ers because they're so much cheaper, but the final code is usually a mess. There are quality companies out there, but there's a lot more trash than quality.
India is big. And they know that the Western world views them as cheap labor. And they're not stupid. There are tons of IT companies sprouting out of the ground in India and the orders just flow in.
The result is usually so bad they have to hire an other company or a few freelances to fix it. You might as well have given it to those people to begin with, because if you need to have it fixed, you're paying twice.
And if you hired a good company/set of people to do it for you, you're likely to have paid just as much as you would have paid your own people.
This kind of action is NEVER okay.
If they can't keep the jobs here, then the company needs to close it's doors and leave the country completely.
should be ended immediately
Great! Now we're going to have an additional 400 IT people competing for jobs in the New England area.
Programming is one of those activities where the best are at least 10 times faster than the merely competent.
At first glance, I thought this was a software package that would exact some sort of cunning revenge...
*sigh*
But they want more money to do it. The bean counters don't understand their jobs, so they assume they're just being greedy.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Not wishing to karma whore, but I've been through the whole outsourcing to India experience and wrote about it in my journal (along with some of my experiences looking for new employment).
To cut a long story short, it wasn't any fun for me, but I managed to escape before the first wave of expensive Westerners were "let go" and ended up somewhere more interesting with more pay.
Here are the highlights in chronological order. And by the way, join a union. Mine is Prospect.
Being Sold for Outsourcing
TUPE and Redundancy (IANAL)
Looking for a new job makes me grumpy!
TUPE'd
Train Crash in Slow Motion
Stormy Weather
Zigziglar from the 5th Dimension
The Job Hunt Continues
Interview No. 5 Scheduled
Training my Replacement
An Offer
It's about time the over-abused IT worker fought back. All's fair in love, war, and outsourcing your livelihood in the name of corporate profits.
if the 1% don't already own it they can buy it cheap. If they do, they don't care. They'll already own that companies chief competitors and make a killing when they die.
.01%) own _everything_. The dynamics you're counting on all change...
See, the economy becomes a very, very different place when 1% (or
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