Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
As a former US-based Dell phone support technician, I can tell you it's not US vs India. It's "follow the fucking script and get the customer off the goddamned phone in less than 8 minutes or you're fired." Metrics were a bitch.
That depends on who you outsource it to. We have some of our stuff outsourced (can't have all due to regulations) but our outsourced guys are better than are local IT staff in most cases. But they are more expensive that the local guys to. They're outsourced not to save money, but to make the department more agile. They can have 20 guys today and 50 next month if they want. There is really good outsourced IT, it's just not going to save you any money if it's good.
That reminds me of waaaaay back when I needed a backup solution that could handle a crap-ton of small files. The DOS and Win3.11 backup programs were limited to 65,536 files in a backup set. I asked a friend who worked for a backup company if they had anything that didn't suck. He said their new Win95 product could handle all of my files in a single backup set but, in a nutshell, it sucked. It would work but I'd be annoyed with it. Their OS/2 product was about to get a major upgrade and would be able to handle all the tiny files but it wasn't done yet. "I'll see what I can do."
A few days later, he handed me a floppy and said, "It compiled. Past that, you're on your own." Used that for a couple years until we upgraded to DAT and new software, also written by his company but an actual product this time licensed and everything.
The worst thing I found in code produced by "quality" outsourcing was a quadratic sort in Java to remove duplicated form the result of a database query that could have arbitrary result size. I do not think this can be made in a more stupid way that still works on (small) test cases. (1. sorting is done O(n log n) by anybody competent 2. duplicate removal is done with hash-tables. 3. Java has integrated hash-tables 4. the database could just have been told to deliver only unique values in this case.) The project had cost a two-figure number of millions at that time and was scrapped 2 months after my report. When I discussed this issue, the technical project lead mentioned that on larger test data they had observed very bad performance. Funny thing is, I was not even looking for anything like that, I was looking at security issues with the interfaces when I see this nested loop that looks suspicious. In essence I saw this out of the corner of my eye while browsing for a method header and then spent 5 minutes on it because it looked wrong.
But, get this: It was the 3rd time they tried to solve this problem with outsourcing, it was a replacement for a critical part of their infrastructure and it was still the same guy in charge that had messed it up two times before. And that is the real issue: Unsurpassed stupidity in local upper management.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Don't be so quick to dismiss outsourcing as an option. IMO, its a great idea... but they're doing it all wrong. Domestic, in-house IT has been commoditized, and a reasonable, rational ceiling has been established for all positions. The money spent there is not waste, and not outrageous. Looking in that space to cut jobs to save money won't work. Its the same as saying "those cafeteria workers are sucking up all our profits... let's outsource!" I can't believe anybody actually believes the bull that flows from the top. But if they'd outsource every single executive and upper-management position, including boards of directors, they'd not only save so much money that their stock would skyrocket, pleasing investors, they'd have better educated, more ethical individuals working for far more reasonable salaries doing a much better job driving the company to bigger success in the short and long term. The shareholders need to stand up and demand that they outsource the suits and PHBs, if they have any sense.
The Admin and the Engineer
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.