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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.
. . .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/
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it'll help stop offshoring, I'll happily swear that Genghis Khan has been reincarnated, and his hordes are now using computers instead of ponies.
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.
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! --
If it'll help stop offshoring, I'll happily swear that Genghis Khan has been reincarnated, and his hordes are now using computers instead of ponies.
Of course they aren't.
Everyone knows the modern horde uses tablets or smartphones nowadays.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
Hostess didn't come back, they liquidated.
All of the rivals of Hostess that didn't go bankrupt are the ones ressurecting the brands that were put in limbo by their failure.
IT talent in New England still have to pay New England rent prices and still have some money left over for food.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Agreed, that to me seems a respectful way of treating your employees. People have families and commitments, the least you can do is give them notice as far ahead as possible. And some generous severance.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
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.
They are very into mobility, 'tis true.
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!
Good point. I should stay more up to date. Also, it's easier to use a tablet or smartphone while riding a pony.
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
Preemptive notification works out great..... as long as you have the cardboard boxes already set upon every desk, have disconnected all electronic devices from the offices (including telephones), and have armed guards waiting to escort each employee individually into the office for their personal effects. Possibly if you want to be nice as an employer, you will have contacted the local employment agencies and have employment counselors on hand.
Basically you need to let them know immediately that their jobs are over. Of course give "generous" severance packages when it is happening too, but it should pretty much be a foregone conclusion that they are going.
Oh yeah, the outsourcing contract had better be pretty firm. Possibly offer to employees some sort of "consulting" work if they care (some might be willing to help), but you shouldn't plan on anybody taking up the offer. Yes, somebody doing this is a jerk, but at least the company will be solvent afterward.
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'll happily swear that Genghis Khan has been reincarnated, and his hordes are now using computers instead of ponies.
Ah yes, the Mongolian Electronic Army.
Only the great firewall of China can save us now!
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
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.
Long live Tastykake! http://www.tastykake.com/
Oh, that's not how it is pronounced?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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..
Took me a few reads to understand the last part of that sentence, due to missing punctuation.
This may have undermined your persuasive argument.
Please DON'T. We have enough idiots in high paying jobs as it is.
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.
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.
Cheaper workers, which is all they care about.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
Here is an easy way for the hacks in the government to raise money and create US jobs; an outsource tariff...
New England power pool. Google it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Programming is one of those activities where the best are at least 10 times faster than the merely competent.
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.
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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How about we outsource all HR jobs and see how many people complain?
Xerox already tried that.
Or better yet outsource the CEO's.
It's only a matter of time before the shareholders get around to realising this. Then the elephant in the room is why anyone in the company at all needs to be employed in any country that's more expensive that rock bottom, as long as the shareholders are getting a return on their "investment."
As more and more jobs go to other countries, there is less money in the economies of the original countries, so people have less money to spend on the things that the companies produce.
In a way, they're killing off their market.
What's going to happen in a few years time when 3D printers are ubiquitous and the plans for things are available for free on the Internet?
As the value of physical goods go the way of the value of Imaginary Property (IP) our lords and masters will try to artificially restrict supply.
There are two things that you can't 3D-print: food and water. Food production can be almost 100% mechanised these days, and with 3D printing, that will become easier.
So the last things of any value will be water, clean water for drinking specifically and energy.
But we already figured that out years ago.
Stick Men