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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.
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.
Doesn't China outsource this stuff to North Korea?
Send Dennis Rodman to broker a deal with L'il Kim.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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!
Hardware from China and software from India.
MBA's from the US
Judges from Italy
Maple Syrup from Canada
and
Putin from Russia to oversee the project on horseback.
It's a small world, after all....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't outsource the maple syrup.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
>>Hardware from China and software from India.
>MBA's from the US
>Judges from Italy
>Maple Syrup from Canada
CHANTING CHORUS: Oil from Canada! Gold from Mexico! Geese from their neighbor's back yard! Boom, boom! Corn from the Indians! Tobacco from the Indians! Dakota from the Indians! New Jersey from the Indians! New Hampshire from the Indians! New England from the Indians! New Delhi from the Indians! ... ... ... ...
BABE: Indonesia for the Indonesians!
SOUND: Cannon shot.
JOE: Yes, and Veteran's Day
DC: But we couldn't do it alone!
SOUND: Morse Code sending under.
JOE: No! We needed the Hope, the Faith, the Prayers, the Fears
DC: The Sweat, the Pain, the Boils, the Tears!
JOE: The Broken Bones!
DC: The Broken Homes!
JOE: The Total Degradation of
BABE: Who?
EDDIE: You! The Little Guy!
--
BMO
LURLENE: Where are you from?
BABE: Nairobi, Ma'm. Isn't everybody?
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.
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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.
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.
Well, 10 years ago you were likely lucky. Most have been pretty bad for a long time. You see, the problem (as explained to me by a guest student from India) is this: The IIT does only produce bachelors of doubtful practical skills. Those that have better practical skills and/or some mental flexibility go on to study abroad. Those that stay go into outsourcing for a few years until they have acquires some skills and then go to work on better jobs, often abroad.
That way the outsourcing companies have an endless stream of cheap, but inexperienced and inflexible workers that leave as soon as they have some real skills. And those that stay longer with outsourcing companies and eventually become managers there are those that never reached any competence level that would have allowed them to get better jobs.
It is really not that people from India were on average any less capable, but the outsourcing companies get the dross.
The real problem is of course that terminally incompetent management in the companies going for outsourcing do not understand that you cannot replace one competent engineer with 2 or 5 or 1000 incompetent ones and still get quality results. These idiots in management can only thing in work-hours and to them they are all equal or if the productivity is lower per hour (but much cheaper) they think they can just throw more at the problem. That works to some degree for creation of physical goods where no intellectual contribution is required. It does not work for software creation at any level. Any manager that does not understand this should find himself fired and unemployable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
One country without an income tax? Just because Johnny jumps off the bridge, do you have to do it too?
The facts are that the income tax is full of holes, loopholes, ways to avoid it, etc. that the Fair Tax, the best proposal for a consumption tax, does not.
Companies / businesses do not pay the Fair Tax at all, which is what would make the USA the best place on the planet to manufacture. That would lift the country out of its current poverty, when there's a factory on just about every street corner, employing 3 shifts of workers to make the world's goods. Without the income taxes raping their operations, outsourcing would increase TO the USA, with foreign factories shutting down as the businesses move manufacturing operations here.
There is no "effective" corporate tax rate. If some company, like GE, manages not to pay income tax at all, the effective tax rate is NOT 0%, it is something like 75% of what the income tax would have been if they'd just went ahead and paid it, but the money goes instead to lawyers and accountants that guide the company's every business decision to take advantage of the maximum deductions available. Then, the US gov't gets $0, it costs GE about 75% of the 35% of their overall profits, and that's a good reason for abolishing the income taxes right there - the US gov't got $0 from GE.
I've calc'd it out, _I_ would pay less tax, the rich would pay MORE tax 'cuz of the fact that they stop paying the 15.3% payroll tax at $113K, and just about everyone that works would pay less. We close loopholes like crime, when the criminals, be they thieves, prostitutes, drug dealers, or whatever, pay the consumption tax every time they buy a Big Mac or a big screen TV or some big boat.
And the Fair Tax doesn't tax savings, or investment, so a lot more of that $$$ would be available to build factories here, and the amount I was saving for retirement before I retired was substantial, and on which I would not have been taxed. I was making around $95K, and now that my retirement income is around $70K gross, my take-home is just about equal to what it was. IOW, I would be taxed by the Fair Tax on about $70K, not the $95K.
This system is a boon to working class Americans, and will bring near-universal prosperity to America and Americans. That's why I write about it at every opportunity. I want this country to have the sort of prosperity I experienced as a kid, growing up in the 50's and 60's. Dad worked in a factory, didn't need a college education to do it, and made good money. We did _LOTS_ of stuff that people nowadays can't do because of the overall degradation in wages compared to prices. We need to get back to prosperity, and I think the Fair Tax is the best way to do it.
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!
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).