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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.
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.
>>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?
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.
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.
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.