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Fury and Fear In Ohio As IT Jobs Go To India (computerworld.com)
ErichTheRed writes: A company called Cengage Learning now joins the Toys 'R Us, Disney and Southern California Edison IT offshoring club. Apparently, even IT workers in low-cost parts of the country are too expensive and their work is being sent to Cognizant, one of the largest H-1B visa users. As a final insult, the article describes a pretty humiliating termination process was used. Is it time to think about a professional organization before IT goes the way of manufacturing?
If by that, you mean "union", then I doubt it. You'd never get enough support from the folks that are still getting paid very well (like me, who lives in Ohio), and aren't being outsourced. There's no business case to do that for anything but level 0 and 1 helpdesk jobs, and not even all of those.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
How many of them drive cars with foreign name plates? I have a friend who lost his job to someone from India a couple years ago. While we sat at his kitchen table I looked out his front windows at the two Toyota Prii that sat there. I was too polite to say anything.
I don't want to downplay the issue. But... market forces and cheap labor. There are a WHOLE lot of Americans in Vietnam, Korea, China, and South Africa tooling up their auto plants and teaching them to be competitive. Welcome to the real world. H1-B Visas are a red herring, and the sooner IT folks realize it, the better. The bigger problem is all the jobs that are going overseas - but there isn't a fix to that.
us citizens are the most overworked people. They have long days, work a lot, low wages and very good 'value for the money'. But you americans buy all the US corporate propaganda and sell out your rights because maybe you'll be the one getting rich by a fluke chance somewhere in the future. Egoism, everyone for themselves results in this.
The funniest thing is that taxes are pretty high in the USA, but instead of producing services and regulations helping citizens, it ends up in social services for corporations and deregulation of corporate america and laws that denies rights to citizens.
No they make it too easy and cheap to source non american employees. American workers laws and protections are laughable at best and mostly non-existent.
> Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company?
As someone who has seen bargain-basement Indian IT work from one of the big offshore body shops, because American IT workers are worth it.
All but two of the Indians I have worked with in the last 3 years have been fucking useless. They have no drive, no curiosity, and no initiative. If it's not in a runbook in front of them, they don't know how to do it. Hell, if it's a slight variation of something that IS in the fucking runbook, they don't know how to do it. Anything that requires thought or reasoning skills? Forget it. All they care about is closing tickets, not whether the work is done right. They love to play hot potato and dump tickets on other teams whenever possible, rather than take ownership of anything. They will close a hundred identical tickets without it occurring to them to do a root cause analysis to find and fix the problem that is generating those tickets. When submitting tickets you have to explain the problem like you're talking to a five year old. Many times it is clear they only read and acted on the first sentence or two while ignoring crucial details in the rest. The only things they excel at are ass covering and buck passing.
There is constant, constant turnover among the teams serving my company. The body shop gets someone fresh out of school who knows enough to be dangerous, they get a little bit of experience while frequently making terrible mistakes on enterprise systems in production, and then they're gone as soon as they get offered a little more money from a competing body shop. Constantly losing the ones who have managed to learn anything about the company's network leads to exactly the kind of shit tech support you would expect.
Some American IT staff were spared in the great offshoring purge, and it's a damned good thing, because they are usually the ones who have to step in and clean up the Indians' messes. When we saw just how terrible they were at everything, a back channel network was quickly established for when we need to get things done quickly and correctly.
India will eventually take ALL IT jobs, including kernel programming and supercomputing applications.
Have you ever been to India? The people you're talking about, the ones that work on the well manicured corporate campuses, are less than 1/10 of 1 percent of the Indian population. The majority of Indians still live in poverty, practice marginal farming or other forms of subsistence living, defecate in the open and have less than an 8th grade education. The Indian government goes to great lengths to hide these facts from the world. They want you to see the glittering IT campus handling all of the outsourced technology work, not the guy with his pants around his ankles taking a shit in the gutter a few miles away. In fact, India is way behind China and has at least 20 more years of economic growth and development ahead of it to even begin to approximate the Chinese economy today. I think that you overestimate the capabilities of the Indians, but that's actually not surprising. If there's one thing about Indians that you must admire it's their shameless self promotion, even though most of the time it amounts to nothing more than the ultimate used car salesman pitch.
One problem with unions is they pit Americans against Americans. When an automaker wants to open a factory in the South, which is still America btw, the unions protest. So they are too extreme in their protectionism and that pisses off a lot of people. Same with Boeing, they wanted to build their next plane in like Tennessee or something, the unions went on strike.
The other big perceptional problem is that unions protect lazy and ineffective workers. Protecting against unfair business practices is one thing, but the stereotype of the union requiring 3 guys standing around watching 1 guy dig and 1 guy hold a "SLOW" sign (road construction) is just too damning. That's not what we need or want, because once again, that goes beyond protecting Americans and into dividing us. Paying 4x the labor cost (for that example) is a cost that the rest of us have to absorb, and that sucks. Then people start thinking, "Oh, I know why high speed rail is so goddamn expensive... fucking unions!" And they have a point. It's really unions plus excessive environmentalism.
Things we have because of unions:
Weekends
All Breaks at Work, including your Lunch Breaks
Paid Vacation
FMLA
Sick Leave
Social Security
Minimum Wage
Civil Rights Act/Title VII (Prohibits Employer Discrimination)
8-Hour Work Day
Overtime Pay
Child Labor Laws
Occupational Safety & Health Act (OSHA)
40 Hour Work Week
Worker's Compensation (Worker's Comp)
Unemployment Insurance
Pensions
Workplace Safety Standards and Regulations
Employer Health Care Insurance
Collective Bargaining Rights for Employees
Wrongful Termination Laws
Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Whistleblower Protection Laws
Employee Polygraph Protect Act (Prohibits Employer from using a lie detector test on an employee)
Veteran's Employment and Training Services (VETS)
Compensation increases and Evaluations (Raises)
Sexual Harassment Laws
Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA)
Holiday Pay
Employer Dental, Life, and Vision Insurance
Privacy Rights
Pregnancy and Parental Leave
Military Leave
The Right to Strike
Public Education for Children
Equal Pay Acts of 1963 & 2011 (Requires employers pay men and women equally for the same amount of work)
Laws Ending Sweatshops in the United States
If you have ever benefited from anything on that list then you should stop whining about unions and start realizing that without organized workers standing up for themselves the middle class is going to join the lower class in being ignorant and dirt poor.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
When I was a teenager I ended up having my tonsils removed. The doctor thought they looked "funny" and sent off to pathology. Pathology came back and said "lymphoma". So we got to go visit the pediatric oncologist who started doing blood tests, bone marrow samples, and scans looking for cancer.
They were going to crack my chest open to put a center line and start chemo. But the oncologist thought things weren't adding up. I wasn't sick enough. So he ordered a DNA test for the ebstein bar virus (mono). That test came back positive when three other of the regular mono tests came back negative. Apparently mono can look identical to lymphoma under a microscope.
The protocol was to crack my chest open. The doctor, realizing things weren't adding up, ordered one more test and saved a teen age kid from going through chemo for no reason. Medicine isn't always a cut and dry if A then do B.