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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.
You too will soon be "outsourced" and regret your opinion. I'll smile at you as I walk into Wal-Mart.
After being laid off from the best job in the world as a DBA that paid more than I had even made, I took a much lower paying job with the Air Force, and am now a "career civil servant". Sure, I'm not making the "big money" anymore, but I have a much better health plan then you will ever have, and my job will never go away.
Have fun at Wal-Mart.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
WalMart pays in the top 5 nationwide for IT and devs, just so you know (per a /. story on the best-paying employers).
And don't be so sure that civil service jobs will never go away: the pendulum has swung quite far in the "bloated government" direction, and one way or another, it has to swing back eventually.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I already see the posts coming in saying "No union for me, thanks, I can take care of myself." I honestly used to think that, back when companies were only outsourcing routine tasks and qualified people were still being treated well everywhere. All I can say is, just wait until you're 40 or end up at one of these places offshoring their entire IT department. I am incredibly lucky and (for now) have a great senior-level position doing systems engineering work. However, between age discrimination, the loss of entry-level work, and the relentless drive to offshore anything that costs real money, we run the risk of driving talented people away from IT.
Here's my idea -- form a profession similar to the one engineers have and a related trade guild, not a traditional labor union. Unions will never fly with the Libertarian, lone wolf, I'm-better-than-everyone-in-my-field crowd. It would have to be structured around the professional licensure model, like the AMA. The AMA and related organizations keep doctors employed and making serious money. How do they do this?
- Limiting labor supply by not allowing new medical school slots to be opened
- Paying for laws their members need passed, such as forcing recent health care reform to rely on the insurance model that keeps their reimbursement rates high
- Ensuring quality of profession members by licensing new medical school grads, and training them through residency and fellowship programs
- Requiring continuing education
I would say the biggest benefit to members of the profession would be standardizing basic education. I'm not talking about handing Microsoft or Oracle or Google the reins, I'm talking about making sure people understand the fundamentals of IT and development, not just how to feed code into the magic black box. This would mean evil tradesy things like apprenticeships and OJT for new members, but it would ensure that we wouldn't get the typical MCSE bootcamp or coder academy graduates who only know one way to solve a problem.
The first step beyond getting people to agree would be to basically do what the other professional organizations do -- take up a collection and pay for laws to be passed limiting the ability to offshore work. It's time we admit that the only way to get anything passed in Congress is to pay for it, and lobbyists are the equivalent of handing lawmakers paper bags of money.
To make this fair to employers, they would need to get something too. I would say the best approach would be to promise no union style work rules would be enforced, while quality would be maintained by self-regulation. I think it's horrible that someone can screw up a job so badly they get fired, then just clean up their resume and get another job without any repercussion -- and I've seen this happen many times. If companies could be assured that their job would get done without the need to bring it back onshore to clean it up at consulting rates, they'd be open to this possibility.
Hell no.
Unions are legalized bullies and borderline gangsters.
They are a business, and their only "goal" is to stay in business.
They force employers to keep incompetent workers.
They force workers to pay union dues.
They force employers to raise hourly rates for every employee, even for lazy workers who have not earned it.
I have an uncle and 2 in-laws who have all paid union dues for 30+ years. One lost his job when the company moved to another state, another lost his job when the company outsourced, and one voluntarily moved to another state to get out of the union.
I once turned down a job offer just because the company had a union. I'm not willing to be "out of work" just because the union wants to whine about not getting enough perks.
My current employer had a union come into one of our facilities. Because enough of the workers wanted a union, they had to have a vote. IIRC, before the vote, more than 50% of the workers were convinced that they needed a union. For an entire month before the vote, the union lied and spread rumors about the management. The workers saw how heavy-handed and ruthless the union was, and it showed on voting day. Only 1 worker voted for the union.
The automation is in the US factories. US manufacturing output has never fallen, decade-over-decade. US factories have become more and more automated first as jobs went overseas, and now China is seeing declines in outsourced-from-US jobs, as the robots are taking over and manufacturing increasingly returns to the US, job-free. The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs from the US was a temporary measure, slowly dwindling.
IT is at the front of this curve (unless you're a software dev, but I don't think of that as "IT"). The writing has been on the wall for years, and the destination is inevitable. Plan accordingly.
This is what technology is: efficiency. This has been happening for over 300 years, it's not going to stop now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
bullshit. unions killed themselves and almost killed the auto industry.
>40 years ago, you could say "You can go to Japan to buy a hunk of junk, but quality cars are built in the US."
1975 american cars were gas guzzling boats that fell apart not long after you left the dealership. union made went from quality to overpriced shit pretty fast. even now, unions demand approval of all new car designs to ensure jobs aren't being lost. so american cars still lag behind in features & quality.
Tell me one reason (a non-racist reason) why a company shouldn't outsource their IT to india.
Here is a example from blue collar middle America. In the Midwest food processing, such as meat packing, used to be unionized. The unions were pretty much wiped out by the Republicans. Who got those jobs? Undocumented workers, mostly Spanish speakers. It's not like citizens went from being union workers to non-union workers. Citizens were replaced by non-citizens because they were less expensive to start out with, and undocumented workers will never complain about illegal treatment or dangerous working conditions. That's why there are so may relatively new Spanish speaking communities in places like Kansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc. And it's also why Trump is able to scream about "illegals" and get so much traction. The real perpetrators are the Republicans and massive corrupt big business interests.
If you haven't lost your job yet it's just because they haven't gotten around to you yet.
Why is Snark Required?
The outsourcing is already in progress. Look up the term "nighthawk radiologist".
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org...
That was in 2004. As digitization has spread through healthcare, the practice has only gotten more prevalent.
If you can pipe the data to somewhere else and get someone accredited to sign off on your work so they are the professional of record, you can outsource anything to anyone anywhere. Use a nurse practitioner for in-office visits, outsource case review to a medical professional somewhere else.
Same deal for lawyers. For contracts, research, etc. you can outsource to paralegals. For discovery, have someone else scan, index, and cross correlate everything before you turn it over to the junior partners, but bill at the senior rate.
BTW there are a lot of unemployed/underemployed lawyers...
We need to look at cutting full time to 32 hours a week
France has a 35 hour work week and an unemployment rate that is double that of the U.S, and also France has a lower labor force participation rate overall (by about 10%).
Indian education is primarily by rote, they don't actually promote independent thinking or out of the box thinking. This is true in general asia, where they believe as a younger person, you can't question the elder person. That kind of thinking creates an uneven power structure where the best ideas don't necessarily rise up like they do in western countries. So, until Asian countries learn to depose of centuries of ingrained thinking, the U.S. worker will always trump an Indian one or chinese one.
Sure there are going to be exceptions, but on the whole, a U.S. worker is more productive than a Indian one and also will be able to focus on and solve complex problems. Now, some of the Indians know this and have gone back to India and is trying to fix that, but it isn't going to be easy because of the cultural and corrupt institutions in place. But who knows?
As a person who had some exposure to both school systems, (with primarily in the U.S. education), I'll pick an American worker every time. Hell, if I was in India I would try to get an American worker because I know for my money, I'm going to get a lot more value.
Except for in steel, which is an interesting case study of how having a protected industry may help in the very short term but really fucks you up in the long run. What remains of the US steel industry is almost of interest to archeologists - steel produced at huge cost while the rest of the world has pushed on with automation resulting in both lower costs and higher quality. With no incentive to spend the capital on automation (protected market) the result was stagnation.
Ironically some manufacturing moved offshore to get cheap steel.
Union membership has plummeted in the U.S., from nearly one-third of workers 50 years ago to one in 10 American workers today. Under the simplest assumption, for every $30 unions had to spend on politics in 1966, they now have $10. That's a factor of three decline. Citizens United legalized unlimited untraceable political contributions. This means the disparity between, say the Koch brothers and unions is even greater.
Unions and corporations have reporting requirements, and they have accountability to stockholders/union members. Post Citizens United, PACs have no accountability. Even if a union gives money to a PAC, the spending is at least theoretically traceable. A union member can sue the union and find out what the union spent on politics. If the money went to a PAC, they could make a good case for having the PAC audited. The same goes for a stockholder, but if I understand the law correctly a stockholder has less say in political spending. For individual money donated through PACs, there is no way the public will ever know how the money is spent. The process is opaque.
Saying that unions are equivalent to individual PAC contributions is factually incorrect. You are just flat out wrong.
As for the impact of spending on the political process, some people, including the Koch brothers, think it makes a big difference. That's why they're spending $889 million before the 2016 elections.
Why is Snark Required?
Doctor and Lawyer salaries are through the roof because those are two of very few jobs that can not be outsourced to a third world country. If Blue Cross could ship you to Haiti for a 40c an hour doctor you don't think they would?
Welcome to the "Global Economy". You have heard all about it I'm sure, and how great it is. A real Utopia where everyone benefits. Assuming of course you are already extremely wealthy, because the rest of the people are expendable. As long as a company can stay afloat using dirt cheap labor, they will. Zuckerberg won the lottery, nothing more. That is your shot to getting out of the cesspool we are creating by complacently watching the government be run by the same people profiteering.
History is cyclical, we have seen this all before. The same result will come eventually, because people never learn to learn from history.
Doctors are being outsourced:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6621...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...
Lawyers are being outsourced:
http://www.americanbar.org/pub...
http://www.economist.com/node/...
Doctor and lawyer salaries are not high because they can't be outsourced (they can), but because of the fucked up healthcare and legal systems in America.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Most professional Americans have a total combined (embedded direct tax) load of over 60% - good luck trying to compete against Indians in that kind of regime. An IT-focused lobbying group is not going to be tackling the correct issues; protectionism cannot effectively compete against market pricing forces.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Duh! We don't have a trickle-down or trickle-up economy anymore; either one would be preferred to the "trickle-out" that we have now as it least moves money in the system. No, our nation is (and has been for quite some time now) been hemorrhaging wealth overseas. Meanwhile, our national debt is growing at warp speeds and when it finally crashes, the nation, "the union" as you know it dissolves. And as for China and everyone else, they can all go fuck themselves as there won't be an dollars to collect on!
Life is not for the lazy.
I have a couple friends who are in big unions... One works for a huge auto plant... the other is in construction.
Both of these guys are constantly being forced to work overtime they dont want to... and rarely get weekends off. Well except for when they get laid off for 3 or 4 months at a stretch.
If you want to get really good at scamming the unemployment system.. go to work for a union. You'll get to know all the latest tricks on how to maximize your unemployment benefits. And then next month youll be back to those 80 hour work weeks you love so much.
I cant put my finger on when, but at some point the unions stopped giving fucks about their members.
If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.