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?

Comments

Re:A professional IT organization?

[Frosty Piss]

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.

Re:A professional IT organization?

[lgw]

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.

Not a union, a professional organization

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:A professional IT organization?

[lgw]

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.

Re:How will that "professional organization" be...

[Required Snark]

Unions have been unable to oppose outsourcing because the Republicans have destroyed union power over the last 50 years or so. So called "right to work" legislation and other forms of legal (and illegal) union busting resulted in lower union membership, which means lower amounts of political donations and smaller voting blocks. The end game on this is Citizens United which means that the American oligarchy can spend as much dark money as they want to buy as much political power as they can get. Money doesn't always buy elections or politicians, but if one side outspends their opponents by large enough amounts for a long enough period of time they can change the rules of the game. Which they did.

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.

Re:No no no

[silentbozo]

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...

Re:A professional IT organization?

[dbIII]

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.

Re: Professional organization?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.