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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?
any more successful than unions at "saving American jobs"?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
A better choice would be to cut the h1b program and start an immediate investigation of the companies involved. But what will happen instead is an expansion and our political class looking the other way.
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.
You mean "union"? No, thanks. I can take care of myself. I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Not yet ... give it time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
> I don't need someone to hold my hand.
Yes you do, actually.
Free markets work by encouraging competition. It makes no sense for companies to pay exuberant salaries to U.S. workers when similar results can be had for far less by outsourcing to countries whose citizens expect a standard of living far more meager than Americans. The Prophets promise to trickle upon those who worship at their alters.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
WTF are you talking about?! Tier 3 and 4 (specialized) jobs are being outsourced to India too. If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways. Anything from networking, Windows/*nix administration, to running the entire enterprise VMWare stack; all of it going overseas. About the only thing that remains is executive staff and grunts that rack-n-stack equipment in a data center.
Life is not for the lazy.
...you say until your job is off-shored, and you can't find another one because they've all been off-shored too.
Professional organization doesn't mean union. It means lobby group. Less focussed on helping individuals with their specific conditions and pay - no direct contact with an employer - but focussed on highlighting the issues, raising awareness of the benefits of a good, strong, local IT workforce, and playing the campaign donation game.
Will be sealed with the advent of better systems and automation technologies. Most of the jobs that go to India are menial tasks which require no or very little skill .The core stuff still happens in the west. There are extremely few kernel programmers in India. So think these layoffs as having been replaced by a robot.
If you are an American, with all the benefits that citizenship entails - education, infrastructure, living conditions, security, stable government, rule of law, material and spiritual abundance - that make you the envy of the rest of the planet... why the hell can you not compete with third-world peasants, struggling against oppressive governments, scarcity of resources, illiterate parents, crime and pollution?
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
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.
If no one in the US has a good job to earn money to buy things with, how is anyone in America going to "consume" anything?
No jobs, no money in consumers hands, no demand.
What "rest of the economy" is left after all the good jobs have gone overseas?
--PM
Nonsense. It isn't a company behaving rationally. It's executives who know that making the company bottom line look better for a few quarters means big bonuses. They can then move on with a great story about how the great job they did before the company crashes and burns.
That's funny, I know people who have changed countries to continue working as a doctor, a lawyer, and a civil engineer (with some retraining on local law in each case).
What makes those jobs different is important: by their nature, you can't do them remotely. A lot of the medical industry has moved off shore, but not the part that requires direct patient interaction. Working in the trades is a great way to never be offshored, and unions have nothing to do with it: no one's going to sit in India and wire your house, or fix a busted sewer pipe. There's significant immigration into all those jobs, but it's absorbed naturally.
America and immigration go together, get used to it. The problem with the H1-B system is its awkward, non-tenure-track nature. Have an B1-B automatically become a green card in 2 years, and the wage problem will be solved.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Except this is bullshit. Consumers only benefit from reduced prices to a point because they have to be able to afford fixed costs such as insurance, food, and rent. Fixed costs that have skyrocketed in recent years. An iPhone being 20$ less means nothing to a family that may have 100$ a month in discretionary income after taxes.
The healthiest economies in the world are the ones that rigorously maintain the middle class because the amount of money in the global economy means precisely dick after people's fixed costs are being met. What matters most to the economy is that money is able to freely flow through as many people as possible because when money changes hands value is created. This isn't about a few hundred thousand jobs. This is about entire communities being impacted because the buying power of the average american is being undermined by cost cutting measures, and as more and more people approach their discretionary income margins the more the economy suffers as there is less capital for luxuries and investment in new technologies.
It is simply stupid to suggest that the economy losing middle class jobs is somehow a benefit.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics"
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.
They moved all of these IT jobs to Cognizant, which is a company made up almost entirely of H1bs. Cognizant is blatantly in violation of the H1b laws, and if they are taken down, as they should be, all of the companies that are depending on Cognizant for outsourced labor will be up a creek without a paddle.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
> A friend of mine who can't get recruiters to leave him alone
Recruiters will take any warm body they can shoehorn into a job, as long as 1 or 2 of the required acronyms appear on your resume.
I'm always flabbergasted by people who say the job market must be great, because of all the recruiters calling them. First of all, those recruiters all get the same leads so you may be contacted by 3 or 4 for the same job. Secondly, they will chase you regardless of your qualifications because they are paid on commission. Third, they are not your friend. They are there to make money by supplying "human capital" to the Evil HR departments who haven't a clue about how to find good qualified people themselves.
Recruiters are nothing but leeches. They have a huge turnover rate because nobody in the game can stand the stink for long.
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.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
No 'professional organization' is going to stop free market forces.
Ah yes. The free market. That wonderful ideal the true red-blooded 'murican idolizes, regardless of how hard or how often it bends them over. In fact, they beg for more as they continually elect these "real Americans" back into office again and again no matter how badly they get screwed by them.
The free market. Capitalism. Nonsense. It all ends up, one way or another, of stealing from you and giving to the few. I bet those company execs agonized terribly over doing this. I'm sure they all gave a sociopathic chuckle when they cooked up how they were going to shaft their employees while giving themselves a tasty little bonus since making 1000x the average worker just isn't enough to build a house made of money.
Many have tried, all fail eventually. What you're up against is labor arbitrage, brought about by the globalization of the workforce. It first started in blue-collar professions; with advances in technology it has moved to knowledge work as well. Instead of thinking about India being some distant country think of it like the business next door, competing for the business that your employer provides. Why would a customer pay 3x for your employer's output than they would the Indian company? Do you think passing a law that prevents the business next to yours from competing would ever work?
Of course not, because you know just as well as I do that any such legislation would either be lobbied into uselessness or have so many loopholes you'd swear it was a sweater. Congress is a free market. The lobbyists have known this for decades and the Supreme Court all but legalized paid for politicians. Few, if any, give a rat's ass about me, you, or the American people. As long as Wall Street keeps the money flowing into SuperPACS and Congressional pockets, they can continue the "Us vs. Them" bullshit and stay in office.
Aside from that though, you're argument is ridiculous. Basically you're saying if you accept the same pay as someone working in a third world shithole, you can keep your job. But you can't because in this country we actually have laws and regulations regarding health and pay, things that third world shitholes don't have to care about. Somehow, I don't think repealing labor laws and turning America into a land of suburban third world slums to feed the corporate fat asses their million dollar bonuses is going to work out well.
~X~
> If it's cloud computing, there is ZERO incentive to pay US wage levels when the staff is effectively performing remotely anyways.
if you believe this then i have a bridge to sell you :)
i've worked for countless companies over the years that have tried to outsource to India (and China, and the Philippines, etc.) and every single one of those projects was a disaster. the majority of those programmers are nothing but bad code monkeys who write terrible code and even worse documentation. the ones worth hiring are getting top dollar themselves. then you get to try to coordinate a project with people on the other side of the planet and who are 12 hours off from your work day. if you want to make it work you need to send some of your people over there to actually lead the team- and even then the results are rarely worth the trouble. the main problem- at least to India and China- is that they're often taught through rote memorization. if a problem comes up that requires a novel solution, or if you are trying to troubleshoot an obscure issue- they lack the skills to solve the problem.
you'll get much better (higher quality and far more creative) work when you outsource to places like Poland and Ukraine- but then you often run into language barriers.
for every company that outsources- there are 10 new startups looking to hire people.
people have been sounding the death knell for IT workers in the US for the last 20+ years. if you think it's going to happen any time soon- well- let's just say I'm not going to hold my breath :)
It's funny how executive jobs are don' seem to be off shored.. I would think a CEO from India would be cheaper for the company.
The above scenario will never happen, because there will always be someone making a lot of money
The point being that the jobs that got outsourced are jobs that are no longer creating enough added value to keep them inside a high-wage location, such as Ohio, USA
Even at Silicon Valley there are jobs that have been outsourced, but if we examine what kind of jobs that had been outsourced and which jobs still remain we will find that the jobs still remain (and are still being created) in America are jobs that are heavy on the side of creativity
Data entry jobs, even some of those so-called 'programming' jobs have become so routine it no longer makes any sense to employ people doing this low-value jobs in America
In other words, if you are Americans and still want to work in America, find yourself a niche, a niche which add a lot of value to what you do, a niche that no one outside of America can easily duplicate, and you will get to enjoy your job as long as what you do creates more money to your employer than what they pay you every month
You guys may not like what I am saying, but we need to face the reality somehow --- this world's competitiveness has heat up tremendously. USA and Europe are no longer the only places in the world where innovations happen
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
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.
Read TFA:
"Cengage...had outsourced accounting services earlier in the year"
"The layoffs affected workers across IT, including networks, desktop support, database administration, developers, data warehouse and other systems."
Also have a look at this, which lists the 33 jobs most likely to be outsourced...noting that many of them pay quite well indeed. Or did. They probably don't anymore.
http://cdn.theatlantic.com/sta...
To put it all in context, you may want to consider the quantity of jobs being outsourced - which is in the millions:
http://www.statisticbrain.com/...
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)