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IT Employees At EmblemHealth Fight To Save Jobs (computerworld.com)
Reader dcblogs writes: IT employees at EmblemHealth have united to stop the New York-based employer from outsourcing their jobs to offshore provider Cognizant. Employees say the insurer is on the verge of signing a contract with Cognizant, an IT services firm and one of the largest users of H-1B workers. They say the contract may be signed as early as this week. They fear what a contract with an IT services offshore firm may mean: Humiliation as part of the "knowledge transfer" process, loss of their jobs or a "rebadging" to Cognizant, which they see as little more than temporary employment. Many of the workers, about 200 they estimate, are older, with 15-plus-year tenures. This means a hard job search for them. The IT employees have decided not go quietly. "We're organizing," said one IT employee, who requested anonymity. "We're communicating with one another. They need the knowledge that we have. They can't transition [to Cognizant] without the information that we have. That puts us in a position of strength — they can't fire us for organizing; we're protected by the law," she said.
Get use to it. Without H1-B reform (not going to happen under Trump / Clinton) , unless you want to walk out now without "parting gifts", you will be training your replacement. Again, without H1-B reform, this will continue to be the "norm".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Other companies have made the severance package dependent on helping with the transition. They probably only need a few key people to break ranks and it all falls apart.
Usually they offer a somewhat reasonable severance package that you only get if you agree to transfer the knowledge. That's about the only carrot they have, of course, but for many people it works.
Why not, the company is acting antagonistically against them. The only people who benefit if the workers remain quiet is the company.
It sounds like the upper management at EmblemHealth need a vigorous ass-fucking with a sharp stick. (No, really; I have it on good authority that that's actually a well-known folk remedy for greedy sociopaths.)
Usually they offer a somewhat reasonable severance package that you only get if you agree to transfer the knowledge. That's about the only carrot they have, of course, but for many people it works.
There is, however, a big difference between transferring information and knowledge. Information is "this is how you do X;" knowledge is 15 years of experience doing the job and knowing the pitfalls and how to negotiate them to keep things working. You can meet all the requirements of a severance package by transferring information without worrying about the knowledge. Besides, if Josephine is also losing her job does the newbie need to know to go to her if something bad happens, so she can get help from Bob, who is also now gone?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The problem is a bad IT Staff can still keep the company running. While a good staff if allowed can have the company expand and grow.
However the real question other than years of experience is their staff actually really good at their job?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Why not just monkeywrench the replacement training?
Train them wrong. Give them incomplete information. Be anti-social. Make a game and see how long you can go answering only yes or no. Basically make the training as empty and useless as possible. Waste time on useless details. Take long shits.
Obviously, no active sabotage, that would be a problem. But who says you have to be any good at the training?
How did that work out for Terry Childs? Admittedly he did a more extreme thing than that, but the sentiment is roughly the same.
I applaud the sentiment these folks have, but I expect they will barely slow down the wood chipper as they pass through. They are a lot more expendable than they realize, and it will barely cause a hiccup in operations.
You're dead wrong on that account. My employer pays for my time. I still own the knowledge and skill that I utilize in order to make that time worth anything. Just like when you hire a plumber, you don't own the tools that he brings to the job even though they are intrinsic to his employment.
>> "they can't fire us for organizing; we're protected by the law," she said. ...but if its a "right to work" state they can legally fire you for any bullshit reason or even not give a reason.
they really think
It's more of a case where they're absolutely certain reacting cooperatively will not save their jobs.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Depends on the scope... and all it takes is for one key group of people (*nix sysadmins, say) to refuse and stand firm on that refusal.
Personally, if I worked for EmblemHealth, I'd be doing a couple of things right now:
1) start looking for another job - like yesterday.
2) dutifully record every last transgression made by the organization against HIPAA, SOX, and any other authority the organization is subject to. Then start sending emails to the uppers stating those problems, and asking for $$$ to fix it. Word them as if it's no big deal, but it really is a big deal, so as to give yourself a big cushion. Carefully record the expected refusals and store them offsite if you can. After leaving, blow the whistle, because odds are perfect they haven't complied by then if they hadn't complied by the time you left.
(and now for some fun ones, made mostly in jest, you understand...)
3) "Wow - for some odd reason I can't seem to locate all the really critical documentation! Where did it all go?"
4) carefully scrutinize every last labor law for the state. Do your level best to find transgressions against it (especially when it comes to discrimination laws)
5) as an extension to #5, record every spoken conversation, on your phone if you can. save the bits that could be construed as discrimination or suchlike.
6) "Training is going to take a lot longer than I thought..."
7) "I just got hired on to XYZ corp, but I won't start for a month. I'll be happy to transfer my critical knowledge at consultancy fees of $400/hr..." (just be damned sure you have that critical knowledge, have a job waiting for you, and that said knowledge isn't already documented somewhere).
8) carefully study the BOFH archives... see what you can put to use. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This, right here... but only to a point.
Get too antagonistic and/or too loud in public, and you will suddenly find yourself rather blackballed when it comes to IT jobs in town...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
For at least the last decade, people have been half heartedly making the occasional comments about unionizing the IT workforce.
I hope that the EmblemHealth employees are successful. It is tough to compete in a global economy, but IT is one of the few professions where there is a serious shortage of qualified talent. If the qualified talent refuses to train their replacements, then those replacements are worthless.
Of course, over the next few years a good portion of the sysadmin skill set is going to be automated so this is very much too little, too late. When you have a team of half a dozen people who can manage thousands or tens of thousands of VMs in AWS or Azure, those 100+ person IT departments start looking bloated.
Also putting pressure on the traditional IT skill set is the continuing downward pressure on hardware costs, BYOD and VDI. There is no need to have a legion of desktop monkeys doing end user support when an organization can rapidly re-deploy hardware and shift applications in real time via virtualized desktops.
As more and more application vendors outsource their support functions and take on the support burden as part of the yearly maintenance cost, the need for in house IT staff will continue to shrink.
There is a lot of M&A activity in the healthcare field right now, and a couple of key vendors are bubbling up to the top of the pile. Within a decade I think we are going to see standardization around a couple of SaaS type platforms. Given all of the data breaches that are going on, individual hospitals and healthcare organizations cannot continue to eat the risk of storing all of that data in house.
Many of the workers, about 200 they estimate, are older, with 15-plus-year tenures. This means a hard job search for them.
As an IT support contractor who works one day to one year per assignment, I hate dealing with people who has been around forever in the IT department. They think that being a contractor is a novelty, joke about getting laid off and taking a six-month vacation on unemployment benefits, and have no clue what they're worth in the job market. The worst part is that all their knowledge is inside their heads and not documented anywhere else. I had two friends who ended up working at drug stores because they fell into this trap, took a six-month vacation and discovered that no wanted to hire them with obsolete job skills. Because they stopped learning after they got out of school, they couldn't change their circumstances and settled for less.
Trump is a businessman, that means he steer clear of unprofitable ventures.
Four business bankruptcies later...
Yep. wield the "Report the fuckers" hammer like it's going out of style. if you have ANY information of wrongdoing you release it to press and feds and do it anonymously so they cant punish you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They already know they're being outsourced as soon as it happens; the official word is just never given until you're in the middle of training someone who'll be making a tenth your pay.
Now that they realize management has decided to get less expensive and more pliable employees, why wouldn't they gang up on management?
Why should they kowtow to someone for stabbing them in the back?
The summary says this person requested anonymity but it closed with "she said". Considering this is an IT department, wouldn't the fact that the interviewee is female help the company to narrow down this person?
4 out of all but 1. None of his businesses have been a great success, most of them have failed. The only one that's worked really well is his TV show.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Depends on the scope... and all it takes is for one key group of people (*nix sysadmins, say) to refuse and stand firm on that refusal.
If your refusal to do knowledge transfer prevents someone from operating a system you maintain, then you are very bad at your job. If a bus hit me tomorrow, any of my coworkers could pick up the systems I maintain using the documentation. Worse case, if a bus took out the entire operations team, someone from outside of the company would be able to use the docs to come up to speed.
If you've left such sparse documentation that no one can figure out how to maintain your systems, the company is better off without you.
Then you work in a rare company where staff is doubled or tripled up. Many places hire exactly 2 fewer people than they should, and spread all of their jobs out pretty wide.
Almost every place that I've worked has been set up this way to save on costs. Generally people leaving under good terms will continue to get phone calls and emails for assistance for at least 2-3 months.
Other companies have made the severance package dependent on helping with the transition. They probably only need a few key people to break ranks and it all falls apart.
It's easy to measure whether an employee "transfers knowledge". It's very hard to measure whether they do it well. In every large system I've worked on, many inportant details about interacting with the system are "tribal knowledge", not written down, and not occurring very frequently, but hugely expensive for the first guy who figured it out. Simply not passing that along seems the minimum resistance to provide here, even if the labor action fails.
There's the stuff you document formally, that describes some ideal vision of the system, and that's certainly "knowledge transfer", then there's the sneaky details about how the system really works, the misleading error messages, the simple tricks that mysteriously work to fix complex issues and so on. I believe I'd run out of time before explaining those particular details. ... and it all falls apart.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Conversely, if someone off the street can read some documents and perform your job with no specialized training, then your job must pay very close to minimum wage, and you're going to be replaced by a robot soon enough anyways...
Usually it isn't the case that nobody can figure out how to maintain the systems (eventually). But often the cost of getting replacement workers up to speed, and suffering potential downtime while doing so, is more expensive than keeping the existing workers.
A long time? No banned from federal service for life.
Incorrect. They may have been banned from becoming controllers again, but they were most definitely not banned from federal service for life. How do I know? I'm old enough to have worked in federal service IT with a fired former ATC. This would have been in the late 1980s. He had no problems getting a government clearance to do IT work as a federal employee at a US military base, but he could never be an ATC again. He didn't talk much about it except I do remember that he still thought he did the right thing in going on strike, which was an opinion I did not share.
I'm not at all surprised to see this. Not too long ago, there was a health insurer called GHO+HMI. They were reasonably priced and accepted in most health care locations. They went private, and the NY Dept of Insurance allowed it. In the filings, they claimed competition and market forces would allow them to maintain services and keep rates low. Today, they spend a lot of money on advertising Medicare plans. I had them for two years under an ACA plan...a total waste of money. "oh, we don't accept Emblem from the Exchange" was the refrain in every doc's office. They fought me on every claim, mis processed, and in one instance, refused to help me at least get the negotiated rates for services. They are screwing their IT staff ? Say it ain't so. I heartily wish the senior executives of Emblem Health, their children, and families, the most painful of disease, bone cancers, and dysfunctional major organs with no matching transplant donors. I sincerely hope for a few hospital infections and an incompetent intern at a crucial moment. They screwed a working nonprofit health insurance provider and literally there is NO bad thing they don't deserve.
Depends on the scope... and all it takes is for one key group of people (*nix sysadmins, say) to refuse and stand firm on that refusal.
If your refusal to do knowledge transfer prevents someone from operating a system you maintain, then you are very bad at your job. If a bus hit me tomorrow, any of my coworkers could pick up the systems I maintain using the documentation. Worse case, if a bus took out the entire operations team, someone from outside of the company would be able to use the docs to come up to speed.
If you've left such sparse documentation that no one can figure out how to maintain your systems, the company is better off without you.
And who controls the documentation? If the entire IT department simply locked away the documentation, they'd be SOL.
You can't legally lock up resources owned by the company. You have to divulge passwords when asked by someone in authority. Otherwise, you could end up in jail.
I've been reading /. for a long time, but just created an account now to comment here. I really don't have anything valuable to add. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry that this is happening. Hope with the elections close, you will be able to force your lawmakers to take a stand to protect your jobs. 200 employees protesting won't make any change. Even if you are not an employee or customer of EmblemHealth, you should stand in solidarity with them, because if it's their jobs today, it will be yours tomorrow. It is time American companies put people before profits.
IMO, H1-B visa regulations might not prove to be as effective as you think (I'm only guessing). Currently I work (for Cognizant) from offshore for a large US insurance group. My project team consists of about 40% Americans working from US and 60% us from Cognizant. Most of us Cognizant employees work from offshore and don't have H1-B visas. There just need to be 1 or 2 people having visas in the US for us to co-ordinate the work. So I'm not sure a solution solely based on reducing the number of H1-B visas is going to work.
How about someone with 4 years, give or take, of specialized study exactly in what you do?
Four years of experience working with similar IT systems should be enough to maintain any system I create. You used the words "specialized study", which sounds like just reading books or classroom instruction, which would most likely not be enough. Education is an important part of working in IT, but it does not replace actual experience. Usually when I hand off a product for others to maintain, the highest ranking person responsible for the actual maintenance (aka not management) is in their late 20's, so it doesn't take much time in the industry to gain the necessary skills.
But like I said, you shouldn't need to pay people $150k+ in the suburban Midwest (where I work) to maintain well built IT systems. You may need them to maintain horribly designed systems, but hopefully you are using them to build the next transformation of your technology stack. Any time spent resting on your laurels in this economy simply allows your competitors to overtake you in the near future.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke