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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.
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.
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?
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...
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.