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Newspaper Chain CEO 'Pleased' To Announce IT Plan, Then Fires Tech Staff (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes from a report on Computerworld: The McClatchy Company, which operates a major chain of newspapers in the U.S., is moving IT work overseas. The number of affected jobs, based on employee estimates, range from 120 to 150. The chain owns about 30 newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee, where McClatchy is based; The Fresno Bee, The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C., The State in Columbia, S.C. and the Miami Herald. In a letter sent to the chain's IT employees in late March, McClatchy CEO Patrick Talamantes detailed all the improvements a contract with the outsourcing firm, India-based Wipro, will bring, but buries, well down in the letter what should have been in its lead paragraph: There will be cutbacks of U.S. staff. The letter received by McClatchy's IT employees from Talamantes begins by telling them [the company] is "pleased to unveil our new IT Transformational Program, a program designed to provide improved service to all technology users, accelerated development and delivery of technology solutions and products, variable demand-based technology resources and access to modern and cutting-edge skills and platforms." Seven paragraphs down in the letter, he lowers the boom: "As we embark on the implementation phase, there will be a realignment of resources requiring a reduction in McClatchy technology staff." IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem. Said one IT employee: "This has taken us all by surprise. I'm not saying that we felt untouchable as they have been doing layoffs for the past 10 years, but being part of IT we felt that we had a big part in what happens" in the company. Employees are now training their replacements.
And when the replacements are H1B's they are breaking the law.
If we just had a union!
transformed into unemployeds.
Prediction: right when they get their outsourced IT working smoothly, those newspapers will be wiped out by Internet competition that uses a combination of volunteers and part-time work-from-home reporting staff doing "gigs" keying into off-the-shelf CMS's.
Table-ized A.I.
"Employees are now training their replacements" gets me fuming each and every time. If I'm being laid off because I'm a shit worker, that's one thing. Skipping meetings, missing deadlines. Shit like this though? Fuck, if I'm not a valued asset then neither are my years of experience and collected knowledge. These assclowns can get in the god damn ocean, I wouldn't train a single one of these dipshits.
I assume payroll is tax-deductible. That the money you pay your employees can be deducted from the gross that the business earns before paying corporate taxes. What if we exclude foreign payroll and expenses from being deductible? If the employees are coming physically to the U.S., perhaps a minimum salary is in order as some suggest (based upon industry). Maybe require the company to retain the employees that they're firing.
Any thoughts? Good or bad about this.
If only someone could figure out how to outsource CEOs overseas...
I'm in Cary NC ... and these assholes refuse to stop dropping 'The Cary News' in my drive way.
You know what the Cary News is? A front page with some fake BS story on it, and 5-10 pages of ads. They distribute it FOR FREE ... because no one wants the fucking thing.
Its awesome that they throw a bunch of dead tree in my drive way ... in an area known as 'the silicon valley of the east coast' ... where we have so many techies that you can't spit without hitting a geek ... and not a fucking one of us use dead trees for our news source.
Nor do any of us give a flying fuck about their shitty spamvertising fake papers ANYWAY.
I've had to call them multiple times to prevent them from littering in my drive way, which they have done for a small period of time and then all of the sudden, I get a bunch of dead tree pulp with no value thrown in my driveway where it can get wet and disintegrate. Its awesome.
Really.
At this point, I've informed the police of their littering and have filed a complaint against the newspaper for littering, as have 3 other houses on my street.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Ever seen that movie Kung-Pow, where they train one of the characters wrong as a joke? Well, if this IT staff is deemed not good enough to keep on, 'not good enough' is exactly how they should train their replacements. You get what you give, and if you give people shit then you should expect the same in return.
I'd train them.
Poorly.
Yeah, rm -rf / –
That's how you fix it.
I don't know if the Donald is being genuine or just opportunistic, but his messages about loss of American jobs, unfair trade agreements, and corporate behavior is why so many people will put up with his other flaws. They see both current parties as out of touch and not fighting for their needs. IMHO we can't blame these companies as they are operating to maximize shareholder value within the current set of rules (laws, regulations). We should be blaming the government for propagating a set of rules that encourage practices that cause loss of jobs. While I'm no protectionist, we DO need some balance. I find it reprehensible that people have to train their own lower-cost and offshore replacements.
This mostly makes sense. Note they are outsourcing, but that doesn't mean the outsourced jobs will all be overseas. Technology they use has basically become stable enough that their IT staff are more like maintenance staff. It's probably easier this way then trying to get all of their salaries down to 30k a year.
Here in the US, "This is awful, we're losing our jobs!"
In India, "Hooray! We're getting jobs!"
Who are we to side with more?
I am wondering when the revolt against these outsourcing companies will start ? I think the number of jobs are still a-plenty for the displaced workers that they do not mind finding themselves out the door. But how long can this last ? It is unsustainable. Maybe the H1B drones in India, can benefit from Reading Sacramento Bee or Miami Herald to keep their numbers up. Good job Talamantes, for placing yourself in the cross-hairs of H1B opponents, displacing Souther California Edison and Disney. They owe a big one to you, right about now.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Can they survive by selling their paper to the 1%, or will they also need to recruit subscribers from the offshore locations, as more domestic readers cannot afford to buy their product anymore?
Thankfully I have the financial savings to tell my employer to go fuck him or herself if and when the time comes when they ask me to train my replacement. I will walk out of the office with my head held high and snicker oh so slightly at the thought of the . heads trying to figure out the environment.
I thought this was 2016, not 1996.
When was the last time you bought a newspaper? Answer my poll question
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
My local paper is owned by McClatchy (Fort Worth Star-Telegram) and I'm pretty sure 99.99% of the readership won't know anything about McClatchy IT staff.
Hope you are skilled at training people.
Well, editorials of this newspaper were calling all the names for daring to touch the subject of outsourcing. But these are not the editors' and article writers' jobs that are on the chopping block.
This is the reason that most of the newspapers are doing rather badly with no profit to show.
Being politically correct has a price. Chicken came to roost. They always come. One way or another.
"Employees are training their replacements", I hear that often.
I hope they're spending all their hours at work prioritising job hunting and not training the replacements. Loyalty is two way.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
And don't think it can't happen. They are already training AI "writers."
Fortunately I've never been in this situation, but why would "Employees are now training their replacements"? Financial incentives?
Trolling is a art,
But how long can this last ? It is unsustainable.
Why do you consider it un-sustainable?
If anything what was unsustainable is keeping jobs in the U.S. with more and more per-employee overhead piling up.
If you make it hard to make jobs people will not have a lesser need for jobs to be done - they will find out how they can get them done for a lot less if possible.
Combine that with a lower and lower birth rate in the U.S. making it hard to even find workers, much less good ones.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the could offshore the work. And there are plenty of European countries with strong IT job markets. They also protect their working class.
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"We just set all passwords to qwerty to save time."
"Just set the permissions to read/write access for all."
"Updates just slow you down."
WTF?! Have they no balls at all? A company I formally slaved for tried this identical shit. Most of us bailed instantly when notified. I didn't even go back to my desk to get my coffee cup...
No you wouldn't. People train their replacements because they're getting paid for the time it takes to train them, plus usually some sort of severance. Getting fired for sabotage ruins all that.
No, you smile through your teeth, and spend as much time as possible applying for a new job, and hopefully you can bail during the training.
Alright Mr trainee:
So step one for any problem on one of the windows servers is: FDISK C:
It's similar in Linux, you do fdisk /dev/sda
Fortunately I've never been in this situation, but why would "Employees are now training their replacements"? Financial incentives?
Simple,, what little if any severance pay is tied to you training your replacements. You don't train, you don't get a severance check.
Unfortunately, way too many people prioritize fun and entertainment over having an emergency fund (aka, living pay check to pay check).
After a decade or so of this crap, it makes you wonder why IT workers can't get it together to organize and take advantage of U.S. labor laws and unionize. Maybe they lack testosterone or vitamin D or something that they can't get it up. Maybe this was the existence they were born to.
Maybe Unix admins should be called Eunuchs admins.
I can no longer think of you as men. I have no more sympathy for you.
I've never been in that boat, but I hear they will dangle some severance over them.
For example, if I were laid off today, I'd be given a month of continued employment and then 60K after that. If I quit (or do enough to get *fired* instead of laid off, I get nothing.. I think). So if you told me I was laid off and my job in the meantime was to train some other guys, I'd have plenty of incentive to at least *look* like I was training them.
Now that work would be the most half-assed in my life, and I would be looking to secure my situation first, but I wouldn't outright tell them to take their severance and shove it.
Frankly from places that I have outsource their IT, I'm skeptical there is enough training in the universe to make the outsourced workforce provide a decent effort. Note this is not about any nationality or ethnicity, it's about the simple economic reality that if your outsourcing company is *cheaper* than in-house talent, even after factoring in the outsourcing companies overhead, then that company is cutting corners severely.
Now if you are outsourcing because you just can't figure it out and go to a company that might be more expensive than managing your own, I understand. But if outsourcing is a cost savings, you are going to get what you pay for. The only exception is when you outsource to pull shenanigans with immigration law, and that's got to be plugged.
I wouldn't train a single one of these dipshits.
Generally soon-to-be-ex employees do this because they receive a larger severance payment for doing so.
It's easy to be high-and-mighty, but when you have a mortgage to pay and kids to feed it's hard to turn down that free cash, as you're going to be fired either way.
He's making an announcement to the entire company. Difficult as that may be to believe, IT staff isn't actually the most popular group of employees in many companies.
So, roughly translated, his message reads: "Rejoice, journalists, artists, writers, editors, and business people, our ornery and expensive IT staff is being replaced with more efficient and friendlier overseas staff, and we're going to save money too!"
(Whether this is going to work out as planned is, of course, another question.)
Trump will stop this madness.
Give him a chance.
It's not sabotage if a rogue cronjob accidentally deletes everything after few months
Free Trade: Where the 1% are free to trade your income and living for enterprises here, for profit derived from a lower standard of living elsewhere.
Yessir. Protectionism is bad. cuz the 1% really, really CARES about you. Got that? Thought so. Now all you need is a rectal probe to remove it.
It's not sabotage and you could never prove it without documentary evidence of a deliberate conspiracy.
I'm not a trainer or an educator. I have no background in training. Presumably any reasonable job in IT involves a lot of fairly complex skills which I am not competent to instruct others on doing in anything but an informal manner, especially under the duress of a looming and forced period of unemployment.
I did a shitty job of training? Probably at least as shitty as I do plumbing, haircuts, landing an airplane or any other skilled task which I am not specifically trained to do. You have to have a college degree and a license to teach children to count to 10, and you expect perfection when I train someone, particularly from a foreign country less skilled in English, in how to do my job?
Fuck you. Fuck you for importing people to do a job so you can get rich(er), fuck you for treating my career keeping your under-capitalized IT system running as if it was a cookie recipe. How about you train me to do your job asshole? Oh, that's right, executives have innate magical skills that warrant six figure salaries and incentives.
If your 6 rupees for a dozen replacements do a terrible job, don't blame my training for being inadequate.
Out-sourcing their IT work to India to save money? Yet another reason to look forward to the death of newspapers.
As newspapers become more like technology-oriented businesses, this will probably not work out well in the long run.
Retailers like Nordstrom are learning that technology should integrated in the company culture and not just a "cost measure to reduce."
I'm not sure what background the CEO has but he probably doesn't have a deep understanding of technology. So either they rehire tech staff or continue the decline. Then again maybe most print "general news businesses" are doomed eventually anyway. Most people don't really want to pay for a bunch of dead tree advertisements just to read local interest stories and AP or Reuters syndications, many of which they could read online for free.
you don't get it. let me explain.
when you are training your replacment, this is not usually the first time for you. which means, you have been on and off jobs (I have and I'm not in the area that this story is about) and you probably NEED the severance that they bribe you with, so that you do their bidding for the final few weeks.
no one willingly does this. we do it because we have a need to eat and they have us.
I don't love this idea. I'm not happy about admitting it, but I have lived it and its a real thing. when employment is reserved for younger folks, foreign folks; and you are neither - you soon get used to going from job to job and restarting it all over again when they are done with you (as soon as the project ends and no later).
it sucks! and I understand. I wish I didn't, but I do.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I wondered that too until I found out he ran focus groups to figure out what to say to win the primary. Trump's serious this time. He's not just putting his name out there, he's in it to win it. The scary part is all that stuff about walls and patrolling Muslim neighborhoods is what his base wants to hear too. That said, don't expect any actually action from Trump on any of those thing, or indeed anything he's said. The funny thing is we're so used to hearing him flip-flop I don't think it'll matter. Plus Hilary is about as likeable as a rattlesnake. If she wins it'll be the first time in the history a candidate lost the "Would you rather have a beer with?" poll and won the general.
Expect to see Trump quiet down about the Hispanics and the Muslims in order to prevent fear from driving them to the polls. By the time the general comes around they'll have forgotten most of what he said and they'll forget to vote like usual. Whether Hilary wins or not will largely depend on how many more gaffs Trump has (which, given his experience in public speaking and the focus groups he's running will likely be very few) and how good a job Hilary does scaring minorities and women ( Trump has forgotten his Dog Whistle a few times when it comes to punishing women who seek abortions ) into showing up at the polls. Hilary has a history of being a lousy campaigner though...
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Slashdot, as of late, appears to discuss less technology and more of this drivel. There are too many stories about jobs being outsourced. And the usual "freedom loving" crowd is begging politicians and anybody who will listen to force companies, one way or another, to not outsource. It did not work for manufacturing jobs, but somehow it might just work for their service sector jobs
You people need to adjust your expectations. You don't need a new plan B. You need a better plan A. If you think your job is in danger of being outsourced, do not expect someone else to come in and save it.
And for crying out loud, stop with the freaking doom and gloom. You guys sound like a bunch of griefers. Every story is filled with people whining about something or trying to recycle really old jokes about Soviet Russia or some shit like that.
I have been hitting Slashdot out of habit over the years. But man, this shit is getting old.
"IT employees thought they were part of the solution to McClatchy's tech direction, not the problem."
Yeah.
It's pretty common for the people who are the problem to think that they are the solution, and then not be the solution.
There's even a term coined for people who insert themselves into a process, but have no real utility to the process itself, other than to slow it down. It's "AI", and no that doesn't mean what you think it means: it stands for "Artificial Importance". People who insert themselves into processes in order to make themselves important are worse than useless.
Yup.
Exactly. Most companies will have it written into their severance agreements that you must train your replacements or forfeit your severance pay. There's nothing whatsoever in them that says that you can't train your replacement badly.
Naturally, don't give them anything in writing that would leave a paper trail to your doorstep, but beyond that, you still have a whole lot of latitude. We're talking about Indian tech support workers here, they're scarcely better than simple script-reading automatons - they certainly aren't going to know if you're giving them bad advice.
When the shit hits the fan 6, 12 months down the road and the company comes calling demanding to know what you did, "I have no idea what you're talking about! I trained my replacement to the best of my ability, any review of the e-mails I sent and documentation I wrote will show it. Perhaps you're just getting what you're paying for?"
That depends on how you commit sabotage. I refer you to this WW2 OSS manual on Simple Sabotage that showed inventive ways of screwing up productivity without putting saboteurs at undue risk. Many of the techniques would be quite applicable to anyone today who held a grudge against their employer.
instead he's whatever the hell you want him to be. He's been running focus groups left and right to figure out what to say. He's still running them. He's saying whatever it takes to get elected and he's so brazen about it and we're so used to him flip flopping that it's not hurting him with voters. Trump couldn't give a rats ass about racism, misogyny or just being plain rude. Now, I _am_ a little scared to find out that all that nonsense he spouted was exactly what Republican primary voters wanted to hear, but at least they voted for the guy not using the dog whistle...
Also, these newspapers are owned by mega corps. Anyone who touches the issue finds themselves out of work in less than a week. Fuck, there was just a story about a cartoonist running a gag in an small Iowan newspaper about the only ones making money farming being the CEOs of Monsato & John Deer. He'd been working for the paper for 33 years and they canned him on the spot when the CEOs in question said "Knock it off". You have a ruling class. Deal with it.
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Look as far as we all know in the world of economics and GLOBAL trade w/ evermore transparent borders, out sourcing IS inevitable. Staff position at non TRADITIONAL IT firms are working on borrowed time for a few post n current poor souls. Better get the resumes sharpened. Thats the university of |Life 101 ryt there
The Bee is a left wing paper that often laments the offshoring of tech workers, and actively complains about the local job market. They always advocate intervention in the economy. Unless it's them. Then they are Republicans. ROFLMAO. And they wonder why I haven't bought their rag in 2 decades... oh the irony.
Esp. when a companies profits are down in the changing times, management will look to cut costs, and IT looks like an easy target. High 'burn rate' and with the power of Internet, others with similar skills can take over. Have to wait and see if this plan succeeds though.
"There's nothing whatsoever in them that says that you can't train your replacement badly."
This never works, because replacements usually start doing some part of your job while you are training them. if they start doing part of your job while you are training them badly, the folks you report to will likely notice. It's rare that you train folks to do stuff in IT without them actually doing some of it under your watch. it's rare that there's a cutoff date where, you train them, and you quit and they start on the same day. That doesn't happen often.
How about you train me to do your job asshole? Oh, that's right, executives have innate magical skills that warrant six figure salaries and incentives.
They get that training in their Master's program.
It starts with a Bachelors degree...once you get it, they see if you can survive without your brain stem. If you do ok with that then you get to go to your Masters' program where they remove some ribs and teach you how to lodge your head up inside of your asshole. Only then can you become an Executive.
Bad decisions? It's the lack of decent oxygen.
Remember a very large fraction of CEOs are psychopaths.
The entire news and information industry is moving to technology for distribution....and these guys are firing their technology experts.
OK, well, I guess we'll wait and see how that works out....
You tried to teach them over and over, but they just don't learn. I work with outsourced IT. I work with legitimate H1Bs, who do work we could not get here. Outsourced IT isn't as good whether it be from inside the US or outside the US. Wipro and Unisys though are some of the worst, lying, thieving ones of the bunch. They treat their employees like crap, train them like crap, and force them into horrid working conditions and high stress environments. Of course they aren't as good as the people that they were replacing and they never will be.
Don't train your replacements. If unionized, strike. maybe strike anyway.
Second immediately go to competing media and take out ads advising the public what is happening. write editorials for other media.
Talk to your government representatives about the American press being outsourced to India.
Then explain to management about a cable equipment supplier in Pennsylvania that was going bankrupt. At the last moment a "White Knight" appeared. During the phase of doing do diligence they discovered that there IT and IT development was outsourced to India. The White Knight who was bailing them out, they dropped the offer as the little cable company in trouble actually owned very very little at that point that they had control over... And the WK didn't want to be dependent on outsourced IT were they no longer even had the current source or databases in the US.
The information is the real value, hold it in a third parties hands overseas, and you court disaster. This is not to say that overseas outsourcing is inherently bad, just non tech companies do a horrible job providing for contingencies and keeping domestic...
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
did a similar thing last month, getting rid of "only" 6% of its IT workforce locally by outsourcing to India. No H1B visas needed as the call-center jobs moved to India.
http://www.azcentral.com/story...
I'm not sure how much this saves customers, the monthly charge customers pay probably didn't drop, but I'm sure that this helped the local organization's bottom line and made their management look good to the bosses. Short-term profit vs long-term stability. Except for an article in the newspaper, didn't seem to be much outcry.
To be fair, I don't remember ever reading in any significant company's corporate prospectus that employment was more important than revenue.
I honestly hope this Indian outfit fucks it up beyond all repair and recognition.
Such an outcome would do nothing to help the displaced workers, but would signal the newspaper company's leadership and shareholders that maybe, just maybe, this was not only a dick move, but a poor technical one, to boot.
Really -- I wish the newspaper the absolute worst.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Walk out now. Do not train replacements.Leave them to their own demise.
Most of the news stories are created by people overseas as they have better creative skills at fiction.
FTFA : Employees are now training their replacements.
Not enough guts to all say "screw that?" Don't have the tools to organize a mass walkout because you can't use email or social media?
Didn't learn anything from the prisoner's dilemma?
Well, once again, you can't fix stupid.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
So I have no debt, about 36k in liquidity can spend at will, another quarter mil in retirement fund so far, and about another quarter mil in assets.
I'm still not about to take a principled stand and forfeit 60k of severance and salary during the transtion prior to that if the time comes.
I realize that the targets of these stories are generally not folks with net values over half a million with no debt load and earning 120k/year (in which case, there would be near zero room for sympathy, because that level of pay makes us pretty rich in most of the country), but I'm saying that it's hard to justify turning down the incentives even when you could strictly afford to do so.
By the same token, I'd be focused on arranging my next opportunity, even though I could spend 6 months unemployed without unemployment benefits and still not be any worse off (in fact better off for having some time away from work). I know this level of pay is probably transient (it feels a *lot* like the dot-com bubble) so I'm milking it while I can before the next bubble burst.
I did a shitty job of training?
I'd do a great job of training. My 4 year syllabus starts with "This Is A Mouse", and no, it cannot be rushed.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The cycle continues. Companies like this will offshore and soon enough all the tech will go down in flames. Even the simplest of tasks will fall by the wayside, critical errors will be made, and frustration with this "great, new IT staff" will rise. The CEO and co will of course cash out on the initial rise in stock and then leave this destruction in their wake.
Then the new C-level will come in and clean up by hiring stateside IT again which will improve most everything. Then the cycle will repeat years down the road.
Just quit. Don't be angry. Don't give a reason. Just quit.
Get on the horn and line up some jobs. Or start a consulting firm all together. When the paper calls for help, change em $100 an hour.
I have quit jobs for far less mistreatment. I have started consulting for ex-employers also.
The point is that no business is going to respect you unless you show them you have some cajones. Don't be an ass about it, just treat it as a business decision and move on.
The number of problems you have will multiply by a factor of a thousand. Wipro ignoramouses couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag that's already torn to shreds. They'll spend 30 hours on Google trying to find a clue, then leave it to karma and drown on the water vapor as it evaporates from the shredded remains of the paper bag.
Seriously though, if you find 1 talented IT person in the entirety of Wipro's employees, you'll be damned lucky and unlucky. Lucky to have found that 1 person, unlucky in that they'll quit wipro and find a job that pays more mid-shift.
A company that I've worked for tried Wipro. They spent 6 months preparing for the cutover, supposedly training the staff that would pick up on the cut-over date.
48 hours before cut-over, 98% of the trained personnel walked out. The remaining 2% were fucking clueless.
Add in comic misunderstandings, cost overruns, outages running 300 to 400% longer than they should, limited to that 300 to 400% only by calling the people that were canned and offering a fortune to get the one problem solved.
By the end of the first 48 hours, we'd already lost hundreds of thousands of dollars and were about to lose several customers.
I'd say good luck to you, but it isn't going to help.
...so I can not buy their paper.
Wait, I can not buy their paper from home!
I hope you go bankrupt, assholes. Wait, that wouldn't be fair to the remaining employees. Now I don't know who to root for.
Fuck it, I hate everybody!
Why not petition the Government to do what they are supposed to do instead of saying your only option is to fuck over your neighbors? Are you really that much of a sociopath that you can't grasp another option? Don't even try that shit about you being a job creator, because if you are defending off shoring jobs you are not a creator but a destroyer. Anyone can look at Henry Ford's business model and understand why it worked and built a huge middle class economy, you sending money overseas destroys that very thing. Without any question at all.
If you are a small business, you are not outsourcing because it costs too much money.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The result of their "IT transformational program" will be screwed up infrastructure and poor support for their enterprise. Seriously, has anyone EVER seen an instance where offshoring like this has resulted in ANY sort of improvement? The cost savings never materialize, and you end up losing the intellectual capital of an experienced staff.
The hired hands in India have no interest in the ultimate success of your enterprise - none of them will be around that long. They are all pushing feverishly to learn just enough buzz-word technology to become "managers" so they can sit around in meetings and direct the few poor slobs at the bottom of heap to "do the needful", which might eventually happen after dozens of endlessly looping email threads that have built-in delays because of the time zone difference. I've never seen such top-heavy organizations, where everybody has "manager" somewhere in their title, except for the new hires who, despite having minimal experience, are called "senior engineers".
> No you wouldn't. People train their replacements because they're getting paid for the time it takes to train them, plus usually some sort of severance. Getting fired for sabotage ruins all that.
Better off getting the severance package in writing and then take it to a lawyer and bring criminal charges plus a civil suit against the executives and middle managers responsible for the extortion.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
My question to management would be:
If they're so much better at IT than I am that you replaced me with them, then shouldn't they already know what the f*&k they're doing?
In the end, they will get poor service from "David" from Seattle who they can barely understand if they can understand him at all. This is how it has gone for every company that outsources IT to India. I always hat having to call in to any major companies anymore because the odds are I will get "David" with such a thick Indian accent that I can't understand a word he says.
If the big companies in this country would stop and think for just a second, they are shooting themselves in the foot. Who is going to buy their products if EVERYBODY is unemployed.
Of course, I could always be wrong. Look at all the figures the government puts out about unemployment. According to them unemployment isn't that bad. Of course, there figures are based on the number of people drawing unemployment benefits. They do not take into account the people who are unemployed and have either run out of benefits or are not eligible for it to begin with. I would say if you take those people into consideration, the actual unemployment figures in the US would be more like 25%.
Here is what we all have to look forward to, no matter who wins the Presidency, the unemployment numbers are only going to go up. But at least since more people will be running out of benefits, then numbers will look just fine. I mean, they have been saying for the last few years that the economy is recovering. I would love to see where that is happening.
It's being built by DAMAC properties, Trump's company designed the golf course and put it's name on the project.
https://www.damacproperties.co...
A more proper statement would be - A company that is licensing Trump's name and using his design firm uses slave labor.
Well, according to an anonymous source it's slave labor.
Hell, truthy enough for politics, right? //Not a Trump supporter
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
A management practice instituted by those who have no knowledge of emotional pain or relishes inflicting it on others. Callous indifference at its worst.
I think your time would be better spent finding a new job then setting up cron jobs to delete files.
They aren't so much better, they are so much cheaper. There's a difference.
Unfortunately it works even when you don't want it to work.
I've been "trained" by people who had every incentive to train me well, but they were just terrible at it. Some yak too much about bullshit (which is worse if you have some rapport with them, worse yet if you know and like them), some are just bad at explaining things, some weren't that good at their job to begin with. And many IT jobs involve so many intangibles that technical knowledge isn't the issue, it's figuring out fucked up politics and 1001 broken workflows and unstated management expectations.
And then I've been on the training end of it, where training somebody else was to my absolute benefit and had miserable outcomes. Sometimes it's just my lack of teaching ability (I refuse to coach any of my son's youth sports for this reason, and my wife wants to divorce me whenever she can't figure something out on her computer). Sometimes the person's just not at the right level of expertise -- management usually has multiple incentives to hire someone with less experience. And sometimes its the intangibles of a specific job and employer, things that defy documentation or obvious rational reasoning or have dependencies you couldn't fix.
And that's when everyone WANTS to play ball, speaks the same language, eats the same food and maybe even has inside experience at the same job.
Now, add conflict (losing your job), stress (ditto), cultural differences, language barriers and everything else associated with a forced transition. How does it ever work out right?
if they start doing part of your job while you are training them badly, the folks you report to will likely notice.
I mean, what are they gonna do, fire you? You're already making me train my replacement and you're going to complain about their poor performance and try and hold me accountable? That's laughable. If you were willing to shitcan me without whatever it is I know, you would have done it already. At this stage you need me bad enough that nitpicky performance questions aren't likely to be on the table. And if they are, then go ahead, fire me. I'll take unemployment for $200, Alex. You'll never demonstrate termination for cause after at (likely coercive) separation agreement has been signed unless I show up high on mescaline, waving a gun and exposing myself.
The absolute best management is hoping for is anything they can get OTHER than a cold transition to outsiders, especially contractors. Because that option was available up front and was free. But someone up the food chain has a hard on for making their little outsourcing plan work, so they're desperate for any advantage they can get. Marginal training is better than no training.
The bleeding heart liberals that bemoan evil capitalistic greed are the ones outsourcing jobs overseas so they can increase their lucrative executive bonuses they receive for decreasing costs.
You can't make this shit up.
Serves you well, computah nerds. Har har. What was it with you weenieboys being "our bosses" after high school? Turned out differently I see. :)
Have had dealings with Wipro.
Some of their US staff aren't bad. Not great, but not bad.
But their overseas staff. Jesus fuck!
I've seen more technical aptitude at a luddite convention...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sure, you may have to train them.
But train them badly, then. Leave out all the long-term stuff, setting them up for disaster. There may be daily backups - leave out the weekly/monthly stuff or the rotation of tapes/media. With time, those unrotated tapes wear out and there is no weekly backup to fall back on. In extreme cases, they'll be using the same media every day for backup - when it fails, there are no backups at all. And never tell them how to actually get a file back from backup media . . .
Teach them to upgrade servers during the day. Outtages for everyone. You may have some experience in various snags and tricks to get a critical service up fast - don't pass that on.
Teach them unnecessarily cumbersome procedures, with much more rebooting than necessary. I.e. add the new user, then reboot the server(s).
Have them make cat3 cabling, teach them to use hubs for switches. Performance decrease gradually, and most of it after you're gone.
But he's "evil", according to the very media that is offshoring jobs to India! And he's probably "racist" too! So no need to actually discuss anything then, let's just let the scum in power carry on while they completely destroy our country, right?
Assassinate all free market capitalists. If you meet them in person, murder their families including their children.
Thank you.
Well its time to bring in the AI and replace the CEO, Its not like they do anything a algorithm cant do better.
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hahaha yeh...good luck with WIPRO....one of my clients tried to do the same to "cut" cost....project ended up costing more than double and was so off track due to WIPRO's "experts" that they had to bring it all back in house. I thought companies had learned by now that short term gains with outsourcing do not out weigh the long term costs (and damage!).
I'm actually one of the McClatchy employees being laid off, and now in the process of training the new team. It sucks. But, if I don't do it, I forfeit my severance package, so, I'm really left with not much choice.
I've read it and today it's mostly useless because it's written for a different world. A world with less surveillance, more industry and less offices let alone IT, and less capable detectives. These sabotage methods were risky at the time; now those which are still doable are very likely to get you fired or locked up.
I've posted before and I'll post again.
This isn't a H1B issue, you can take away that all together. There are companies who handle migration and onboarding with localized resources and new outsource vendors (off shoring). But that doesn't mean the company themselves can't do the job directly.
Nothing no one can do about it or anything. As VM/Cloud services become more and more reliable the more localized IT depts will be cut.
Get over it.
Sorry but if you start a process that you know will cause problems, that is sabotage. Be the better man. If you don't want to train the replacements, don't train them. Personally, if I were in that position and could afford to do so, I'd decline to train the replacements. But I'm not going to commit sabotage nor would I undertake to train the replacements and then do less than my best. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with making sure that the IT community at large knows who my (former) employer was and what they did.
linquendum tondere
Tell them to go fuck themselves and walk. Thinking that offshoring will cut cost is a sign of incompetence in the leadership of the organization. If you haven't lived working with an offshore team like this, then you don't know the pain.
Writing scripts that are not easy to maintain with hardcoded assumptions in a monolithic format, compile binaries that don't correspond exactly to the sources, write code that leaks memory or scales badly, write documentation that is ambiguous, contradictory or potentially dangerous, bend cables or pins in connectors, tangle up ethernet cables and use a confusing colour / labelling / layout, schedule backups and jobs at the peak periods of the day, put a scratch across the server restore disc, set the backup system to miss files, write down passwords incorrectly (e.g. o, O, 0), routing traffic through incredibly onerous filters, violate licence agreements or lose registration keys, ignore or delay hotline requests, loosely seating drives and daughter boards so a knock could crash the computer etc.
All things that look like incompetence rather than malice even if they end up costing a business days to fix them.
They tie the severance package to 'successfully' transitioning your job function. Most of the time they also make you agree to be contacted for a set amount of time post employment.
I'm certainly not going to train my replacement if I can help it - I'll bail as soon as I find another job, leaving my former asshole employer holding the bag.
If you can train a monkey to do your job and a monkey is willing to do it..... well, then maybe your years of experience and collected knowledge isn't that worthwhile anyways...
Don't quote me on this.
is the advance double click class full? i really need to get that down quick.
The Executives make money while Americans go jobless.
Turning America into a 3rd World Country one job at a time.
Thanks, McClatchy...I hope all your subscribers dump your ass.
Clinton and her 1% friends have been shafting us for too long.
Now they bring out the scare stories against Trump because he openly blasts their unpatriotic corruption.
Do the smart thing - vote Trump.
* receives bribes from Saudis who sponsor the killing of Christians just for being Christians
* receives bribes from NY so that they can continue to operate their scam
* has her daughter married to NY crookster
Compare Trump to Hillary and he is a saint.
Deliberately mistraining your replacement is sabotage. Giving it a half-hearted effort isn't. In that situation, I'd probably have such bad morale that I wouldn't be doing a particularly good job, and I'd be looking forward to being laid off.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
only answer questions they replacements specifically ask.
on H1-B/outsourcing issues ever again?
Once they themselves are guilty of doing this, will they ever deserve any trust/credibility on any labor-related or national security or national economic or middle class related news stories ever again?
From this date forward, we should all just assume that any McClatchy news outlet is Facebooking the news.
The real problem is the United States is over-regulated and overburdened by needless regulations. We should be free to trade with whomever we wish internally or externally and not be burdened by stupid regulations, borders, and similar things that are completely unnecessary. It's one thing to outlaw companies from releasing deadly toxins into the rivers, oceans, and air, but another to regulate things like employee pay, mandatory vehicular registration, license plates, insurance, and similar. Not having insurance, license plates, vehicular registered, etc doesn't harm anyone and there are places where we don't have these things or they're limited. Vehicles in Colorado are registered for life, in New Hampshire car insurance isn't mandatory, and drivers licenses / license plates never stop someone from getting into a car and killing someone. Unless a person or company is harming people where those being harmed are not doing so knowingly and willingly there should be no law against it (ie shops should be able to sell harmful drugs to willing customers even if it harms them for example provided there is reasonable notice given).
I shouldn't have to burn my food in order to satisfy some governmental authority at the expense of losing my business. Yet this is exactly the kind of thing that happens. You want to keep your job? Then compete effectively and stop mandating government regulation. If companies don't have to pay 10x what they pay for labour overseas it won't move overseas. There are people in the United States who do perform better and those people aren't losing there jobs.
Transformation is corporate speak for layoffs. I've experienced it myself in the last couple of years. So if management starts talking about "Transformation", "Realignment", or "Reorganization", they are all the same thing, layoffs, get your resume ready.
In a very parallel situation, we had a specific group of IT workers, win a sector award the same year that they were all "Transformed" into unemployed. All of this with a Union, such that it is. About the only help it did was that a small percentage of workers were able to move into new positions, however most were lost.
Progress.