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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!
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
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.
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?
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!
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"
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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."
Yeah. He's only four bankruptcies down so far; why stop now? Five's a great number. Sure, let's elect yet ANOTHER rich fuck to lead the country further down it's corporate rathole. Plus, one known to be a xenophobic, misogynist, jingoist, grade-school-vocab-having MORON who thinks "Rosie-O-Donneling" someone he doesn't like is how to manage a disagreement. Peeeerfect. THAT'S a great idea. Wonder why I didn't think of it?
Oh.
BECAUSE I'M NOT A STUPID FUCKTARD
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.
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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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.
Remember a very large fraction of CEOs are psychopaths.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
> 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
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.
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.
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!!!
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.
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.
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
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.