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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!
"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.
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.
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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.
__________
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"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"
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.
That would be great, if the 'elected' folks who would have to implement and enforce your excellent ideas, hadn't had their jobs bought and paid for by the very corporations whose policies you're trying to counter.
This shit, and so much other shit like it, is ultimately the result of a badly broken electoral system. Fix that, and everything else becomes at least possible. Until we force electoral reforms that do away with elected offices going (mostly) to the highest bidder, we'll be stuck - bent over, holding our ankles, and paying for the privilege.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
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
"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."
And there are plenty of European countries with strong IT job markets.
IT salaries in America are higher than in most European countries, and tech unemployment, at about 3%, is lower.
They also protect their working class.
The best route to prosperity for working people is a thriving economy. You don't get that with rigid labor markets.
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.)
"You don't get that with rigid labor markets"
Let's try something more flexible like outsourcing the management.
No golden parachutes for fuckups.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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.
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.
You forgot:
0. Convince the "representatives" profiting from current status quo that they should work together to change the laws to be less vulnerable to corruption (i.e. less profitable for them)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
Just like job markets are substantially different from state to state, in Europe it's different country by country.
As for IT salaries, are they higher or lower relative to the cost of living? I think you'll find that it's actually about equal. I am an IT guy in Norway and I make a lot more than Americans but my cost of living is higher... it balances.
I think that there's somewhere in-between. America is the biggest and wealthiest socialist country in the world. Has been for a long time. When the unemployment rate goes up, they find something new like scaring the shit out of people which currently employs nearly 20% of the working population of America directly or indirectly using government funds.
The thriving American economy is based almost entirely on providing work for millions and millions of people through more or less unnecessary programs. Even if it means giving a guy 20 years in prison for smoking weed... it creates jobs and without the constant fear of all these evil criminals, a million jobs at least would be lost and another million jobs would be needed for the people who are in prison if they were out.
There are many shades of gray here.... whether it's militaries, DHS, NSA, FBI, police forces, CIA, TSA, prison systems, arms dealers, etc... the US has a massive protectionist market for employees. Bush senior started it, Clinton tried to screw the whole thing up.. Bush Jr got the ball really rolling and Obama thrived by building the most impressive FUD economy the world has ever imagined. Americans are so scared shitless now that the government can spend anything they want and create jobs a million at a time because some American-born professor of middle eastern descent is calculating a differential equation on the plane and the crazy assed woman next to him thinks he must be a terrorist because she can't tell the difference between Greek and Arabic writing so the plane is grounded and 500+ people are needed in different jobs to do everything from write policies to investigating it to providing PR etc...
Your awesome and prosperous thriving economy is how the national deficit happens. Every country in the world prints a certain amount of new money each year and needs some legitimate method of feeding it into the economy so that everyone will have more to go around. Norway who doesn't even need to do it still does it because if everyone else did it and they didn't it would screw everything up. So they all make new fake money, run up deficits and feed that money into government funded jobs which eventually circulates to the gas station or fruit stand or restaurants. The deficit is a great thing if all countries can agree to go into debt at an approximately even rate. Thankfully, China is finally playing the game properly.
Now, higher quality of life, standards of living, etc... that comes from rigid labor markets. As an American in such a country... I can tell you the standard of living in the lower, middle and upper class in Norway is substantially higher than in the US. The reason is because the standard of living is higher in all three classes due to protectionism. The rich don't surround their houses with walls like freaky scared people. The middle class send their kids to public schools because we all have a higher standard of living thanks to the rigid labor markets.
Americans generally don't travel much and seldom bother to learn a foreign language.
Many tech companies in Sweden use English as their working language. In Britain, English is even more common, although they don't speak it as well as the Swedes.