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IT Layoffs At Insurance Firm Are A 'Never-Ending Funeral' (computerworld.com)
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: The IT layoffs at MassMutual Financial Group will happen over a period of many months, and it's going to be painful for employees. Employees say they are training overseas workers via web conferencing sessions. There are contractors in the office as well, some of whom may be working on temporary H-1B visas. Employees say they notice more foreign workers in the hallways. Approximately 100 employees are affected. The employees are angry but can't show it. A loss of composure, anything other than quiet acquiescence, means risking two weeks of severance pay for each year on the job. But maintaining composure is hard to do. "I know a few people that are probably close to a breakdown," said one IT employee. [A second IT employee described the emotional impact of the layoffs on employees in this way: "It's like a never-ending funeral."] Intel also confirmed major layoffs in April, which will affect some 12,000 employees or 11 percent of its total workforce.
Now you may or may not think Trump will DO anything about it, that is a separate topic...
But a whole lot of people are tired of this and Trump keeps saying he'll do something about it.
At the end of the day, "Acting Presidential" is less important to the average person than not having their job outsourced overseas.
..Is that the company's sales are up 15% from 2015, and "represents the 10th consecutive year of record results".
Greedy bastards, plain and simple.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Malicious compliance is the solution. The worst thing you can do at a megacorp is doing exactly what your job description requires.
It may not happen to you tomorrow, or next year, or in five years, but it'll happen eventually. Companies will always find someone cheaper.
Most people in tech make good money, there's no excuse to not have money saved up. Strive for an early retirement, because when you're forced to, it won't matter.
Yeah, so I used a buzzword in the title...
I think it's time I look at an exit strategy from IT. I'm starting to lose the appetite I had for it.
I'm thinking truck driving school, then start driving trucks. Pays less, but I imagine it has less bullshit.
I'm also considering it because it would seem the IT Worker is now an Endangered Species.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Why not simply stop granting H-1B visas altogether?
Good luck with that.
I'll quit first. Why cut your own neck slowly? Frankly though, people keep voting for the same people that listen to business saying they need this cheap labor and please allow them more.
That sounds right at first reading, but then I realise it's not necesarily so. When I started my current job, I had 20 years of experience in the specific field I was hired in. I still needed a LOT of training in this company's product, their procedures, their coding standards and process, their complex infrastructure and networks, etc. If we hired Linus Torvalds tomorrow he'd need a lot of training.
On my last job I needed far less training. A lot of that has to do with the available documentation and following standards or not. At the last job, company network resources were accessible on the network as normal. My current job has multiple VPNs you have to use even when you're in the office.
So anyway, the specific TYPE of training that the replacements needed could be strong evidence either way.
I worked 3 contracts for HP.
Each of them ended the same way. After years of successful operation, and after a few failed attempts, they eventually handed the operations to another group either outsourced or over seas.
The very core of an IT person is employing automation. We work to handle more than we could before. We build systems and procedures that ensure against failure and allow for our obsolescence.
I've never minded it.
But this is no longer an IT thing. Any job can be outsourced and automated.
"Don't fear death... fear not living..." -me
Don't let companies force employees without saying anything to train their replacements under penalty of loss of layoff benefits.
There are actually half a dozen things that could be done to prevent this kind of BS, too bad the 1% who benefit from this control the asshats who make the laws.
I don't understand why people don't just walk.
What's one's dignity worth?
Dignity doesn't pay the mortgage...
Management wants you to train your H1B replacement? Ok, I'll "train" him.. give him subtly wrong information, just wrong enough to slowly, over a period of weeks/months, to eventually fuck up the company. Go out to dinner with a bunch of your fellow to-be-replaced workers, and get them to pass the word to everybody else getting canned, to do the same thing.. Don't write anything down that can get back to management, all by word-of-mouth, and even though you get canned, you can be happy in the knowledge that the fucking company will swirl down the drain in the not-to-distant future..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I can see the conversation now:
H1B worker: I'm having problems with runfiles not appearing, but I'm sure that the process is running. You you think it is a permissions problem?
Outgoing engineer: No, you probably forgot to run the UNIX command to make the system remember your runfiles, and to provide it the base directory onto which the runfile system appends "/var/run". You'll probably want to specify the root directory (/). The command is, of course, rm -rf /.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Well I sure hope they're doing a piss poor job at that training.
Train them well. When Asok asks what you do, tell him 1) keep my LinkedIn profile up to date, and 2) surf the web looking for my next job.
Have gnu, will travel.
Makes me glad I'm out of IT
You can't be serious. There won't be truckers in 5 years.
Automated cars are a real ting. They exist right now, and work well. They are still in development, they are not ready for commercial deployment, but the major technological hurdles are overcome at this point. The long haul trucking industry will be one of the first to be very interested in this. Drivers that never get tired, obey all rules they are told to, etc would be of great interest and worth paying for even if they technology is reasonably expensive.
2 weeks per year, apparently.
With India. You just can't. Their quality of life is so much lower and they have so many desperate people. I can't compete with people who lack clean air, water and food security unless I give up those things.
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I don't understand why people don't just walk.
Probably the same reasons people live paycheck to paycheck and don't plan ahead financially. Situations like this are why I keep enough in savings that I can comfortably say "fuck you" and walk out if my job ever goes sour; being confident that the savings will last me long enough to find a new job.
Free market is not always good. H1B is not the issue here. The greediness of US investors/shareholders are. CEOs are measured by how they add value to investor, not how they increase value for the whole nation (that is usually in the domain of Govt and regulations) If CEOs are supposed to take care of "share holders" interest, and the majority of share holders (by value) in the market are citizen's of united states. That means US people (read 1% rich) wants this type of free market. Free market is not fair-market. The employees should think about these things, and act in elections.
I agree the H1B program is a farce per "skill shortage," and glad Mr. Trump has highlighted the issue in his campaign, but I'm not a one-issue voter.
I believe Mr. Trump will likely be a train-wreck in foreign policy, offending leaders and countries far and wide, perhaps triggering wars.
USA knows him from TV over the years and we take him with a grain of salt. The rest of the world won't.
I'd rather be unemployed than an apocalyptic zombie.
Table-ized A.I.
So send the employer notice the employer has now created a toxic work environment, with morale in the pits, etc.,and that until the situation is corrected, you won't be coming in - but keep those paychecks coming, or else ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Come on guys, fight fire with fire! Everyone walk together! Everyone! Maybe even leave a few fires burning, not that you caused any. Get together and agree on your severance package and demands present it to the company as a group. Make it painful.
They can't do this easily without you. Make them give you a golden parachute.
Folks, we are Americans! Our forefathers sailed the oceans on wooden ships the size of school bus. We are hearty, tough, and are not to be trifled with.
We have to stop getting trampled. This is not who we are.
Get together. Stand together. Fight the man together.
Take it to social media.
Blog it.
Make noise.
These jerks are taking your jobs and your livelihoods. If this company wants to move to India, let them go sell their shit in India, but make sure another American doesn't do business with them.
Make sure TRUMP spouts their name at his rallies and what a disgrace this company is to the USA.
Look outside your tunnel. Get your friends involved. It is time to man up and bring it!
And it would be a total shame if you put up a kickstarter page to help you all stick together through this.
Maybe a sympathetic hacking group would get involved to create mayhem until you are able to get back in the saddle.
It is time to drop the hammer and get tough. They do not tell you what you get as severance, you tell them. You are not a dog being fed scraps.
Knowledge is power. Don't go gently into that dark night!
Love these cheap toasters, just bonza guys! It's great! and $3 phone covers shipped to my door, USB cables for 4$ it's magic
Wait you want my jo........ oh
After all, they're the only thing that has ever worked against a bunch of asshat employers.
That is all.
Do you honestly believe the teamsters will let that happen?
It's most efficient to produce as close to your customers as possible, so this is definitely in the cards once robots can replace humans.
The big bonus is that they'll need people like us to fix/maintain these robots... Probably not everyday maintenance (we have robots for that), but definitely anything beyond that...
It is easy for Trump to make promises because he is clueless when it comes to technology. Trump doesn't even know how to use data in his own campaign. He reads donation numbers out loud at a press conference when most people these days would just post the numbers on their website and be done with it. He is telling you what you want to hear to "make the sale," but the actual situation is being driven by economics that are hard to address in a free market.
Just read the marketing notes from Trump University. . . he is totally playing the segments of the population in the most pain. . . for HIS gain. Except the stakes are way higher than they were with Trump University. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
They only have to be 1/10th as good to break even.
Which branch of government makes laws and provides for funding of issues like changing the minimum wage, providing free college, allowing in immigrants who despise our culture, banning guns, and making America not great?
1 unlock moving to other jobs (give an H1B say 90 days to switch jobs)
2 triple the payroll tax for H1B holders (double for green card holders)
3 audit the qualifications for a job offer (no requiring somebody to have been a beta tester for %program% of stuffing keywords to eliminate local labor)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/21/donald-trump-flip-flops-then-flips-and-flops-more-on-h-1b-visas/
good enough is always good enough, especially at 1/10 the price.
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I've work for a fortune 100 insurance company for over a decade. We've been training off shore resources to replace on shore employees for several years now. All while continuing to show large year over year profit increases. When we started outsourcing, (about 5 years ago) the off shore folks were very bright, spoke perfect English and knew their stuff. Over time that bar lowered considerably. Now we tend to have serious communication and cultural issues. Most projects come in way over estimates and months late. The thing is, my company doesn't care. They pay these firms literally pennies on the dollar and overlook quality issues. What my team would have been expected to deliver in two months now takes our off shore counterparts a year or more. If a project is very time sensitive, we'll come in and clean it up after they've butchered the core build. In most cases though, directors seem perfectly happy to accept poor development and missed deadlines in order to show how much theoretical money was saved using outsourced resources. I've seen management doctor budget reports to show cost savings when in reality we were paying more in the long run on clean up and maintenance. It's a shell game and it's disgusting.
It’s just unfortunate that executives will not be affected, though.
It's pretty easy to spot people from other countries by the accent. It's not proof the people are H-1Bs, but that's the way to bet.
I don't even see why this is such a bad deal. You get a few months of a heads up to start networking and looking for work. You get a month or two of pay while interviewing for your next job, and then move on with your career. The other option is for the company to just lay off everyone, which is worse for both sides. Its not like these employees could reasonably have expected to work at this same company until retirement. This isn't the 1960's.
I would welcome such a deal if my company offered it. I would only be pissed if they used this to cheat me out of my 15% target bonus, which based on my performance I treat as regular salary. Staying on my employer's good side would also likely put me at the top of the list for contracting once the outsourcing firm fucks everything up.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Every time I hear these types of stories I make a note of the company and then I shy away from them if I can...and I encourage others to do the same. I don't like boycotts, but I do like "word of mouth" :-)
Over 20 years ago, I worked in a law firm. I did all the non immigration work. The firm had a huge immigration practice, but they needed a guy who knew where the Civil, Criminal, Family, Traffic and Supreme Courts were located....that was me. 1. Immigrants come in and save their money, often in coffee cans. They know the US will eventually change the laws, declare amnesty, for a price. (When Trump legalizes them for a price, they will have the ready cash...trust me) The only problem arises when someone in the home country really needs you (birth, death) and you can't go, because you've over stayed and can't legally travel back once you leave. 2. H1B was a scam even back then. You write the description as follows "Must know code language A, B and C. Must speak Farsi, Mandarin and Spanish fluently. Experience in VT100 Terminal Emulation to HDMI conversion essential. Ability to repair Peugeot vehicles with a factory certificate required. By the time you are done, you have described your ideal candidate, with a description only your H1B could fill, because you wrote the description for that person. We used to run want ads in the paper of record (I said it was 20 years ago) and all the poor bastards who sent resumes in good faith were used as exhibits to prove "does not speak mandarin and Farsi" or "cannot program in language B", or "No VT100 to HDMI conversion experience", or "VW mechanic only, no French cars". The concept, to bring in unique talent, for narrow positions, is legitimate. Importing folks to replace US citizens at 60% salary with zero rights at the job is the result. I never personally worked on these petitions, (I only played the piano) but I saw enough even in my non tech oriented practice to know it was/is a total scam.
I agree that the workers should do more than just take it up the ass with a smile and a "Thank yuh massa!" By holding their severance package hostage, management has workers by the balls. Collective action would be the best way to send a clear message to management, but unfortunately, organizing people is damn tough, especially when livelihoods are on the line. IT workers are pretty much on their own. Government won't help. There's no union to help. In short, stop waiting for somebody to rescue you.
But here's some food for thought: What if people had a second or third source of income? Even if those alternate sources of income were much smaller than their day job's income, the balance of power would certainly change. I think it's imperative that workers cultivate alternate sources of income AKA side hustles.
Over the past 8 years I've been doing dividend investing and putting my money to work for me. Now I make an average of $700 every month for doing nothing (passive income FTW!!). This isn't enough to enable my financial independence, but it is enough to give me more options in life. Ultimately, having F*** You money should be any worker's long term goal.
The company I worked for had very close business relations with large range of huge "name" insurance companies and a myriad of smaller firms as well.
I was front line with them for 2000-2015 and watched as "another large insurance company in Boston, named after a US President" first outsourced a lot of their work to US firms while keeping in-house people. Then they got rid of most of the in-house staff and eventually outsourced all of that work to India. A LOT of Americans at several different companies lost their jobs.
The firm I was with went from having about 20 people dedicated to that client to having zero and instead just a client contact when they needed something.
Another firm we worked with in the Boston area did very similar things. First they outsourced within the US. And then they sent all that work to India and not only laid off a lot of their own people, the companies they used for US outsourcing also laid off a bunch of people.
One thing all of us can do to help support some jobs in the US is demand paper statements and bills for everything you can. An awful lot of people are employed to produce and mail those damn bills and statements and it's one area that has not yet been eliminated entirely by offshoring. Some companies are trying to do mail in Canada and have it trucked into the US to be mailed but this is still relatively rare. Right now, demanding a paper bill stands a good chance of helping keep somebody in a job. They don't need a handout. They need YOUR utility bill or insurance policy to print and mail to you.
Sig for hire.
We can't call it a union (although the CWA just won their 6-week fight against Verizon, so there's that..) but a professional organization is what's needed. A professional organization can hire lobbyists, who will pay Congresspersons whatever is necessary to counteract the lobbyists on the business side. There has to be a way to level the H-1B playing field so body shops can't abuse it, and no one company or set of companies gets a huge advantage. If I were king that's the first thing I would do - cancel the entire program temporarily across the board so no one can keep profiting from it, sort out reasonable limits on it, and restart it alongside a professional organization. The organization would act like a combination of the AMA and state licensing boards, ensuring a high barrier of entry into the profession (i.e. no more coder bootcamp yahoos or paper MCSEs.) It would also enforce quality, make members responsible for messes they create, etc.
The other thing that a professional organization can offer is a reasonably standard training progression through an apprentice-style program. The big offshorings I've read about lately have been at utility companies, Disney and insurance companies. I wonder how many of those jobs they got rid of were mainframe-related. I work in the airline IT industry and it is getting extremely hard to find people to replace the retiring mainframers, and these people will be needed for quite a while. If you had a bunch of apprentice-level people working with the older guys and learning that skill set as one of a broad set of other skill sets, you wouldn't have the knee-jerk offshoring reaction. Plus, you could have a mix of "master craftsmen" and apprentices to spread out the salary levels. Yes, people with 25 years' experience and a family to support are more expensive than fresh grads who don't even have a goldfish to care for and can move tomorrow if needed.
I really think this is the only way to ensure that we have a steady supply of new people coming into the field. Not every system out there is built in Web Framework of the Month; I've been lucky to have the opportunity to work in lots of IT subspecialties with a diverse set of systems, ancient and new. I worry that new people aren't going to get this opportunity because Tata and Cognizant are abusing the H-1B program. Mainframes are ancient, but some of the core banking, government, airline, utility and insurance systems have decades of business logic embedded in them. TCS and the like have the perfect sales pitch for mainframe-dependent CEOs -- "fire your senior guys, sign here and we'll put 50,000 coders on the project tomorrow; you won't even know you have a mainframe."
There aren't more stories of these workers losing it completely and shooting up the places, although their rage is better spent shooting up the CEO and his fellow "we'll make millions personally while screwing more americans out of their jobs!" losers on the Board....
In response to the winner-take-all, it's worked well for the last 200 years, and even then we used to vote for the vice-president separately and before that the runner up became VP. What we really need to do is increase the number of Reps and Senators to more accurately reflect our population.
Money or justice?
If you love justice, you will say screw the severance and refuse to train replacements.
And the country is having a national debate whether it's better to elect a liar or a thief. How about neither? It reminds me of that scene in the Blue Brothers. "We got both kinds of music... Country AND Western!"
The latter half of the 2000s was rough for US dev and test employees at the Lexington campus as more and more foreign workers filled the halls and morale took a dive as people saw the writing on the wall. Of course, now Lexmark is in the toilet and being sold to the Chinese, so that worked out real well.
"Shall we play a game?" -W.O.P.R.
"I suspect people are sacrificing their dignity for the illusion of safety here- how is the situation they are faced with different from the one they will face at the end of the line? The person may have a bit more money but they will still be unemployed."
It would be great if people were smart with their money and saved, but it's tough. For example, I have two kids in child care/preschool, and it's going to be a huge bite out of our salaries until they're both in elementary school. Soon as this started, my savings rate went way down and we've had to focus on pumping money into our retirements and college funds rather than having that essential emergency fund. Child care in an expensive area is like paying another mortgage every month.
Also, a lot of people might need to keep working to fund retirement. There are tons of people who have very little saved for whatever reason. In previous times, employers paid for retirement through pensions, and most people didn't live more than a few years beyond retirement. Now we're faced with the prospect of living until 95 or 100 with only what little savings we could scrape together and Social Security.
As for why people would stay, almost all of these H-1B replacement stories involve companies selectively cutting the people with long service to the company. I'm a long-tenure employee with my employer, but I have no illusions that they're eventually going to offshore everyone if some MBA's spreadsheet tells them to. However, if you worked during a different era where companies took care of their employees, this might hit you really hard. My wife works for a company that routinely has people working there 20, 30, 40 years because the (now previous) owners treated their employees so well. They just got sold off to another company who is notorious for _not_ being nice to their employees and a lot of the long-service people are very upset and nervous about the future. Like it or not, your job becomes part of your identity when you work somewhere long enough. People might feel like they need to stay until the bitter end, that they'll never get new work (even if they're qualified.) This is actually a concern of mine, and I work very hard to keep my skills sharp. Employers don't want to hire people once they turn 40.
I guess my advice to any new entrant to IT is that you need to be flexible, willing to cobble together contract work into a job, and save every single penny you make that isn't covering an essential expense. Oh, and you have to be in another field after 40 unless you're incredibly lucky and land at an employer that values experience. Truth is that insurance companies see computers as a necessary evil, not a competitive advantage.
Seems lately that IT job openings are mostly contract positions, when I scan careerbuilder, or LinkedIn.
In the past 10yrs where I work, I've seen the transition. Ten years ago, most of the data center personnel worked for the company. Now they are mostly outsourced service personnel, or contract employees. Most of the hires in EDI for the past few years have been contract workers, too.
My own department used to be 100% company workers, until the past three years or so. Now they hire seasonal contract workers, "temps."
Of course, the Executive that did the big outsourcing push received kudos and promotions, and is now a SVP....
When I discreetly talk to the contact workers in my dept., I find they get no medical or dental benefits. They are just compensated with an hourly rate.
Lastly, during my annual reviews, my mgr never hesitates to remind me I am the most highly compensated person with my job title in the dept. I interpret it as "I will be the 1st to get the boot, when the time comes for further cost reductions."
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Transamerica has hired H1B visa employees to replace US workers too. US employees have had to train their H1B replacements under threat of withholding severance just like at Disney.
Chose one: [ ] Hillary - lying, cheating, corrupt politician who will deliver status quo, leaning left. [ ] The Donald - Exaggerating bullshit artist bigot who will deliver status quo (after hiring help), leaning ? (talks right, does left) [ ] A Circus - multiple 3rd party candidates all jump in the race and the election is a free-for-all, winner will deliver status quo...
There. Fixed that for you. And no, don't pretend he is not a bigot. He's a vulgarian version of George Wallace.
Employees say they are training overseas workers via web conferencing sessions. There are contractors in the office as well, some of whom may be working on temporary H-1B visas.
Unless you are living in a small town or city with few IT employment options, if you get caught in such a situation, you allowed yourself to be cornered into that kind of situation. This kind of shit does not happen all of the sudden. The writings are always on the wall for a long enough time for anyone to orchestrate a plan B or C.
Always have your bug-out bag ready, specially if you work in IT. That's your job security. Otherwise, you will always live in angst waiting for years for someone to give you the pink slip (and finally getting it with no options ready.)
I will shed no tears if/when one these laid off people shoots up the place. It's ok, they're insured.
...
Teach them what your PHBs have told you to teach them. Teach them the absolute minimum that isn't in the PHB's instructions. Don't explain anything about how or why. Collect the severance pay. Go get another job and wait for the panicked phone call at 03:00. Have agreements (made on napkins at bars ; napkins then burned) with other axed colleagues about minimum pay rates and "fire-fighting" pay rates. Screw the bastards, and teach people even less.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Does a company pay a worker to slit his own throat?
Is the check post-dated?
Iceland claims they have exclusive fishing rights in Irish coastal waters. Idiotic claims are common, Argentina has no exclusive.
EEZ are irrelevant unless they have power to enforce them.
In practice when claimed EEZs overlap the line is drawn halfway between coasts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There is no doubt. The debate is about the numbers that were celebrating.
Ask yourself: If there had been thousands, would the press say it? Hell no.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Maybe if the civilization-ending asteroid strikes Earth. Otherwise, they'll be truckers in five years. They'll still be truckers in ten years. After that, it starts getting a bit iffy, but I bet they'll still be some people driving trucks even in twenty years. Even if not, I'd still say you'd have better job security than IT.
Indeed. I cannot think of ANY American president who has a good record in the Middle East. Although Carter got a peace deal signed, he's sometimes blamed for the Iran hostage crisis. Fair criticism or not, bad stuff happens over there and you won't come out looking good.
Table-ized A.I.