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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.
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?
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
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.
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 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.
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!
After all, they're the only thing that has ever worked against a bunch of asshat employers.
That is all.
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!
good enough is always good enough, especially at 1/10 the price.
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It’s just unfortunate that executives will not be affected, though.
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.
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."
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.