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University of California Hires India-Based IT Outsourcer, Lays Off Tech Workers (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes from a report via Computerworld: The University of California is laying off a group of IT workers at its San Francisco campus as part of a plan to move work offshore. Laying off IT workers as part of a shift to offshore is somewhere between rare and unheard-of in the public sector. The layoffs will happen at the end of February, but before the final day arrives the IT employees expect to train foreign replacements from India-based IT services firm HCL. The firm is working under a university contract valued at $50 million over five years. This layoff affects 17% of UCSF's total IT staff, broken down this way: 49 IT permanent employees will lose their jobs, along with 12 contract employees and 18 vendor contractors. This number also includes 18 vacant IT positions that won't be filled, according to the university. Governments and publicly supported institutions, such as UC, have contracted with offshore outsourcers, but usually it's for new IT work or to supplement an existing project. The HCL contract with UCSF can be used by other UC campuses, which means the layoffs may expand across its 10 campuses. HCL is a top user of H-1B visa workers.
This university should lose it's state and federal funding for doing something like this.
Horrible insult to the USA, our students, and our educators.
Terrible.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Laying off current qualified workers should cause all of their H1B visas to be automatically canceled.
Obviously there is not a shortage of available workers.
Uh you do know that of the two presidential candidates Trump is the more likely one to offshore things? Hint: businesses do it all the time and he is a businessman.
they should be teching real skills not outsourcing work. Also PASS the savings on
Also PASS the savings on
Passing savings on? What kind of commie talk is this. Real capitalism is asking the highest price the market will bear.
The mountains of madness have many little plateaus of sanity - Terry Pratchett.
Trump is...
Here is Trump's actual policy regarding H-1B, which you may read on his campaign site:
Increase prevailing wage for H-1Bs. We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program's lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.
The last time anyone heard anything definitive about H-1B from Clinton was early in 2016 at which point she wanted a higher cap (more H-1B workers.) Not surprising given how much loot Silicon Valley has dumped into the Clinton coffers.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Yet he staffs his resorts using similar tricks.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Are you telling me you can't find a handful of smart kids in your Computer Science department that would rather do remedial computer work than work at the mall? You've literally got an entire department of unemployed cheap labor and you are looking to India? That doesn't speak too highly about your graduates...
Immoral maybe when having a citizen train another citizen. Probably illegal when having citizen train H1B worker. After all, when are H1B workers allowed? When an organization can demonstrate that they can't find Americans to do the same job (says nothing about the cost of doing it). But here, you have Americans who can do the job having to train foreign workers who can't as yet do the job. If they were training an offshore team in Bangalore or Gurgaon to do it, it would still be legal, if sadistic, but if they have to train H1B's to do it, then no!
At least not unless there is a reduction in services. I don't know why people think outsourcing always saves money. It often doesn't. Basically outsourcing is a good idea if you are too small to be able to do something yourself efficiently. You either don't do enough of it, or do it often enough to make it worth having an internal team.
For example construction is something basically everyone outsources. You just don't build new buildings often enough to make it a worthwhile proposition to have a dedicated staff for it, they'd be sitting around most of the time.
However when you get large, often you can do shit in house for cheaper, or at least the same price and have more control. It isn't like those contract workers are free, and it isn't like the company who contracts them takes no cut.
With a large university, practically everything should be in house. They are so large they usually have their own police forces, they are literally small cities. So you have enough needs that hiring your own staff usually makes sense. In general when I've seen a university outsource something they used to do it ends up costing them more, and the service is generally worse, sometimes a bit, sometimes a lot.
Thus my bet is in the end this contract costs them more than they were paying.
Worst example I've seen is a friend who consults for a public school system (primary, not university). They outsource most everything, as is evident from him contracting to them to do development. So a project he was doing needed a dedicated Linux virtual server. They balked at that, and he pushed back, confused. It was a low spec server, could be a VM, it just needed to be dedicated for security. The reason they balked? The outsourcing firm that ran their servers charged them well over $1000/year per VM. AT a rate like that, you don't need many VMs before it would be cheaper to buy a server and hire a guy who does nothing but mind after it.
H1B minwage needs to be like 100k-150K
Those skillsets are high school level skilled trades these days. Because of the insistence that IT was only something you could get into with a full college degree by people like those on Slashdot we never trained those workers in the skillsets.
IT is the equivalent of welding these days. Until the US vocational schools start cranking out IT and programmer techs companies are going to fill the positions with Indians.
They *HAVE* skilled workers. They are getting rid of them.
The businesses probably argue that the H-1B workers have the TECHNICAL skills they need, and the training is more of a list of "This is what we've already done, this is why we did it" etc. since you can never hire a new worker, domestic or foreign, that instantly knows everything that's already been done on a project.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
And who controls the government in the US? That's right, the corporations. Case closed.
And who controls the government in the US?
Elected politicians do.
The fact that these elected politicians sell legislation to the highest bidder has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with Statism.
If you want to reduce the influence of money on the State, then the correct course of action is to reduce the influence of the State. I bet however, that you are one of those "don't throw your vote away" douches that is going to vote for Donald Clinton.
"His name was James Damore."
What is stopping them from "outsourcing" their IT to another UC school which teaches system administration as part of it's curriculum. It seems like it would be a good opportunity to teach remote administration.
It was probably on the table that they have another UC's IT department handle it; it was likely *never* on the table that IT students handle it.
Personally, I wouldn't be an IT student, if it's obvious that IT is going to be outsourced everywhere; about the only thing you could train to be would be a trainer. It's like being an English major: the only jobs are in creating more English majors.
What am I missing?
Most likely the fact that UCSF is a graduate medical university, and that means that pretty much every IT system on campus has "live data", which means, in turn, that you have to be able to trust the people running it with HIPAA sensitive information.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue, if they ever screw up. You can't really trust students to the same degree.
>The fact that these elected politicians sell legislation to the highest bidder has nothing to do with Capitalism and everything to do with Statism.
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear. These politicians are being capitalists by selling their product, legislation to the highest bidder. Their supposed to sell it to the voters (who appointed them at the ballot box and pay their salaries with taxes) but the voters offer less than the market will bear.
That's capitalism - like it or not.
The thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service. What you're seeing is the outcome of the long republican drive telling us "universities should be more like businesses" - which is what they are now doing, and this is exactly why that was always a terrible idea. The two types of organisation have nothing in common. Universities are not SUPPOSED to be profitable or efficient or even cost-effective. They are suppose to produce knowledge and to give that freely to the world. That's the exact opposite of what a business is supposed to do.
If all you care about is the cheapest school the market will bear - private universities exist for that purpose, but public universities first and primary goal is supposed to be research and even their entire education section's sole real purpose is to pass the results of the research into the population and, coincidentally, train another generation of researchers to take over when the current batch dies.
Making money, even training people for a job, is nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do. The latter is, at most, a tangential benefit from sharing knowledge with students.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh man, I don't often comment, but wow, they chose HCL... HCL is shit. I work for a financial company that is canceling HCL contracts and kicking their asses out, several of their staff has recieved permanent bans from EVER working at my company again. From people not showing up ans billing for time, costing over $100,000 in fraudulent payroll. To people just deciding to not work because the Project Manager was not in that day. despite them having set tasks and work scheduled for that day. We've gone through a slew of "frontmen" the business representatives, even their White American representatives suck and fill our ears with lies. Going to India based solutions is NOT good for American companies. For one there is a massive language barrier. Indians are inefficient and poorly organized. I'm a casual scripter and out programmed a team of 10 "professionals" As stated above, it takes 10 or more to achieve the same level of work as a single well trained US based IT worker. Then there's the constant brain drain. Indians cycle on a 3-5 years at their job, burn out and work somewhere else. Or some other company is hiring for better pay and they pack up and move across the country to their new venture. Over the long term this ends up costing business far more than their bargain basement prices at the start. Indian politics are also horrendous. Woman get worse treatment no matter their skill level. They'll fire a skilled worker to hire someone from their local district. America needs to stop trying to skim the bottom line and work towards highly trained and more efficient working practices. Not this "out of site out of mind" principal.
How about we do one better, we see what the ACTIONS of what someone like Trump, who makes products actually does versus what he SAYS.
Oh, you're all quiet all of a sudden? What happened? Yeah, you drank it all, didn't you? Quit smiling at me with those blue mouths!