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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.
No, because they are supposed to be committed to the welfare of students that pay good money to be there. Instead they choose to become part of the problem.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Expecting an employee who is being fired to train his replacement is immoral. This is even more so when the employee is being fired without cause.
The employees have every right, both legal and moral, to stonewall the education of their replacements. It would be immoral to sabotage systems or update documentation to be incorrect, but passive resistance is fair game, and far better than the University deserves.
There are plenty of good people, but the problem is good people get too many enemies as they rise to the top.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
UCSF is a medical campus, and they operate a hospital, so this is probably where the cuts are being made. Healthcare IT is badly funded and there's never enough money to do anything interesting...they're focused solely on keeping doctors happy so IT's needs never come before that. But, having a public university system signing outsourcing contracts with vendors, foreign or domestic, is a new twist I didn't see coming.
It didn't say in the article what they offshored, but in my experience HCL is a mainframe programming shop, so of course this means that anyone being replaced is probably "old" and will have a very rough time finding employment even close to previous levels again. That sucks double for them, because they're going to be marched through the "train your replacement" humiliation to get severance/early retirement.
I'm all for stuff like cloud computing, colocation, etc. where it makes sense, but I really don't understand why companies continue to believe they're going to get some great deal doing an outsourcing engagement. Do they not realize these companies have to get paid enough to profit from the deal? Where do they think that money comes from? I hate the trend of running companies on a huge tower of outsourced services. Every company of reasonable size should do almost everything in house -- it's cheaper in the long run and the employees doing the work are more engaged. There is absolutely no task that is better done by an outsourcer than your own employees.
In a battle of Good versus Evil, Evil usually wins unless Good is very, very careful.
#DeleteChrome
UC is a system of campuses.
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.
What am I missing?
See, you're looking at the problem with common sense, they're looking at with dollar signs.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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You do understand WHY foreign labour is cheaper, right?
Despite common believe, IT employees are not able to live on half a can of mountain dew a day.
The entire economy has to basically collapse in order for local labour to become "competitive" with countries where everything in the economy is cheaper.
As an example; technical education in India is about US$1000 per year (http://qz.com/445500/the-cost-of-getting-a-decent-education-in-india-is-now-staggering/).
According to GP, that would be roughly 35 times cheaper at the very least.
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They used to be. But then the federal government took over the entire industry and got rid of bk'ing student loans.
There's theory, and there's fact.
The theory was that no one in their right mind would loan someone in poverty, and who did not qualify academically or athletically for a scholarship, the money for them to get an underwater basket weaving degree, unless the government agreed to do it.
In exchange, the government, as guarantor, put the condition on the loans that they could not be discharged in bankruptcy -- just like any debt owed the government (i.e. we still have debtor's prisons, only they are for taxes). That way the guarantor could throw your butt in jail if you decided not to pay the student loan back.
The fact is that underwater basket weaving isn't really a marketable enough skill to allow you to make your student loan payments.
Way off, buddy. I'm one of those eurotrash types who lives in a (still) democratic country. Unfortunately you USians are doing your damnest to destroy what's left of democracy all over the world.
But I digress. It's a long standing tradition in your mighty country to buy your way into politics. Show me a politician not backed up by some lobby group (BTW nice euphemism for bribery) founded by some corporation. I'm not talking here about some obscure name from some obscure state but the ones from the federal level.
Can you?
That "argument" boils down to "USA! USA! USA!" - might fit a Trump rally, but really is not argument at all.
How is that not an argument? I expect the government of Mexico to serve the interests of the citizens of Mexico. I expect the government of China to serve the interests of the citizens of China. I expect the government of the USA to serve the interests of the citizens of the USA.
What is an argument is that service from abroad is likely to be unsatisfactory - at least because of distance, time zones, and the cultural differences, even if the provider is competent in general. And that last point is not a given.
When somebody else wants to fuck your wife do you quibble about whether or not his service will be satisfactory to her?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Sometimes irony is too much.
I imagine the university will also have the cognitive dissonance to talk about STEM and the information economy and the future of highly skilled work. We need to educate our kids in technology so they can have jobs in the future!
By that they mean the kids can take courses at the university to bring business to the university.
All the while doing this to actual tech workers.