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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..."
You've let the worst human beings rule this world since... a long time now. You expect *good* news to just appear without doing anything about it? This nightmare will continue until a good person (if such a thing exists) decides to put a stop to it.
So this college can't produce skilled tech folks?
And that's why they need H1B's?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Trump!
(Perhaps being crazy is underrated.)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
UC is very wrong to do this. They should lose all of their funding. My message to Students and Staff get ready for subpar work. Yes Sir Yes Sir but no progress and they will even break what infrastructure you already have.
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.
This is exactly the kind of foreign labor abuse President Trump is going to crack down on. I hope it bites them in the ass.
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.
Real capitalism? Define real capitalism please, because its not capitalism with plenty of government intervention like it is in the USA (or a lot of countries for that matter).
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
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.
University of California Cites 'Courage' As Reason To Lay Off Tech Workers
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...
So one of the most Liberal institutions in one of the most Liberal cities in the country (being outdone only by its neighbors Berzerkley and Santa Cruz) decides to do exactly what Liberals accuse Big Business of? So many things - they can't produce students who'll do the same work at the same rates while being in the same time zone & place?
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.
Maybe give the students a crash course in Hindi/Kannada/Tamil/Marathi, so that they'll know how to run the conversation
I wouldn't hold out much hope. He two-faced and both of them are fake orange. He's already flipped to supporting H1b visas already:
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-h1b-visas-gop-debate-immigration-2016-3
Kelly: "Mr. Trump, your campaign website to this day argues that more visas for highly skilled workers would, quote, "decimate American workers." However, at the CNBC debate, you spoke enthusiastically in favor of these visas. So which is it? "
Trump: "I'm changing. I'm changing. We need highly skilled people in this country," Trump said. "And if we can't do it, we'll get them in....And one of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges ... as soon as they're finished, they get shoved out. They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately. They're not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country. "
We the people, for the people by the people
(suckers)
https://www.usfca.edu/arts-sci...
Well, it's kinda funny...
This was likely a factor in the decision: the minimum wage is $13/hour and will be $15/hour by 2018.
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Minimum-Wage-Jumps-to-13-Per-Hour-in-San-Francisco-385257511.html
When something is more expensive, less of it gets bought. When it costs more to hire people, jobs start to go away.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Student loans need to have chapter 7 and 11 so that schools can't get a free pass.
Other wise I'd tell them to fuck off if I was told to train the person who is going to take my job by me being laid off.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
There is a large portion called "profits" that you seem to be omitting. People really get screwed at both ends because companies are taking everything and funneling more and more to shareholders year over year, or simply keeping it offshore. At one time there was balance but now there is not.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Capitalism is NOT a system of governance nor is it a form or measure of patriotism, regardless of how one may have been socially engineered to believe otherwise.
CS = lot's of theory and little hands on at state schools. Also mit and harvard are more on the theory side and had some outsourcing WTF in the past.
nested VM's just request an 32 core 128 GB VM and then nest all own VM that you need under that.
masters degrees that are not accredited with schools own accredited ones.
H1B minwage needs to be like 100k-150K
The higher ed bubble is ready to pop.
ITT was good in the 90's / 2000's but in 2016 it went under.
Le Cordon Bleu schools owned by Career Education Corporation 2015
Being used to undercut my field of employment.
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.
Anyone who has tried to outsource an entire department worth of people can tell you: this shit is going to go up in flames like the Hindenburg. Hydrogen. Gas. Explosion. Their network is going to become a smoking ruin. Sit back and roast marshmallows over the flames people.
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.
Horrible insult to the USA, our students, and our educators. Terrible.
Yes, but this is in character with CA politicians. Recently when the Bay Bridge was constructed they used Chinese steel.
Do you think the jobs of white collar IT workers are any more valuable than blue collar steel workers to CA politicians? That being a UC employee makes any difference to them? And don't kid yourself about the administrators of the UC system being politicians. Funds must be cut to fund their political payback projects and their vanity projects.
FWIW, I have seen behind the scenes of UC politics a little, spent some time on two campuses.
And who controls the government in the US? That's right, the corporations. Case closed.
In a battle of Good versus Evil, Evil usually wins unless Good is very, very careful.
#DeleteChrome
So they are trying to keep a sinking boat afloat. That's why they recruit out of state/out of country students: they pay full tuition, as opposed to residents who pay less.
Also, don't underestimate the influence of the corporate takeover of the educational system. The regents and the leadership at all the campuses are integrated with corporate interests. Public funded research results in patents and the profits are used to support research. Sounds OK, but in fact the ultimate benefit goes to corporations who have deals with the schools. It's a lot like the NFL using state supported schools as their farm team system. Get someone else to develop the talent and harvest the results at a huge discount.
I'm not defending any of this. It's just one more example of the corrupt state of the country. All the costs are go one way, all the payout goes the other.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
Real capitalism? Define real capitalism please, because its not capitalism with plenty of government intervention like it is in the USA (or a lot of countries for that matter).
Oh yeah, I can really tell that "government intervention" is hurting Apple these days.
I cite Apple, because if you were to pick one company who will gladly ask the "highest price the market will bear", they are THE example.
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.
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.
Laying off current qualified workers should cause all of their H1B visas to be automatically canceled.
Like when Microsoft laid off Nokia workers?
Obviously there is not a shortage of available workers.
I'm sure that Microsoft could have employed all those "Can't make a cell phone product anyone wants to buy" workers in another segment of their business, like the X-Box division. That would have enabled them to make an X-Box no one wants to buy too, since that's the core competency of those workers.
In other words: that's a dumb idea with frosting on top.
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?
Yes, they are telling you that.
UCSF doesn't have a CS department, and they aren't talking about CS anyway, they are talking about IT. Different degrees.
Which they weren't happy about and didn't train me correctly. And honestly, I don't blame them. It was a shitty position to be in.
Be seeing you...
And what does it say to those CS students across the bay. No worries, you're wasting your time?
What it says to UCB CS students... is "Aren't you glad you're getting a CS degree (computer science emphasis), rather than an IT degree (business and communications emphasis)?" ...which is probably exactly what it should be saying.
That's not capitalism, it's free market economics.
Simply to mandate that if you replace a position with an H1-B, you have to pay them the same salary. It's only fair. And also allow them to find work, whenever they want, on the open market and leave the company at any time. No company can effectively master their H1-Bs.
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?
Especially when the product involves basic human needs like Education or Health. Quite why the food industry hasn't realised this and continues to compete to drive prices downward is a mystery to me.
Universities have been outsourcing their IT for years. At my school, we use Microsoft for email, Elucian for student records, Plesk for web services, and I can't recall which company does personnel. Company comes in and claims that, because of their existing infrastructure, they can offer better services at lower per-student cost, and budget pressure takes over. Contracting out the actual staffing of help desk is just the next logical step.
It's a funny thing to watch a university that was part of the development of open, distributed electronic mail abdicate its management to Microsoft. It feels like selling out, although it's probably just the natural progression of technological maturity. My only compensation is to imagine that the university is using some of those people to develop the next cool technology, and I just don't know about it yet.
Those laid off should claim that layoffs trigger them and they need a safe space at work. Claim that outsourcing is a microaggression! They should be able to get the process reversed quickly.
Do you have ESP?
>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 *
Your trying to sell a product for MONEY, do not kid yourself, this is about MO MONEY for the top of that college. Those top 20 folks that are multimillionaires on the back of student debt. They just gave the big F-OFF kid, your not smart enough to realize your stupid. Perhaps it was that Fluoride, Mercury fillings, and lead in the water that put your kids here?
New World ORDER and TPP for the FAIL folks, repeal Nafta, pull down this bullshit outsourcing/insourcing scheme, GO VOTE ignore any polls and vote. You won't stop this level of stupid with some letters to the dean, expect all colleges to attempt this soon if they are not already doing it behind the scenes. Your paychecks will not go up, and your employment will not get stable until you fix the 1% bleeding you dry. Its called Tarrifs, its called taxes, its called real trade agreements that help Americas people not to the benefit of 65 people that own half the planet.
That's with fringe benefits which are at least 33% of that cost.
So multiple $127k * 0.66 to get their salary... or about $83K per year.
That's not a lot for tech workers in one of the most expensive cities in the US
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
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.
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?
You hit it right on the head...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Damn it, where are my mod points this morning? Excellent post!
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
CS = lot's of theory and little hands on at state schools
Apparently CS also means skipping that class where they talked about using apostrophes (unless it's used to remark out a line in a script).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Now that it is happening to the public sector, the real power in this country other than big business (public sector unions) will sit up and notice, and maybe we'll finally get some rules against this
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
+1. I went to university for 5 years for a CS degree and it cost me $25k for tuition alone (it's closer to $40k today). As far as being a prerequisite for my current job goes, I'd say maybe 5% of the overall content was useful, another 5% provides a nice background, but otherwise 90% was wasted time on unnecessary specialization (AI, search engine algorithms, heuristic search, advanced maths). But 100% was required to get the piece of paper which is a requirement for my position.
In Japan is hard to get accepted by a college but after that you’re on a easy street party!
Also the entrance exams can be passed easy if good at test cramming.
doctors have a union / AMA to stop that!
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.
I think they are similar in that there are two aspects to welding - one i step skills trade and the other is the engineering and science aspect that requires advanced education. You can get a BS, MS and PhD in Welding Engineering for example, where the focus is on the science of welding and goes far beyond sticking two pieces of metal together; and the welding engineers I met have great respect for good welders. Similarly, you can teach a bunch of kids coding basics but don't expect them to understand computer science; do real CS types respect coders?. Also, welding and programming are similar in that anyone can strike an arc or write code, to do it at a master level takes experience, practice and talent. Fortunately for welders, having that type of skill means you are in demand, for coders it simply means you are too expensive and can be replaced by a couple keyboard bangers just out of school.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Bernie Sanders.
Capitalism doesn't differentiate the external causes of profit. It just rewards profit.
If the federal government stopped subsidizing student loans the education industry would adapt and, perhaps, lower tuition. Or reduce the time needed for specific training (degrees intended to prepare one for a vocation might better be called 'training'). Or change the course offering to reduce institutional costs. They would adapt.
And if the Federal government stopped granting H1-B visas on the flimsiest of claims of no available talent, businesses would find employees to do the work needed, or move where the employees are. Unless, of course, moving was not practical.
Capitalism is distorted by government manipulation, and that's a good reason to limit government. But capitalism isn't nearly so concerned with that. It's not that capitalism is right or wrong, it that capitalism is efficient, even when interfered with. And efficient economics is better than inefficient economics.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
We graduate college STEM graduates. We need voch tech STEM graduates.
I always find the most amusing outsource is when states/government outsources unemployment office jobs. Really, you could not find someone unemployed to fill the position in the unemployment office? I know Indiana played with it, along with California and even England.
True this.
Not long ago your typical college graduate in India could find work as a call center worker. That changed, and many college students in India were working their last year of school in those call centers. Fast forward to today, and it's not even high school graduates in India that are the hot call center employees - it's high school graduates in the Philippines.
College graduates from India are now sent out as programming leads, project managers, business analysts. High school graduates in India are head-down coders. A full year of experience qualifies you as a lead. Two years later, you've rotated back to India, team lead. Two years later, rotate back to the US, an architect. Your predecessor rotated back to India to lead your team... And you, as architect, have a team of BAs and leads telling them what to code overnight.
Departmental outsources let companies fix costs in a way that they cannot with the incumbent department. VPN the NOC over to Gurgaon, everyone is watching the screens, responding, taking MAC orders and funneling them through the chain leaving your actual workers waiting 72 hours for their login to the ERP to be reset. Or not.
It's a real time Dilbert strip.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I learned a new term last week sitting in a grad class -- "Fresher".
When an Indian identifies themselves as a "Fresher", it means they don't know squat about that field even if they hold an advanced degree.
My guess is that lots of Freshers from HCL will be running around UCSF very soon.
Damn, man. Now people won't be able to tell if the "Hello, dees ees weendows tiknical support," phone calls are real or a phishing scam. Maybe the UC system people who made this boneheaded move fell for it.
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.
Can you hear my eyes rolling from wherever you are? Because you should be able to.
I'm constantly amazed at the ability of Libertarians to ignore the power of concentrated wealth. If you reduce the influence of the State, who steps into the vacuum? Nobody? You think that's reasonable to expect? Or maybe the most wealthy and powerful private interests? What do you do about them? How do you reduce their influence when they start running roughshod over people and their rights and interests? Do you sue them? With what money? And who enforces contracts and the outcome of lawsuits? The government? The same government that should be so weak it isn't worth taking over?
This is what drives me nuts about this simplistic Libertarian bullshit. The government has to be the biggest kid on the block! Reasonable people can disagree about the size and scope of government. But the government has to be supreme in order to enforce laws. At the end of the day it has to have coercive power. The idea behind a government by and for the people is that this big bully will work for the benefit of society and protect the weak against the strong. You keep money out of it by enacting laws against it and enforcing them; not by reducing government to the point of impotence.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
You can also offshore mathematicians, physicists, doctors... should they all be replaced with vocational school graduates? What happens when our vocational school graduates are replaced with offshore vocational school graduates, because those will be always cheaper?
You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear.
Nope. Wasn't me. Do you have a problem with reading comprehension and attribution? It appears so, since it was someone else who said what you are now claiming that I said.
Do you make this mistake often? Perhaps also when you blame republicans for what the democrats did?
"His name was James Damore."
That's about right. Figure 50% of salary for benefits, costs, and regulatory expenses.
Sort of $84k salary/yr. Pretty good work. But that's the average. Your CCIT/blah network architect and senior admins get more, the net admins less.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Show me a politician not backed up by some lobby group (BTW nice euphemism for bribery) founded by some corporation.
Just one? How about Dave Brat.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
You're not familiar with the 'plural you' ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Thinking that through, I never, NEVER got any single thing that cost more than $75 from my parents. Never. Not even my good fly rod. My first phone bill as an adult was $11.76 for a month. I scored free installation because the Phone Company got caught claiming private lines were not available in the city despite being required by tariff to provide them when requested.
And now I'm coming to grips with giving my 14 year old daughter a smartphone worth $400-$800. For two years tops. And $50/month for service. In two years that's more money than my first PC cost. And the phone line for the modem. And the modem.
Some of our pain is self-inflicted.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
should they all be replaced with vocational school graduates?
They are. My wife is a doctor and what a doctor does in 2016 has changed a lot from what they did in 1996, 1976, 1956, etc. You have nurse practitioners, registered nurses, all the way down to orderlies. You can get into the medical field with... voch tech level training. It's not because the work doesn't need to be done it's because the doctors need to work on other things and it's too expensive to pay them to do something someone with a tech degree can do.
A doctor should know how to put in an IV but there's a good chance they'll suck at it. They don't do it anymore that job falls to other positions.
We need fewer CS code architects and more Programmers that can actually build it.
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.
Didn't ITT Tech just go under? And how is designing, building, upgrading, maintaining and troubleshooting complex systems anything like welding?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
> And how is designing, building, upgrading, maintaining and troubleshooting complex systems anything like welding?
Spoken like someone that doesn't weld in an industrial setting.
A CS major should have as much to do with what the programmer does as a college welding major does with skilled trade welding.
Didn't ITT Tech just go under
Good, maybe we can push people to community colleges and high school voctech programs instead of for profit colleges.
And then bribing the government to give you some sort of competitive advantage, and raising the price more.
Rule 35 of the internet: "If it can be hacked, it will be". - Charles Stross
Sorry pal, but now you're moving the goalpost. You declared that capitalism is selling at the highest cost the market will bear.
No, Kabukiwookie said that. Rockoon, the man you are replying to, said nothing of the sort. Rockoon pointed out not all market economies (where supply/demand helps set pricing) are capitalistic in nature. Governments can be involved in a market economy without their economy being primarily controlled by private ownership of property and the means of production (capitalism). China is a prime example of communism which relies heavily on manipulating market forces through state run corporations. On a global scale it behaves very similarly to capitalism, but the lack of private ownership of the economy precludes it from being considered capitalism.
the thing is - this is not supposed to be a capitalist institution. A public university is part of the civil service.
Every institution within a market economy, whether the economy is capitalism or communism, will be affected by market forces. Every institution without exception. Unless the government can both control the institution and force people to work there for a rate determined by the government, market forces will affect even non-profit institutions.
Making money, training people for a job, or increasing demand for IT professionals in the local economy are nowhere on the list of things a university is supposed to do.
There I fixed that for you to make it more relevant to the topic at hand. Like you implied above, the university should stick to its public charter and not take on so many tangential roles. Public universities were not created to increase the number of IT jobs by employing them in the university. If lowering the costs of operations helps them provide a better learning experience for a more affordable cost to society, they are doing their job. The choice to outsource IT operations may still be a bad one, but it doesn't conflict with the role of public universities in our society.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Oh, right. I forgot that Dubya fixed all that in the years from 2000-2008, and Obama fucked it all up again.
Nope, W. and Obama are both globalists, as was Bush Sr. It's been getting fucked up for at least that long.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
CS = lot's of theory and little hands on at state schools. Also mit and harvard are more on the theory side and had some outsourcing WTF in the past.
There is the problem. IT != CS. Getting a CS degree to do IT work is like getting your MD and becoming a nurse. Requiring CS degrees for simple IT work has fucking destroyed the industry.
Janet Napolitano
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.
That's poor oversight by the voters. Because most of them are re-electing the douchebags who made promises to the voters before the elections and then sold out to corporate interests. I'd expect a lot more people voting for third parties, concerns about "lost votes" be damned.
C - the footgun of programming languages
So underpaid foreign dregs is America's future in your book?
I think I found the corporate scumbag shill!
Not American but this affects every country that is currently racing to the bottom. Ffs, passive resistance is needed, probably futile, but someone needs to take a stand before we're all writing documentation for our Indian colleagues.
I've been told that as long as SW devs stay with a company past 45 or so, they can make it work until retirement.
...
That plan wouldn't work for any SW folks in this case.
About to turn 35 and jittery
One supposes the UofCA has a poor CS curriculum since they do not think so much of CS workers.
I can see how a guy who can't understand the shift key would want that to be true. But actively inserting an apostrophe where one doesn't even belong isn't a sign of laziness - laziness would involve leaving OUT an apostrophe where one ought to have been. Dropping them in where they don't belong is signs of a cognitive issue, and brings into question the meaningfulness of the entire post.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
There's your reason.
Kickbacks.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And now I'm coming to grips with giving my 14 year old daughter a smartphone worth $400-$800. For two years tops. And $50/month for service. In two years that's more money than my first PC cost. And the phone line for the modem. And the modem.
Some of our pain is self-inflicted.
Just get her a flip phone with cricket or whatever pre-paid equivalent you have in your area. Smartphones are great, but I feel like young teenagers don't have the capacity for responsible cell phone use.
Passing savings on? What kind of commie talk is this. Real capitalism is asking the highest price the market will bear.
And real free markets is refusing to pay a dime more than you absolutely must.
... and not once have I ever seen a transition to contract labor, especially off shore contract labor, do a satisfactory job.
Not once.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
As a group categorically refuse to train their replacements. If one person says they're going to do it, the administration can single that person out and make an example out of them. When the entire staff locks arms and says "no". What can they do then?
1. Proceed with firing them... That's great except for the problem where all the knowledge goes out the doors.
2. Lock them out... Except they only manage the physical access, so they're not sysadmins, nor know how to close accounts, etc.
3. Lawyer up and sue them for breach of contract or terms of employment?
I suspect the last option would likely be what they'd do, but if that happened what then? If my companies suing me for refusing to train my replacement, I don't see any incentive to train my replacement.
The whole thing seems like a fluster cluck from top to bottom.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
they haven't managed to patent foodstuffs to the point of having a monopoly yet.
The food industry does ask the highest price the market will bear. They can't gouge like education or health because there are lots of suppliers of food, unlike suppliers of education or health, who each undercut each other slightly to gain a slightly larger marketshare (and thus more profit overall than the alternative), which in aggregate drives the price that the market will bear down toward the cost of producing the food.
To make education or health care more like food, we'd need to increase the number of education and health care suppliers, or rather somehow make it easier for someone to go into business supplying education or health care and let the search for profit do the rest.
Of course, with education at least, a significant chunk of demand is not for the education per se -- it's easier than ever to actually learn things from many different sources. It's the status conferred by the organization that declares you to be educated. Increasing the supply of such status requires more than just increasing the supply of educators, but somehow increasing the pool of institutes that employers et al consider sufficiently status-conferring. That is a harder problem.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Glad to see someone else properly distinguishing between the two.
Of course, they're not mutually exclusive either, and it's possible that this situation in question is actually capitalism in action, not just the free market.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Uh, Welding Engineer. Look it up.
And the MPlumbers go by "Mechanical Engineers with specialization in fluid dynamics"
and the PhCarpenters are Civils.
If I were a UCSF IT employee, and if I thought I'd have a hard time getting another job, I'd be willing to keep my job at a lower salary.
Can UCSF offer their current employees a lower salary? Doing this would help UCSF, because the employees who stayed would be experienced.
If UCSF's HR/contracts department was able to fire current employees and bring in new HCL employees under a new contract, then they should be able to figure out a way to lower the salaries. If all else fails, maybe they can eliminate the current jobs, and then re-create the same jobs at a lower salary, and offer the jobs first to the current employees.
If a third party wants votes - let them earn it the right way. You don't run for president every four years... you need to be at the grassroots running for every office. Where's the libertarian candidate for postmaster, the green candidate for dogcatcher ? Run for those offices, prove your ideas at the ward level by running for seats at the low level and slowly wiinning. Then run for the councils of small towns and when you have a bunch of councilors then you run somebody for mayor of them. Prove your ideas in the towns that bite.
When you got a mayor in a 30% or more of the towns, then start running for cities and metros in the same way. When you got a bunch of those - THEN you can run for state government and eventually get some governors.
And then - 20 years from now,THEN you'll be a viable third party who can run for congress and the white house.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I live in Brat's district. He's a Tea Party douche-nozzle who sides with the plutocrats every time he votes on a bill. He's just as bought as the rest of them. Plus, he doesn't govern -- he grandstands.
'Brat' is a wholly appropriate name.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
First: The AMA is not a labor union. Also, as the years have gone by it has been gradually morphing into a political group. Most doctors are smart enough not to form/join a labor union and are smart enough to know that political goals can be achieved better by political organizations.
Second: Contrary to popular opinion, most doctors do not belong to the AMA.
Particularly if you create the organizations yourselves to give yourself meaningless credentials! Right Dr. Paul?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
One of the two candidates in our upcoming presidential election has promised to fix the H-1B problem and the other has not.
I suspect IT workers in California will still vote "D" come November believing that Democrats actually care about the working class.
If not they need any public funding withdrawn, and get the ITT Treatment with regards to student loans.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
http://www.petition2congress.c...
Casteism
The first step towards socialism - a justice system and police force paid for through taxation. Laws banning slavery, forcing universal suffrage, universal justice, universal taxation, sexual equality, racial equality, banning the buying and selling of children and use of children as sex slaves, etc.
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
Bernie Sanders?
How much cheaper is it for an entity to outsource an IT department than to manage it's in-house staff, or a US based shared IT services company?
Isn't the competition in the states good enough that US companies can compete with global providers?!
If not, then should the US implement an 'equalizing' policy such that supplanting US jobs to foreign sources costs as much to do as it costs to keep jobs in the US?!
Could the US inflate foreign economies so that their workforce costs are at parity with our own?!
IF money (i.e. 'bottom line') were no objective, wouldn't jobs and education both benefit?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.