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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.
But hillary is paid by the people who keep the H1B machine running.
They both suck, let's not pretend.
they should be teching real skills not outsourcing work. Also PASS the savings on
Trump is very much against this. Hillary Clinton is an endorser of the H1B program. I'm a Canadian and seems I know more about this than you do. Follow some of Trump's speeches more closely and listen for yourself.
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!
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...
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.
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. "
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Why would I listen to Hitler; everything I need to know about Trump I learned from CNN. So as long as he's still a fascist baby-eating, muslim-gassing, Europe-nuking, orange-faced, tiny-handed, Putin-fellating, literal antichrist, #ImWithHer.
Would you support him if he finally returned the kidnapped Lindbergh baby and promised to stop dropping nukes on Japan?
"His name was James Damore."
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.
That's not capitalism, it's free market economics.
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?
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.
>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 *
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.