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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.
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
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.
You can trust HCL (which is actually located in Sunnyvale, not India) with that, because they have deep pockets to sue
If they ever lose a major judgement we will find out that the US entity is a penniless shell and the money is all in India.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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?
>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 *