Slashdot Mirror
University of California's Outsourcing Is Wrong, Says US Lawmaker (computerworld.com)
Earlier this week, University of California hired India-based IT company HCL to outsource some of its work offshore. As part of the announcement, it announced that it was laying off 17 percent of UCSF's total IT staff. The U.S. lawmaker, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) and the IEEE-USA find the outsourcing job "wrong." dcblogs writes: A decision by the University of California to lay off IT employees and send their jobs overseas is under fire from U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif) and the IEEE-USA. "How are they [the university] going to tell students to go into STEM fields when they are doing as much as they can to do a number on the engineers in their employment?" said U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif). Peter Eckstein, the president of the IEEE-USA, said what the university is doing "is just one more sad example of corporations, a major university system in this case, importing non-Americans to eliminate American IT jobs." The university recently informed about 80 IT workers at its San Francisco campus, including contract employees and vendor contractors, that it hired India-based HCL, under a $50 million contract, to manage infrastructure and networking-related services. The affected employees will leave their jobs in February, after they train their contractor replacements.
No amount of money could make me train a replacement. If everyone thought the same way, we wouldn't have this problem.
It's the read-headed stepchild of the professions, and self-styled engineering nerds say they do it for the "love" of inanimate objects. Business-types know this, and will exploit it ruthlessly.
Fuck engineering, study something else, kids!
Be careful. Those microaggressive usage of words like "wrong" are trigger words that violate my Safe Space.
Unions are needed!
Seriously, I'd fucking walk.
And when I interviewed for my next job, I'd be brutally honest about why I did it. If the prospective employer didn't like it, that would tell me all I really needed to know about working for them.
the H1B salary level needs enforcement / direct w2 rules + an COL part to it.
The affected employees will leave their jobs in February, after they train their contractor replacements.
Basically asking someone to dig their own grave. For me to do that the severance package would have to have to approach seven figures. Basically they'd have to pay for my retirement.
utterly useless.
Yes, on the days I was supposed to train my replacement I would bring a few beers and some chips to work, sit down, share them, and tell the replacement some funny stories and not to worry about those computer things.
It's the read-headed stepchild of the professions, and self-styled engineering nerds say they do it for the "love" of inanimate objects. Business-types know this, and will exploit it ruthlessly.
There is truth in this. To quote a favorite villian, "if you are good at something never do it for free". If you WANT to give something away for altruism that is fine (see open source software) but don't let others take advantage of your love for a subject. Always be aware that others may try to take advantage of your good nature.
Fuck engineering, study something else, kids!
No, study engineering. It's a great way to make a living. But spend some time looking at the situation you are in before stepping into it with both feet. There are bad employers even for good professions. Learn to know the difference.
As someone that started in school for an engineering degree and later landed in IT, IT is not "engineering" (it can be the T in STEM but it is not the E).
How many bills did Rep Lofgren introduce/vote for that would have increased the IT budget for the UC system? If they are like most places, IT is considered a "cost sink" and has to struggle to just keep an even budget (as costs increase). You can't hardly blame them for doing what they feel is necessary to maintain the service they are expected to provide with insufficient resources.
meanwhile, in unrelated news, Rep Lofgran announces reduced funding for California public universities.
Fine! They will just hire contractors to train the new contractors!
"How are they [the university] going to tell students to go into STEM fields when they are doing as much as they can to do a number on the engineers in their employment?"
They'll probably call it "affirmative action" because it benefits poorer Indians. Problem solved!
Ezekiel 23:20
If you were a young person making $60k with a family you might not be so quick to walk away from money while you search for another job. Not everyone is in the same circumstances where they can pick and choose.
$60K is a fine living. It's pretty close to the average gross salary in the US. If you can't figure out how to make that work for a few months then shame on you. Pack your crap and go somewhere where the cost of living isn't obscene. If you can be bought cheaply you get what you deserve. Personally my integrity costs substantially more than that.
FMLA is your friend.
Only Trump is running jobs off, not the Democrats/Liberals! They are for the people.
Idiots.
We complain that our cybersecurity is lax and here we go giving people in a foreign land the keys to our kingdom. And tell me one thing: These people that are doing the support, what do they do when they aren't doing direct support for the U.S. company? Prove to me that they aren't spending their "other" time calling me and telling me their name is "John from Windows support and we see you have a virus on your machine." They are in the perfect position to do that...they have the hardware, the software, the training and now even a list of people they can cold call.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Wonder how much the university spends on football every year (including coach's salaries, stadium and all associated costs)?
Could that money be put to better use?
If H1Bs are for jobs no qualified American can fill, and HCL has a whole slew of H1Bs. Laying off American's actually working in those jobs to replace them with H1Bs from HCL should prove something no? The H1B program likely needs to be scrapped altogether. Granted there are some legitimate H1B holders, but it's obvious it's being abused. Anyhow, the bar for H1Bs is too low and vague. EB visas, which require extensive documentation supporting the claimed skill level, should be the go to for skilled immigration. If UCSF wants to outsource, then they can deal with staff physically located in India and all the logistical challenges that entails.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
Issues will not be recognized until we start outsourcing congressmen!
In the area of UCSF $60k with a family is not a fine living. You don't know what you are talking about.
So don't live near UCSF. Frankly someone with that sort of salary was probably commuting pretty far anyway. If you lose your job you move if you have to. There is no requirement that you continue to live in a place you can no longer afford. That's just idiotic. I've lost jobs before and the first thing you do is cut expenses any way you can. If that means changing locations then so be it. It's the reality of the situation.
Obviously you don't think of anyone else and lack empathy, but I guess that is considered normal here.
So saying that someone should not let themselves be cheaply bought and that they shouldn't dig their own grave is "lacking empathy"? I don't think you know what the word means. The fact that I have a spine and don't let others walk all over me does not in any way prohibit me from caring about my fellow human beings.
Not so much that I want him personally to win (lesser of two evils), but I want whomever wins to seriously tackle the subject of American's having their jobs sold out. Since Hillary wants 4 more years of Obama politics Trump unfortunately is the only hope of protecting US jobs.
Funny thing.. I know a place in Denver where that happened.
The company announced the outsourcing and all the highly skilled admins who had run the place for the last decade bounced out to new jobs within a few months.
They had to call in Microsoft just to document some of the systems for the new H1B contractors.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Yes it is. But it's not impossible to do even if you don't have those obligations. You might have to live very frugally for a while but it can usually be done. I get that it might be tough for some people but sometimes the price to do the right thing is high. Don't live beyond your means and always have a plan in case things go south.
I would train my replacement as long as I was employed by the company. The ONLY circumstance in which I would not do what my employer asked is if I quit.
I'm sure that's what you mean.
Also, I would put as much effort into training my replacement as I would training any person who just started with the company. I put a great deal of effort into maintaining the infrastructure for the company and I'd like to see it last for as long as possible.
Obviously they don't have a clue.
A politician decried something they know nothing about for political gain? I can't believe it!
Let me tell you, outsourcing these IT services is a hell of a lot better solution than raising tuition on students, which is what most schools have been doing like crazy. Now if we can just get them to stop wasting money on expensive, proprietary software licenses, we'll be in much better shape.
So in that case, they can either, pay IT staff less, fire some (more than they do if they outsource some of the work,) or charge the students more money in tuition... I don't see that being stubborn really helps any... It might move you higher up the axe list.
Speak for yourself.
That is why the smart companies hire the replacements in parallel and in a gradual phase in.
I also have the financial sense to save for a rainy day and not leverage myself to the eyeballs. I've been months without employment in recent years, and my family was provided for quite well despite the disquieting uncertainty.
. . .they haven't outsourced the college administrators first. Given the massive administrative overhead of most colleges nowadays, that would save some serious coin. . .
Bravo. Let's hope this starts a movement.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The implied point was that it's exactly this sort of debt/wage slavery that enables these inhumane practices in the first place.
And that's not even addressing the underlying idiocy of running institutions of higher learning as for-profit businesses.
Microsoft? Haha, could the contractors not figure out how to press "F1"? Microsoft may make shitty software, but it is still point-and-click. A monkey could generally figure it out.
I don't live beyond my means, and that includes having savings. I wouldn't worry about those bills you mention because they'll get paid in the interim. If they'd worry you, I posit that perhaps you're the one who needs to take stock of his own financial situation before judging another for being willing to live out his convictions.
If I could wave a wand and make all the lobbyists, visa loopholes and bad politics go away, I'd do two things:
1. Make systems engineer/architect level people in IT part of the registered engineering profession with all the requirements and privileges afforded to it.
2. For the rest (help desk, sysadmin of existing systems, etc.) establish a hierarchical guild system where people actually learn the work from masters and there is a progression throughout one's career based on personal achievement of levels of mastery.
Why would anyone go along with this, you ask?
For #1, Professional Engineers are responsible for maintaining licensure through exams and continuing education, like medicine and law. This guarantees at least a minimum standard -- if you know you hired a PE, you can at least guarantee they got through engineering school, passed a licensing exam and have some relevant experience. The same can't be said for a random yahoo who just made it through Bob's AngularJS Coder Bootcamp. In addition, PEs are legally liable for mistakes. If you told a company the trade-off for higher salaries was a guarantee that their project would be delivered correctly or they could get compensated, I think they'd go for it. The model today seems to be to hire a random offshoring firm, get 1000 random new grads working on your project and hope it works...this is a definite improvement.
For #2, having the routine IT tasks (simple ticket-based sysadmin running known procedures, help desk) or development tasks (code CRUD application with these exact specs) broken out as trades also promotes quality. When I started a million years ago, I came from a science background in my education. Learning how to do various IT things required lots of self-study, but I also had an informal "apprenticeship" with my more senior colleagues who taught me a lot. Formalizing this has a huge benefit in my mind -- new grads get paid to learn things the right way, again, MCSE Bootcamp is not the right way. They also are given more responsible tasks over time, not thrown in the deep end where their mistakes will end up costing companies money and downtime. It's not a union, it's a merit-driven guild -- and that distinction would have to be very clear to appeal to the overwhelmingly libertarian crowd who populate IT jobs in large numbers.
Long term, I think this is the only way to go. Healthcare has it right -- doctors (through the AMA) pay Congress bucketloads of money to ensure that the supply of physicians stays low and quality (and compensation) is kept high. We in IT/dev don't get this and we get stepped on because of it. In addition, there is a clear delineation between the professionals (doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) and the paraprofessionals (assistants, aides, etc.) Computers are part of our daily lives - it's time our profession grows up and becomes recognized as important. Until then, companies will continue to think of IT the same way they see the janitorial or landscaping service -- costs to be minimized.
The question you perhaps should ask yourself is, "Why don't I?"
They hated it when salaries rose to that of Executive level. Now, at every twist and turn, they further attempt to devalue and estrange what I nurtured and made strong. The Snowflake Generation is not the savior, rejecting legacy is not the answer but everyone working together in mutual respect for each other is. When younger workers give way to experience and legacy and when older workers give way to new ideas and methods - this will all get better.
One easy way that lawmakers could slap down this kind of practice across the board is pass a law making it illegal for companies to require employees to train H1Bs as a part of an involuntary severance package. Your knowledge is your own. You already contributed to the company, and if you are competent enough to train your replacement, you shouldn't be replaced in the first place.
To keep the law simple, if you train an H1B to do your job and are let go within 2 years without cause, the company has broken the law and owes the employee 5 years pay restitution with full benefits for 5 years and a $500k fine to the state. The 2 year time limit can be extended indefinitely if it can be shown that management was conspiring to circumvent the law. If the H1B replacements are so much better, they should be able to pick it up as they go.
Also within the law make it a felony to attempt to subvert the above law, such that management at the company is criminally liable if it can be proven that steps were put into place to circumvent the above law.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I *created* my circumstances, as does everyone else. We all have agency. If you choose to squander it, you can't rightly blame anyone else for the result.
Seriously, if they are going to do that, then lets start cutting federal money to UC. After all, they are saving money now and we no longer need to fund UC.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
just took over the UCSF campus.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
Exactly! So have that money in the bank, and wait on those kids until you're financially stable. These are the most basic of life lessons. Make some minimal effort to plan you life, especially to plan for the unexpected disasters. Almost everyone will have one, and it's on you to be ready for the inevitable.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... to "outsour" our jobs. Nobody likes it when a job goes sour.
Maybe so, but that's offtopic here. These jobs are going overseas. That's the thing: I can compete with H1-Bs, they have the same cost of living I do. But the same guys living in India? Not so much.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
" At-will employment needs to come to an end. "
Then you can't quit. You have to honor your contract. You're stuck working as long as they're paying you.
Well if you want to come sort and document a poorly documented 60,000 user environment spanning 19 states 48 domains with Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, tons of SQL databases and a host of custom interfaces to healthcare specific apps that live on AS400 systems be my guest.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
The main thing would be to do away with H1B. The bigger problem I see here is a government-financed agency using the H1B dodge as opposed to private industry. Shouldn't our tax money help our citizens first?
State/federal should cut funding to that university, they want to fire american workers to replace them with labor from india then well they don't deserve tax $.
Yeah, you tell those monkeys how to Active Directory.
No seriously, Windows is easier than MacOS and Linux when it comes to conventional Desktop stuff, MacOS tends to be a lot easier to cross-skill than Linux/FreeBSD since most of the command line stuff is familiar. But MacOS X users forget that the CLI is there where as Windows users are frequently berated for using the CLI when the GUI can do something.
That tells you a lot. If you were to train a replacement, the first thing I'd do is show them the "wrong" way to do it with the CLI and completely ignore the GUI way of doing anything.
Notice you never see board members being replaced by foreign SCABS .
oh, what are you going to do about it, run through the streets wielding machetes? shut up and take it you little bitches.
What seems to be the common thread is less the salary level of H1Bs, and more how it's being used. The worst offenses by far aren't from a regular US company filling an individual job slot with an H1B - it's the elimination of an entire department, replacing it with contracted services. Those contracted services then go to a company that primarily employs H1B workers. It's this loophole that needs eliminating, along with the contract service providers that are relying on H1B workers.
Holy crap.. #10,452.. when did you join?
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
I'm not saying I agree with the outsourcing here, or the issues with training replacements, or the other non-sense. But I'm not sure I understand how this is an H1-B issue. I can't see where it says that people are actually coming here to take jobs and work. They may be coming here for training, but I don't see in the summary how they are displacing people here.
It sounds to me like they are offshoring a lot of these positions. Are workers in India, for example, doing work in India as outsources considered H1-B workers?
I'm not a HR person and don't understand H1-B's. But a lot of the discussions seems to be around H1-Bs and I'm curious how this offshoring falls under that.
When this story came up on Facebook yesterday my first thought was: If they don't want to use US workers then they don't need US government money. Let see if the law makers have enough balls to do something about this.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Obviously they didn't have the skills needed and they couldn't find anyone in the US with those skills. If only they could find some sort of place that teaches people those skills.
What we need are a large supply of competent developers that are willing to work extra hours, and on a 30k-40k salary.
If we had more Americans in this group, then we wouldn't need to outsource at all!
The way American workers are claiming leadership-level salaries is uppity, greedy, and disgusting. If easily-accessible education doesn't fix that, then capitalizing on the global labor supply is the only option left.
But are they? It's a 50 million $ contract, I guess that means they pay this per year to the Indians? They laid off 80 people, that would be 625k per person. Somehow I doubt they had salaries like that.
take your morning" constitutional" on the front lawn of the execs making the decision and let them experience the equality in resources.
Peter Eckstein, the president of the IEEE-USA, said what the university is doing "is just one more sad example of corporations, a major university system in this case,
This is the part I find most alarming about this particular case. While I don't care about the details of how an entity chooses to organize, FUNCTIONALLY universities in the public system are not, and AFAIK were never intended to be, private corporations free to cut costs however they see fit.
In UCSF's case, let it be privatized, all its public funding cut, and reparations paid to the generation(s) of taxpayers that supported it with the understanding that it was serving the American public.
In the broader environment, society needs to re-enable scholarship and an understanding that university education is not trade school, and requires public support to the degree that scholars, doctors, _certain_ types of lawyer, etc. are needed. Let real corporations pay to train IT and engineers they need in their own private educational institutions.</whining-about-society>
If these are Hell desk drone jobs, they are looking at people's private data.
Are they vetted the way on shore people are?
Have they taken piss tests that have been validated by US labs?
Is the data properly encrypted before being transmitted across the globe.
Do the students have the same privacy protections they would have if the data never left the campus lan?
Or are they just the cheapest bodies they can fish out of the Ganges?
I worked with parts of the UCSF staff on a contract, these guys took long lunches came in late and left early. Their IT staff was decentralized and fought each other, but the general lack of motivation to do anything was the biggest issue I saw.
Moral of the story, if you can be outsourced you need to up your skills until you can't be.
Once an outsourcing company (Indian, US whatnot, but mostly Indian) gets there, a systematic cleansing of third-party contractors and consultants and employees gets started by them. Complaints, politics, making people look bad etc. goes the playbook. Ultimately any position worth anything will be a billable one,and local client VP/procurement would be paid off, etc.
It's just starting at UC.
UCSF has also been in the news recently for treating it's janitors like crap and firing them when they complained, and for raising the salary of their medical center's CEO to over $1 million (on top of the ~$550,000.00 he gets from being on the boards of several vendors who sell to UCSF).
Check this shit out...
It's not just that. Most people live at, or near, their income level. Society encourages this in many ways, and young people in particular are vulnerable to it because they lack the experience with the slings and arrows of unemployment in the face of established debt and other costs, so they don't sock away as is prudent.
When the question of "accept job or don't accept job" comes up, many times, there is a state of panic driving decisions to some degree. Same thing happens when one of the Bobs tells you "hey, you've been replaced by Jayesh, you have three months to train him, then you're on the street. Be sure to fill out your TPS reports. That'd be ghreaaaat."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not only are health care data privacy laws not enforceable outside the US, but the data is vulnerable to breaches so brilliantly illustrated when a medical transcriptionist working in Pakistan threatened to expose patient records unless she got her back pay. It was revealed that the person who outsourced the work - and was responsible for the salary dispute - had ignored a prohibition from using offshore labor.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I was in this situation once. I agreed to train my replacement for two months then rang in sick on the first day. Never went back to the company.
The social contract between companies and employees is now broken so when you do get a job you do the absolute minimum required to keep the job. Absolutely nothing more.
Fuck 'em.
It should be pretty easy to unionize on the spot with all the other people in the same boat. Collectively, they would have all the leverage they need. The fact they all weren't just summarily fired indicates they have something of value that the company needs.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Is anyone really surprised? At the end of the day universities are businesses. They don't care about their students much less their employees. It's about making as much money as possible no matter at what cost. If they could replace professors with robots they would. That's why universities don't hire full time teaching staff anymore. TAs and Professors now make less than someone working at McDonalds. So the fact that they outsourced and will continue to outsource jobs to India is really not a shock. http://www.drymaster.us
I thought so too . . . until they hold your 3 months severance hostage
Can this comment be bumped up somehow? Here we have a state agency actively exploiting the H1B loophole. This isn't some private company, this is the government, OUR government, doing this.
My modest proposal -- if a company does the "lay people off and replace them with H1B workers" thing, they completely lose the right to hire ANY H1B workers, not now, not in the future, not ever. And any H1B workers they already have on their payroll get converted to green cards, so they are free to go elsewhere.
So.... If I move to India and re-apply, can I get my old job back?
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
A long time after I did.
No amount of money could make me train a replacement
Funny, a few years ago some ex-colleagues of mine were in exactly that position: their jobs were transferred to India and they were asked to hang around for a few months as a transition. I was thinking to myself "Self, how much would they need to pay you to stick around rather than walk now?" The answer I got was they'd need to about double my salary. But I'm in the happy position that I think I can get a new job in a few weeks if I need to.
Turns out the company made the same calculation. That's exactly what the retention package was. My bros were astounded but decided they could live with themselves. They took the cash, then sat around drinking coffee and interviewing for a few months. I'm sad they lost their jobs but happy they all landed on their feet.
Like I wrote yesterday, UCSF is not a jobs program. It's a graduate university training doctors, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists. That's their mission and primary purpose. They should, quite properly, be spending their money lecturers, professors, and facilities and as little as they can get away with on overhead like IT and security. As a taxpayer and UC tuition payer, that's exactly what I want them to do.
Fact. You're about to start your weekend because of someone else fighting hard.
captcha: silences
despite your snark.
I've seen this sort of deal play out multiple times. It always ends up costing the company more:
1. Non-IT management types want to save money
2. Outsourcing firm promises just that
3. Non-IT management secretly negotiates contract with service levels etc. Unfortunately not knowing all the ins-and-outs
4. Upper management approves the plan based on obvious savings
5. Workers are displaced
6. Service levels drop to the contract minimum, if that, and it turns out a number of critical things were overlooked
7. Extra ala-carte services cost $$$
8. The foreign workers, despite impressive credentials, turn out to be lower performers on average, either due to language issues, inflated credentials, or cultural differences in work ethics.
9. Local management gets leaned on by non-IT idiots that started this mess
10. Problems that didn't occur before are routine, normal problems take weeks to resolve
11. Dissatisfied with the contract at new contractor is found when it is time to renew, with equivalent results.
The best part is that the idiots who kick-start this process get their incentive bonus for savings realized before the problems kick in, then move on to other companies to wreak havoc again.
And yes, there are cases where these deals work out great. There must be. But I have yet to learn of one.
I'd quit immediately if I was told to train replacements before I got fired. Why knot the rope thats gonna be used to hang me? I don't understand why anyone puts up with that kind of crap. Passive resistance until you find another job, then quit asap before you do anything to help them get rid of you.
This is what unions are supposed to be for, things like ensuring that work rules and contracts do not permit forcing employees to train overseas replacements before getting laid off. Non-union employees need to stand up for themselves and not let themselves get abused like this. It would only take one or two instances of an entire IT department quitting en-masse to make the point that making employees train their overseas outsourced replacements is a non-starter. Get a couple CEOs fired rather dramatically when their outsourcing idea results in the company taking a multi-million dollar hit when an entire department quits before they get laid off.
That'll *uncreate* your circumstances right quick. We all have agency, but we are all also subject to fortune.
The simple solution is for Federal ADA's to start prosecuting people that replace a American worker with an H1-B. I believe they could argue quite effectively that employee A was replaced by H1-B performing exactly the same job functions and this violates the terms of the H1-B program. The H1-B holder should be immediately deported and the company(s) involved should all be fined a minimum of a years salary.
Personally I'd like to see the law expanded and have these violations make the CEO personally liable.
Having just gone through this at Southern California Edison I can say with certainty, your the omnipotent voice that thinks it means something. Your opinion means exactly squat. If you had a job that paid enough to actually count here, you would indeed be training your replacement. Why? Because they put little lines in your separation agreement that give you money for completing your new obligation. Enough money to hopefully get you by until the next job. Yep, it sucks anyway you look at it, but you really have no choice other than to go along with them unless you get a firm offer quickly, which happens a lot, but in the $100-$150k bracket, jobs usually take time to acquire. That's where the speration agreement dollars help out. It gets you through for say 5 months and a bonus at the end. If you plan well, that's enough to get by for a year.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Just not correctly.
In cases like this, severance pay is likely tied to staying behind and training one's replacement.
Dear CEO,
Congratulations! Your private drive has received the status of DESIGNATED SHITTING STREET. Enjoy the view.
Obviously they didn't have the skills needed and they couldn't find anyone in the US with those skills. If only they could find some sort of place that teaches people those skills.
If the current employees training their replacements aren't currently qualified to do the job, then they're certainly not qualified to train their own replacements.
Exactly. IT practitioners might like to think they are engineers, but they aren't. Even if Microsoft says they are.
Well geez, how does anybody miss the solution if it's that obvious. Just have money in the bank! Man, how stupid are people if they couldn't even think of that? Just have money and that solves most of your problems! Why doesn't everybody just have money?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
If your job is being handed off after a training/etc. period, the job is effectively gone at that point. Should one wish to quit, they should be able to quit without fear of losing unemployment eligibility, any pre-existing good reputation, or any other negative consequence of refusing training. Any retaliation, no matter how minor or subtle is to be met with severe penalties (read: ones that discourage offshoring) towards the company and any involved contractors.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I was laid off. Twice, in fact. Both times, I was unemployed for ~6 months. My wife and I had two small children (under 4) at the time, a mortgage, blah, blah.
Our choices enabled us to weather the bad times without them being catastrophic. We didn't buy the biggest house we could possibly afford, despite pressure from our lender and realtor to upsize. And this was in 2003, in the heyday long before the housing bubble exploded. We didn't buy new cars every year or two. We made most meals at home. We did travel the world a bit, but we prioritized savings, of both the long-term retirement and rainy-day varieties.
So when life threw its inevitable curveballs our way, we endured...and despite the snarky presumptions of some asshats here, we didn't run to our parents for shelter.
As I said, we *created* our circumstances, just as everyone does...either through preparation or lack thereof. That doesn't mean I'm without empathy, though. I'm about as tree-hugging crunchy leftist hippie as they come where social/humanitarian issues are concerned. But I have no patience with bullshit puling about victimhood and powerlessness in these types of employment scenarios. If you're a slave to debt or salary, it's because you put the yoke on your own shoulders.
Wife and two kids. Mortgage. More here.
You can't guard against every contingency.
Every financial planner worth their salt will advise you to keep enough cash in reserve to cover *at least* 6 months of your regular expenses, and ideally up to two years' worth.
It's solid advice that we chose to heed from the beginning.
It's not training, it's knowledge transfer. This is happening globally, outsourcing is all around, be it Office 365 or internal IT, the Outsources are better structured, to provide stable, predictive service for a lower cost running a 24/7 operation.
I am in outsourcing business, a US based company and do this day in and out. Almost no company wants to own IT. It only makes sense, dont take my word for it, here are some food for thought.
We see a knee jerk reaction when the outsourcing company is based out of India. More you look more you will see US companies doing the same
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/outsourcing/index.html
http://atos.net/en-us/home/we-do/ito-services/it-outsourcing-insights.html
https://www.accenture.com/us-en/service-application-outsourcing-overview-summary
http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/technology/solutions/application-management-technology-services.html
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/services/it-support.html
http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/learn/infrastructure-managed-services?~ck=mn#What-we-offer
There is an obvious information security consideration when outsourcing to foreign countries. And.. beyond outsourcing, it is common for US multinationals to use employees in foreign countries to handle the work of US customers. That includes work involving what we would all regard as critical US infrastructure. The Internet is dissolving a lot of 20th century notions - including that of "nation".
Your sarcasm aside, we're not talking about minimum wage jobs here. Unless you're still recovering from a previous disaster, if you've been working 2 years or more at a "real job", you should have 6 months expenses in savings. Do you? It's not about "stupid", it's about our failure as society to teach the most basic survival skills.
We're not hunting buffalo and avoiding wolves here. If we were, not teaching young adults how to do those things would be a failure. We're trying to live independently in a modern society. And the most basic survival skill in such a society is to have savings instead of debt, for when shit inevitable happens.
Everyone should know that. Everyone with a "real job" should have that. Where did we go wrong?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Train the guy horribly but put a great face on it. Write two C++ code and compile it and drop it one the backup system and the other on the main system. First code on backup system, tell him that he must run it in the morning every day or backups don't run. Well the C code stops all backup so they don't run. Second code tell him that it must run on Feb 1st 2017. Must do it or everything gets messed up. That one does the rm -rf /*. Chuckle and deny everything.
dunno.
how much were they paid again? 50 mil and 80 people replaced doesn't really match up.
$50m is probably total contract value spanning 5 to 8 years. It might include some stuff not handled by those 80 people. Besides, some of the layoffs may be spread over 2 to 3 year period depending on their criticality, grandfathered systems etc.
Those who are selling out American citizens to exploit third world peasants for fun and profit are guilty of high treason and should be sentenced as such.
You know what the difference between treason and high treason is? If you're guilty of high treason, we make you dig the ditch yourself, regular treason we'll dig it before you kneel down and take your "due process" to the back of the head.
Exactly why I have 6 months worth of "fuck you money" saved up
Twinstiq, game news
I actually don't think the h1b should be deported. Not his fault. His manager should be jailed though. And company fines.
Even then it does not add up. $50M/80 jobs/8 years = $78125 per employee per year!! So much for an Indian HCL employee!! They are worth more like $20K per year.
> Well if you want to come sort and document a poorly documented 60,000 user environment ...
How much would a job like that pay?
A large part of the problem is that when H1B's were instituted, their minimum salary was $60,000. Adjusted for inflation, that should be $120,000 (so $180,000 with the hidden 7.5% social security tax and other benefits).
I saw the billing rates before I retired.
U.S. worker: $90 / hour.
Onshore h1b: $60 / hour.
Offshore worker: $30 / hour. (And have very poor english skills so you can't use them unless you have onshore h1b's).
Quality used to be master degree quality for bachelor's degree wages.
Quality has declined sharply and is now "C" average bachelor's degree wages for bachelor's degree wages.
Use of offshore labor played a huge part in Sysco's recent SAP failure ( I think it cost/wasted a cool billion dollars).
Because offshore labor NEVER says "this is impossible". They always say they can do it. At a minimum, they'll say, "I'll do my best". This is their version of "are you insane? This is impossible!"
They also rotate in and out very rapidly. 6 months before moving on elsewhere. The myth is that they are hot swappable and managers love to hear that it experience with business rules and facile mastery are not needed.
Anyway.. a partial fix is to set H1B wages (not what the contracting company bills but what the h1b employee gets to take as their pay) equal to the top 10% wages. As it is the really rare talent the H1B was intended to provide is often shut out of the lottery by consulting firms fielding thousands to tens of thousands of bachelor's degree candidates.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Holy crap.. #10,452.. when did you join?
Well, if that is surprising...
As a taxpayer, I'd say that this type of action by a publicly funded organization should require a very thorough and immediate review of the University of California's government funding, including all grants.