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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.
Unions are needed!
Too many people forget that interviews are a two way process. The company determines if you meet their needs, and you determine if they meet yours.
The moment the prospective employee forgets that second part, they screwed.
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.
In the area of UCSF $60k with a family is not a fine living. You don't know what you are talking about. Obviously you don't think of anyone else and lack empathy, but I guess that is considered normal here.
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
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.
If you don't have 6 months cost-of-living saved up, and you've been working a professional job for more than a couple years, that's your fault (unless you've had a recent disaster). If you don't keep enough savings in the bank to walk off a job if the terms of that job become unreasonable, you've made yourself an indentured servant. The only people with a valid excuse to stay and train their replacement (except maliciously) are those still recovering from a different tragedy that cut down that 6 months savings. We're not talking about a minimum-wage job here.
It really sucks that we don't teach the basics of money and savings in school, and people are left to figure it out on their own - I was an idiot until my late 20s. Take every opportunity to learn about how to build financial independence. It's not all-or-nothing, and every step is a good one. For a start, when you get that first real job, keep living like a student until you've got your disaster fund built.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In most cases though, the average applicant does not have nearly the leverage in such a negotiation that the company has.
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.
Numbers are numbers. Money paid to employees is done out of the money the university has to spend. They either have to take in more of it, or pay out less of it. Which do you propose they do? The rest of the equation is irrelevant. Pretend for a second that YOU have employees, and your costs are going up, but your workload is not shrinking... what do you do?
There are 10 chancellors on the UC Board of Reagents; average salary is about $400k. That's $4M to start with.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
Exactly, when you have 100 applicants for one job, guess which side is in full control?
[...] that's your fault (unless you've had a recent disaster).
Let see... Great Recession... Some people on Slashdot argued that it was my fault that I was out of work for two years (2009-10), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy in 2011. I just file it under "Shit Happens" and move on. Five years later I'm still in recovery mode. Six months saved up is a nice goal, but it's not always possible.
Not the original poster, but I am a Libertarian.
The reality of life is that it isn't always easy to just "move" if you have a family or other circumstances.
Well, if you're talking about the people who are traumatized by chalk marks, I can see your point. OR you can suck it up and deal with it. Of course it isn't easy.
Here is a tidbit from my father, a wise man. "Easy things are not valued, because they are easy. Hard things are valued, because they are rare" When Everyone has something, its value is replaceable by the next person's version. When EVERYONE has a college degree, then that degree is worth less because it isn't rare.
Do the things that are hard, because those things have intrinsic value.
Whining about things being "hard" is one of the greatest crippling things, and why people like the UC system are outsourcing. Americans (I am one) are an entitled spoiled brat. It is why places like India are starting to kick our asses. And Liberal Politicians, rather than see the problem for what it is, are trying to protect the snowflakes from the heat of reality by passing more laws and regulations that ONLY serve to empower themselves.
Their grave is already dug, it isn't personal, it is just business.
I will not be digging my own grave. And anyone wanting me to put me in one, is likely to end up there first, or with me.Life is a bitter struggle to survive, and I plan on thriving (not just surviving). If this ever happened to me, I'd walk out, take as many of my colleagues as I can, and hope to hell that the idiots at the top get fired for their short sighted thinking.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You're 100% accurate and didn't actually insult me (even though you thought you did). This is a world economy, driven by world economics and world politics. Just because you're offended by it, doesn't make it less true. Cheaper is right, Middle aged is right, Middle Class is right, IT is right.
But unlike you, I actually have a plan for when I am outsourced. I will not be traumatized by it, as I fully expect it. I'll be okay because I have the foresight to see it coming. My skills are unique, and aren't all in the IT basket.
The interesting thing is, you offer me nothing but insults, which is what I expect for idiots who think they are right about everything, who actually know nothing at all. YOU my friend are the one that is easily replaced. I am unique in this world, there is only one me. Narcissistic and all ;)
And don't worry about me, I'll be fine. You on the other hand, are dependent upon the slave masters of government for your well being, since you seem to think that Government is there to lead you. You get what you pay for. ;)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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'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.