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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 $50 million contract, to manage infrastructure and networking-related services. The affected employees will leave their jobs in February, after they train their contractor replacements.
No amount of money could make me train a replacement. If everyone thought the same way, we wouldn't have this problem.
Unions are needed!
Seriously, I'd fucking walk.
And when I interviewed for my next job, I'd be brutally honest about why I did it. If the prospective employer didn't like it, that would tell me all I really needed to know about working for them.
the H1B salary level needs enforcement / direct w2 rules + an COL part to it.
Are you kidding?
And give up the opportunity to teach people how to format DVD's on the unix main frame by using:
cd / /usr/bin/rm -rf *
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Funny, I just typed that in the terminal box thingie an it doesn't seem to be formatting my DV{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER"
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.
The point was that if you're making $60k and then given the choice of train your replacement and continue to draw another month's worth of $60k plus some severance package to keep you on your feet for a few weeks so you can look for a job.........or walk and receive $0. It isn't that the fictional person couldn't live on $60k.....it's that the safety net only exists if you agree to train your replacement.
It much easier to say that if you have money in the bank and no kids to feed.
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
. . .they haven't outsourced the college administrators first. Given the massive administrative overhead of most colleges nowadays, that would save some serious coin. . .
How many bills did Rep Lofgren introduce/vote for that would have increased the IT budget for the UC system?
None, but to be fair, Lofgren is the congresswoman for California's 19th at the federal level and the UC budget and funding are decided at the California state level. So it's not her job to do so.
This is absolutely true, and that is why we need to enact employee protection measures to ensure that employees can refuse to train their replacements without losing any severance package to which they are entitled. At-will employment needs to come to an end. If the company doesn't renew your contract? Fine. But otherwise they're stuck paying you even if they do want to hire replacements. These conditions are unheard of in more civilised parts of the world.
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.
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.
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.
> That only gets rid of what is in /usr/bin.
He started with cd /
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
There is the third choice. Take the pay, and botch the training. Be an incredibly bad "teacher". Don't correct even the most basic mistakes. Be like a politician, don't answer any question straight. Be rude and belittle them for asking "stupid" questions. You were hired to do some kind of work, not to teach. They can't really expect you to be able to do a good teaching job.
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 $.
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)
If you are saying that these schools won't raise the price of tuition and you know that for a fact then it would be good if you could show in writing that is the case. It certainly is not a given under any circumstance I've seen.
If you read the law, that's pretty much already the case. The fact these people are having to train their replacements means the people being hired aren't qualified to IMMEDIATELY do the job, they can't legally qualify for H-1B due to that.
What's needed is for these people to SUE THE SHIT out of UCSF and get the fucking ball rolling.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Third option: Train them wrong. "Sure, of course I'll train my replacement." Teach him the most fucked up version of everything you can, but do so with a straight face. Make sure your trainee is utterly clueless on the day you tell your boss "He's ready to go! Best in the business, this one."
It raises the price of the outsourcing for the employer, and in sufficient quantities by enough employees, could even be enough to make the outsourcing project totally fail.
Who did what now?
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.
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
The other factor everyone's missing is: why do people need to make more money for a "living wage"? Simple: too many of their costs have ballooned. And it's not across the board (technology gadgets are cheaper; look how much computers used to cost in the 80s), it's two very specific sectors: housing and healthcare.
Housing costs have skyrocketed in the last 10-15 years thanks to the housing bubble and foreign "investment". What have the politicians done to fix this issue? Nothing.
Healthcare costs have also skyrocketed. ACA was attempted to deal with this, but it didn't address the reason the costs were so high in the first place, it just tries to spread the costs out over everyone, so anyone who's middle class ends up subsidizing everyone who's lower middle class. What have politicians done to address the actual costs of healthcare (as epitomized by the EpiPen issue)? Nothing.
Fix the reasons that people think they need so much more money to live and maybe they won't need such higher wages.
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.
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.
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.
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."