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What's Happening As The University of California Tries To Outsource IT Jobs To India (pressreader.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Nova Express shares an epic column by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik. It details what's happening now as the University of California tries to outsources dozens of IT jobs -- about 20% of their IT workforce -- by February 28th. Some of the highlights:
- The CEO of UCSF's Medical Center says he expects their security to be at least as good as it is now, but acknowledges "there are no guarantees."
- Nine workers have filed a complaint with the state's Department of Fair Employment and Housing arguing they're facing discrimination.
- California Senator Feinstein is already complaining that the university is tapping $8.5 billion in federal funding "to replace Californian IT workers with foreign workers or labor performed abroad."
- Representative Zoe Lofgren (from a district in Silicon Valley) is arguing that the university "is training software engineers at the same time they're outsourcing their own software engineers. What message are they sending their own students?"
- 57-year-old sys-admin Kurt Ho says his replacement spent just two days with him, then "told me he would go back to India and train his team, and would be sending me emails with questions."
- The university's actions will ultimately lower their annual $5.83 billion budget by just 0.1%.
Shouldn't be any discussion about this. If a UNIVERSITY is outsourcing. They should instantly lose all federal and state funding.
Wanna behave like a private company? Get treated like one. No taxpayer soup for you.
Shouldn't be any discussion about this. If a UNIVERSITY is outsourcing. They should instantly lose all federal and state funding.
Wanna behave like a private company? Get treated like one. No taxpayer soup for you.
It's a fine position, but how about the rest of the debate?
California was four-square against the recent election outcome, which was in large part *against* globalism. Lots and lots of supporters here and in the MSM were arguing the benefits of this sort of thing from every viewpoint. Some people lose their jobs, but the economy prospers overall. Those jobs are never coming back. We'll be losing all of them to AI anyway.
California is so much against the populist uprising that they are implementing sanctuary cities (and sanctuary universities), giving illegal immigrants drivers licenses and the ability to vote, and generally planning to oppose any new federal mandates and changes (such as deportation of illegals).
And yes, it's the California cities which are [politically] deep blue, while the rest is generally red.
So how does this position fit into the rest of the debate? How can one show outrage over this situation and still support the [generally accepted as] liberal Californian viewpoint which embraces globalism?
Most times outsourcing is not done for saving costs (that just the excuse). its done because the current team has become too set in its ways and pissed off one too many administrator.
**Life is too short to be serious**
...and the key stakeholders in the universities will enjoy their kickbacks and high end dinners.
With corruption the return of invested capital is humongous. Corrupt idiots selling out for a diner and the feeling of being privileged.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Is UC a state university, though? State universities absolutely should act like non-profit educational institutions. Otherwise what is the public interest in being involved?
Did you hear about the Australian online census failure?
One of the long string of fuckups as a consequence of going for a bargain basement IBM service was that the computer was administered from China and logs were sent to the US for performance analysis. Of course they didn't tell their customer this.
The system crumbled under the load of millions of people logging in at once (due to the advertising of "census night" instead of any time over a few weeks, which is how estimated load had been calculated), IBM were not answering the calls at night so the spooks were called in to see if that site hired by the government was being hacked. The spooks found a bit of traffic from China (the system administrators at work on other virtual machines on the same host - discount plan remember) and a continuous stream of data going to the USA (performance logging). GeoIP blocking was put in place which locked the sysadmins out, the thing fell over completely under the load and the final consequence was the site being down for well over a week. Officials went on TV saying it was hacked by Chinese and US hackers but that was bullshit, they had just fucked up and didn't put a system in place that could cope with the load.
The point? Currently the situation is network traffic from China, from people working from home, is seen to be fine in a lot of cases let alone traffic from India.
Those massive attack vectors are already there and that's part of the reason we are neck deep in a malware swamp.
Adding to it is of course as stupid as you suggest.
That's part of the shuffle going on here. First, they bring in the immigrants to train in California. Some might stay. The University is still tweaking the plan IRT. Some Indians are going back to India to train "their own teams". Some might stay here. So, it's both. No one seemed to notice that it's ONE GUY in the US, and will become a WHOLE TEAM in India.
This is going to be a disaster. You can't learn a system in two days. Even with perfect documentation, you need way more time. This isn't some coding project. The sys admin mention probably manages dozens of undocumented systems. Stuff will work for a while, but after the first power outage, time change, etc...someone4 is going to be calling these guys up constantly getting information from them for the rest of their lives.