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Lowe's To Lay Off About 125 Workers, Move Jobs To India (go.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Home improvement retailer Lowe's says it's laying off approximately 125 information technology workers, the third round of job cuts this year. Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay said in a memo that the affected workers were notified Wednesday. He said the Mooresville, North Carolina-based company has spent the last several years planning a strategic IT workforce team to respond better in what he called "this highly competitive 24/7 retail environment." Some of the jobs will be relocated to Bangalore, India.
Good job, Donald.
Not sure where this 24/7 notion comes from. Lowe's has pretty mundane business hours and a pretty limited reach. They aren't exactly IBM. A 3rd shift IT workforce seems like it would be nothing but a total bother instead of some sort of benefit.
125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If IRIS by Lowe's is any indication, Lowe's either offshored the coding to the lowest bidder, on the notion that with enough heads banging on keyboards, they'll be able to beat much more capable competition... or the US team was already headbanging on keyboards, producing rotten code, and Lowe's figured they had nothing else to lose.
Either way, it's hard to see the future looking bright for IRIS.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Where was the outrage when blue collar jobs by 100,000s were disappearing all through 80s and 90s? Textile jobs, furniture making... before that auto jobs, before that railroad jobs ... White collar and the educated never cared, never bothered and were telling the 50 year old furniture makers to learn new trades. Well, it is all coming back to them, now they cry a river for the loss of 125 jobs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Founder of Lowes is a Hillary supporter and contributed money to her campaign.
Founder of Home Depot is a Trump supporter and contributed money to his campaign.
These two companies form a duopoly in the home improvement stores in the US, and the Republican/Democrat parties are a duopoly in government.
I guess I'll add Lowe's to the growing list of companies that won't get any of my business because they've fscked over their IT departments:
Toys-R-Us
Disney
Carnival Cruise Lines
And now Lowe's
"Hello. This is Punjab from Lowe's. Your hammer is sending signals to the internet and we need access to your bank account to fix this problem..."
What passwords? I don't remember anything since I got a pink slip.
If laid off Lowes staff hold any "secret" passwords needed to run the company, whoever let that happen should be laid off too.
Every secret password here is shared in a team password vault.
Note to self: Don't call Lowe's and expect a useful or coherent answer.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
...Lowe
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
its not, and you obviously don't
Did you complain when hundreds of small hardware stores closed down after Home Depot and Lowe's expanded across the country, bringing lower prices for your purchases with them?
There's nothing Trump can do about it. He may tweet about it, but there's nothing in his powers he can do.
I feel bad for the workers. They are all gonna be flooding the job market at once and the longer you are unemployed the harder it gets to get a job. Employers do not like hiring unemployed people.
And the IT profession is especially brutal in that regard. The attitude of "if you're any good, you'd be employed" is still a thing out there even though the whole shortage idea has been proven to be a myth.
Home Depot has the better line of Chinese tools...
$550 worth of lumber is going back to Lowe's today.
Fuck them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Long term, I think that most IT jobs at non-IT companies will be outsourced, and those outsourcers will do anything to raise the margin on their deals. This includes offshoring anything that they possibly can and/or replacing native workers with H-1Bs. The offshoring firms have a well-known loophole in the law that sets the minimum salary for an H-1B at $60K per year, not adjusted for inflation. I actually think that closing this loophole while keeping the program for its intended purpose is the way to go. If you're a body shop, and average onshore salary is $40K more than the $60K you can get away with paying a visa holder, it's obvious how much of a gift that is for the company and no wonder their sales pitches to companies are so effective.
IT companies that outsource are engaging in a race to the bottom - once you outsource, nothing new or interesting will ever be attempted in that environment again because the provider will want to charge an arm and a leg for change orders. Also, the wall between the company and the outsourcer is going to limit how much can be changed and how the company engages with IT.
Other than the distortion of the market this causes, I also don't like the fact that new entrants into the IT world aren't able to find as many entry-level positions at reasonable salaries anymore. Speaking as someone who's been doing this for 20+ years, and got where I am today by going through a progression of these entry-level and mid-level jobs, that pipeline needs to be in place to ensure people have the foundational knowledge they need when tackling bigger, more complex problems. No one comes straight out of college with the entire skill set required to do IT in anything but the simplest environments. In my case, I did a series of support and admin jobs to get the expertise and skills to "learn how to learn" about new stuff and how it fits into the realities imposed by the surroundings.
Fundamentially, I worry about so much cloud abstraction in IT that people who haven't been around forever lose the ability to understand what's actually being provided under the hood by hosted SaaS stuff. Companies who treat their IT like a janitorial service are going to fall into this trap too. Being at the higher end of things these days, I deal with a lot of "systems architects" who are very good at drawing hand-wavey diagrams but can't work out where the bottlenecks and dependencies are because they don't see the end to end view. Anything complex seems to be hand-waved away in a cloud symbol on their diagrams, and an "oh, the provider takes care of that." I'm not saying we should go back to the no-abstraction era of physical servers, etc. but that we should take the time to understand the realities of what's going on.
Why exactly does Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay have to be an American located in America? What does he do that an Indian in Bangalore couldn't do better for half the price in this highly competitive 24/7 retail environment?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Their registers are monochrome screens so I'm leaning towards AS/400.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
When I can't find any help in Lowe's, I usually figure they're out back smoking. So now it turns out they're in India?
They'll be next.
Get used to it America. The Corporate Beancounters think that India is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything.
India is not the answer to anything except a life of pain.
I know from bitter experience that the quality of code coming out of India is generally very poor and will often require extensive re-working to make it useful.
No more though. My Job went to India at the back end of last year.
The company wants me to come back and sort out the mess. Not going back even at twice the salary. They chose their fate.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Can the CIO, Paul Ramsay, define for us just how many "some" is in the 'Some of the jobs will be relocated to Bangalore, India.'? Is that half a dozen? A dozen? Two dozen? Or more like 75 or 100...or, you know, 125 jobs?
I'd like to think, likely naively so, that some day shareholders will wake up and realize that not all things that are good for the bottom line, are good for the company, either in the short term with morale, or long term for the longevity of and sustainability of the company.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Then you don't get your severance check.
And I accidentally shredded the master encryption key media too for the backups.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
they make there in store people smocks with Spanish on them this is the USA not north Mexico!
They'll find someone else to sort out the mess; you might as well profit from it. Just make sure to set your prices very high, like 3x your old salary plus a guaranteed generous severance if they lay you off again. If they're that desperate, they may very well agree.
Someone I know worked for a home improvement product company and was running a marketing project that involved a market research component.
My friend had an ad taken out recruiting customers of Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's who had bought a similar product in the last year. Pretty standard stuff in marketing.
My friend got a call from a woman who identified herself as "Chief Counsel" for Menard's and demanded to know what the market research project was about, who was behind it. My friend said it was confidential and that they were not at liberty to discuss it. The Menard's counsel said that she was willing to go to court over it and got really mad.
My friend went to their company's lawyers and they said "Just tell her, there's nothing that will hurt the company in her finding out, and Menard's will make a legal issue out of it, even if it only costs them money, we will end up wasting money defending ourselves."
I've heard since then from other people that Menard's is run by some crazy right-wing family that sees conspiracies everywhere.
I swear, every time I come even within an arm's reach of a family run company I see some kind of paranoid, power-mad behavior. They are the worst customers I deal with, always a ton of bad behavior. They almost always seem to have 1-2 non-family members they let halfway into the inner circle and keep on a string to do their dirty work. And tons of secrecy, always worried employees will "find out" about something, usually related to "business expenses" which end up being money shipped out to family members. I caught hell at one when preparing some planning for a project, asking about a group of users/computers that I couldn't pin down in the office -- as it turns out, they were owner family members on the payroll for no-show jobs and the computers/accounts were in place to demonstrate they were indeed employees, and not just a tax deductible way to siphon cash out of the company, which is what they really were.
Hmm. I need a new refrigerator, and was thinking of getting it at Lowe's. I guess I'll get the refrigerator somewhere else.
Does anyone know of any appliance companies that haven't outsourced their IT workers?
Someone is shopping for a big fat bonus.
Too bad that Lowes stock holders and employees have to pay for it by hiring some incompetent Indian maggots.
Want to fix this? Its the US Federal Income taxes that are making US workers uncompetitive. Abolish the income taxes, every last one of them.
Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax runs the country on a consumptiion tax that, after a personal exemption keyed to your living situation - single, married, married with X dependents - taxes everyone at the same rate. The exemption is just enough to ensure that people in poverty pay no Fair Tax.
Our economy would roar if the Fair Tax was passed. Not only would all the jobs that have left the USA come back, but 1000's of foreign manufacturers would move here to manufacture in the least-cost country on the planet, the USA.
Truth.
/jk! They all crush the boxes and recycle them now Comrade!
You can always "shop" for the better cardboard boxes out behind Home Depot.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I guess it's time to call in.....Super Donald!
Yes, Super Donald- the Defender of American Jobs and the downtrodden Working Man! Preventing corporations fro- wait, what? You say that this is okay by him because it allows Lowes to make an extra 0.00001% profit? Well ain't that somethin! Haw haw, the joke's on me!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Can someone translate this from "Retard" to "English"?
I tried Google but it doesn't seem to recognize the source language.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
For starters, I'd like to see Lowes try & sell their wares in India, and see how far they get
So very true. You would think the number of horror stories of companies pulling this shit would serve as a deterrent, but it seems there is always another sucker thinking that India is a good investment.
Yeah. "Oh. With a bit of management.."
Yeah. Right.
Then you tell them something they don't want to hear and the Adjustable English Comprehension Knob gets turned down to "I'm ignoring you." and they truck on doing whatever they want.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
somebody on the other side of the planet with a potentially unintelligible accent. So much better than being in the same building.
Not sure if this is a contributing factor, but Home Depot is their only real competition. The Home Depot website and app are some of the worst I have ever seen for a large commercial enterprise. Half the time neither do not work at all, and if they do, they are full of problems with almost every aspect of the experience. On top of that Home Depot has started a policy awhile ago not to honor any giftcards or store credit online. Dealing with their technical support in an attempt to buying something online was a nightmare, though the options that are given to them to deal with customers isn't probably great. The last time I tried to by something, I ended up giving up in frustration in attempting to give them money, and in went and bought the same product someplace else (BestBuy of all places) where it was more expensive, but at least I could finish my damn transaction.
Given that this is Lowes only "competition", perhaps they feel relatively save off shoring their IT staff and the possible degradation that may ensue, as it can't be any worse than what Home Depot does now. Perhaps they do the same, no idea. The only time I use Home Depot, now is if I need some lumber or widget that I am reasonably sure they will have in stock and go to the physical store. They are essentially a brick and mortar only store to me, seeming to regress into the past.
I'm voting for 480.
Who's with me?
Very, very bad!
No country will give you Visa when they know about your uncivilized Caste system http://blogs.wsj.com/indiareal...
Casteism
...I'll get my coat.