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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..."
...Lowe
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
its not, and you obviously don't
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.
$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.
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?
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.