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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.
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
$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?