Posted on 10/22/2015 2:12:22 AM PDT by markomalley
Some HR person at Atlanta's SunTrust Banks has come up with what they genuinely believe is a clever idea – after dumping 100 of its IT staff, the billion-dollar financial institution is requiring them to remain available to help out for free for two years.
You can see how this makes sense; we’ve all had co-workers leave and then realised that they were the only one who understood some ancient REXX (ask your dad) or were the only actual F# programmer in the building (Visual F# and Visual C# are not even vaguely similar).
As a new grad I found myself in a firm where they’d shafted all the developers during a financial glitch and discovered that although they had the source code of the system, they didn’t have the right Makefile and so couldn’t tell which version of which source file actually worked. Couldn’t I "just put it back together?"
SunTrust has also made the staff train up their replacements. Yes really. Then it let them go. Nice.
Imagine the scene; you say to your boss that you’ve got to stop working on his project and go help a firm that’s probably a competitor. The fact that you’ve got that thing hanging over you hardly makes you more employable.
Also, the security permissions of people in IT are often more than senior execs, because like dentists and proctologists they must access sensitive bits of the IT body. As Jerome Kerviel showed, this ain’t no theoretical risk punted by a security sales droid.
Anyone who (like me) has had to deal with the tech/legal fall out of what happens when good IT pros go bad knows that the number one reason for sabotage, "accidentally on purpose" fraud, and sloppiness that is hard to discriminate from malice, is a feeling of being wronged.
It doesn’t even have to be justified, revenge motivates everyone from Bond villains to BOFHs. One hundred IT pros can wreak more damage than a Death Star and more cheaply, because they’re not being paid. I’d pay them money to stay away. So, what will happen?
You’re a manager with a dozen staff back from the dead. They hate you. A lot. They hate your firm, your customers, your systems and your dog. How good a job do you think they’ll do? Maybe HR sent you an email saying that "not being paid will incentivise them to work faster". Great.
Can you trust even one line of code they write? Remember, if you deeply understood what they were doing, you’d not need them in the first place. Then we get the arguments.
Managing IT pros is like herding cats. If you change even one line of my code, you are responsible for every bug ever after. So they’ll blame the Indian outsourcers, and maybe they’ll be right, maybe their hatred of the people who took their jobs might possibly just affect their judgment ?
Of course the outsourcers will want to blame the old programmers for the crap code base they inherited, but of course they’re, umm, well, err in India, so your job is to referee slanging matches between an Indian whose boss has told him to blame every problem on the crap old code and someone who used to be your friend saying that it was supposed to work that way.
Of course I may be too harsh, maybe the outsourcers act wholly without self interest and with utmost personal integrity.
In the modern globalised world, one of the most important soft skills is not any given foreign language, but the ability to understand people who don’t speak English well. Imagine a conversation with a Zombie Techie when he actively doesn’t want to understand or be understood?
And there are other soft issues, such as morale. You’ve got really unhappy people who know dirt about your firm coming back and griping, and some will now have better jobs.
Then of course all of them will read this article. Perhaps some of them will adopt unacceptable behaviour like staring at female staff (or the groins of males), emitting noxious bodily gases loudly, parking in the CEO’s reserved spot, wearing a T-shirt with the logo of some hate organisation (or rude words in Hindi), smiling madly at people in the corridor, all stuff that would get you fired – but of course they want to be fired.
The nuclear weapon is of course the regulators. We all know banks systems are really bad and the regulators are (at last) keeping an eye on things. Forcing disaffected programmers to fix a broken system could so very easily arm a whistleblower with an investigation. Even if they find nothing it’s an expensive hassle.
Oh yes and as their manager, you get blamed, HR has already banked the bonus.
So SunTrust may say that some of the work must be done by phone. This is the clearest evidence that a clueless HR bod came up with this idea. We’ve all done a bit of phone support, of the form "have you looked at the Grotax log" and of course "try turning the entire bank's data centre off and on again".
Maybe you’re smarter than me, lots of people are, and maybe you can debug a 200,000-line program that you’ve haven’t looked at in two years without having the code in front of you, or a debugger and with the "help" of an Indian outsourcer whose primary reason for being hired is that he was cheap, but not good enough to get a work permit.
Its "logic" was this is a cost-saving exercise, but it would have saved far more by simply saying that if we need you, would you come back for twice your daily rate?
Sweeten this a bit by showing them the glowing reference you’ve written since they’re sharp enough to know that this is a variable, and thus a gentle, threat. When you do call them in, do it with respect (maybe more money), not coercion.
Last time I dumped an entire team of contractors I cut them a deal where they’d have to come back a couple of days a month to fix and tweak the system they’d built, and we’d choose which days and we would pay them.
If you’re a freelancer, you know the difference between it being a lucrative option and something to fill the gaps, so they were very happy bunnies and I saved the bank a fortune by not paying under-utilised staff.
So when the fan was well and truly hit six months later, they literally came running and crushed the problems because they knew the system and were motivated to help us out. They fixed first and we sorted the money later.
By the way, SunTrust has declined to discuss the details of the severance deal with media outlets, as far as El Reg can tell. If you work at SunTrust or know anyone involved in this perfect shitstorm, feel free to contact me via The Register. ®
I first heard about this yesterday, and this was the conversation that popped into my mind:
REPLACEMENT H-1B WORKER: “Hi Mr. X, I was told I could call you for advice on the code you wrote for this process before they laid you off and hired me. We added a new process, and the code doesn’t work. Could you help me fix it?”
LAID OFF MR. X: “Sure. Just un-comment this line here, comment out this line and recompile. That should fix it for you.” Click.
Later...
REPLACEMENT H-1B WORKER: “But sir, I did as Mr. X suggested, and it wrote data to the wrong part of the database, and we can’t undo it...our records are unusable, all the key fields have been overwritten and the backups are no good!”
This sounds vaguely rotten to me, and I'm not sure I would agree to it -- but I don't know how large the severance package might be. But in any case, workers who have been paid should not be said to be "required to work for free". It is not accurate.
It’s a given that what SunTrust has done is not ethic.
Additionally, I can’t see how this meets labor regulations, labor decision case precidents?
Coerced work obligations without pay in their severance package?
And how the hell can this practice be Sarbanes Oxley, Payment Card Industry, and HIPAA compliant?
Identity Access Management and Privileged User Management standards usually require individuals to have a continous employee or vendor recertification for privileged user access.
Once an individual is terminated, they’re supposed to lose access.
Reclassifying terminated employees as unpaid contractors and letting them have privileged access to sensitive financially significant systems doesn’t seem like that would pass compliance audits.
Idiotic bastards.
As an ex-techie, I am SO looking forward to all of the comments and further installments about this story.
It’s Buttered-popcorn time!
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, companies were run by executives from manufacturing and sales. To rise in the organization they had to lead people and value people. Employees were generally loyal to companies and companies were loyal to their people.
In the 1970’s companies shifted from appointing operating executives to senior roles to appointing financial managers and lawyers. This generation of executives viewed employees as an expense, not an asset. Hence three decades of downsizing, offshoring and restructuring have virtually eliminated employee loyalty toward company. It has also resulted in poor management and leadership skills within organizations.
Perhaps the mellennial generation will force organizations to develop better leaders and begin viewing employees as assets to be nurtured instead of wage slaves to be discarded.
This may be true, but the cost of doing business in the US, especially manufacturing, has left executives with few options.
The severance package isn't payment for work... it's payment for being let go through circumstances beyond your control.
This may be true, but the cost of doing business in the US, especially manufacturing, has left executives with few options.
You may also want to consider the role of 401k's and fund managers in that mix. As an investor, chances are that you care about Black Rock Small Cap Growth's performance. The actions that the Jack-In-The-Box (one of the fund's investments) takes to maintain share price and quarterly dividends is not really much of concern to you. Fund managers know that and base their decisions on that fact.
If you, as a corporate manager for (as an example) Jack-In-The-Box, take an action that is best in the long term but might temporarily reduce returns for a quarter or two in order to achieve long-term growth, you will be called on the carpet like nothing you've ever seen because your shareholders (the majority of whom are institutional owners, such as Black Rock Small Cap Growth) won't tolerate a loss of returns for even a quarter.
That changes how corporate managers act and how they think. IMHO, not always for the positive.
Someone is actually using F#???
Number-cruncher: “Say! We can get THREE Indian IT resources at the same salary as one of our American IT resources, AND we don’t have to pay them benefits!”
IT (technical) manager: “The American resources work much more efficiently, design better code, are always available outside of business hours, and they speak clear English.”
Number-cruncher: “But THREE instead of one?! AND we don’t have to pay them benefits? C’mon! Surely you could train them to perform at the same standards as the American worker. Where’s the downside?”
IT (technical) manager: “Historical and anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise, and American resources are here, face-to-face, and they’re easily managed versus a resource on the other side of the planet.”
Number-cruncher: “I’m sorry, but the big boss man is going to appreciate having a bigger bonus check more than he will with what you deem to be higher quality staff.”
IT (technical) manager: *sits back and folds his arms across his chest* “Well you surely know how to do my job better than me, so please, by all means, let’s go for it. When the systems are smoking heaps of garbage in eight to twelve months, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
When Disney pulled the same stunt, they offered the severance package only if the worker signed it that minute. If they wanted to discuss it with,say, their lawyer, the severance offer was revoked.
The workers would have been better off if they all walked away, and let SunTrust negotiate openly to bring them back to train their replacements. That's pretty much what unions are supposed to do. I'm not a fan of unions, but I think the IT industry is reaching the point where are the lesser evil.
F# is that like FORTRAN 2015? I could do that.
Go ahead, let me back in to your system after you fire me. I dare you.
Delete C *.*
The comments following the story at the Register tell the tale. Not sure what SunTrust was thinking. Have been involved in projects where the majority of the new code is from offshore. Management had a hard time figuring out why their cost-cutting measure didn’t improve their bottom-line. Really.
Did I say RM? I’m sorry, I meant MV. My bad. You’ve got backups, right?
I work in IT support, servicing many companies, and see the disaster this practice has done in corporate America. On the side, I have advised many personal friends whose companies (number-crunchers) were considering laying off their IT staff and hiring a “managed services” company (usually based out of India) to really consider the longterm costs. However, the number-crunchers are usually planning to take their bonus for “saving” the company so much $$$ and jumping ship before hitting the iceberg. I probably should write a book on my observations and experiences with this “practice”, but will have to do so after I am retired or replaced, as the powers that be would not be happy with the expose....
Let’s see...Fifty years of undocumented program modifications, line after line of dead or stunt code, misleading comments, etc. What could go wrong if an H1-B makes a few minor changes here and there? After all, they were taught good programming practices and strictly follow all the rules in the books, But real programmers know its like a sewer down there and things can get really dirty in hurry if you don’t know what you’re doing, namely the traps, pitfalls, and what to avoid. It’s an art and experience comes with a price. Not to say there aren’t any good H1-B programmers, but many should be working at Mickey D’s for their $10/hr, not on critical software. Put H1-Bs and complex related systems together and you have a potential disaster lurking in your IT systems long after the H1-Bs are gone.
That's the discussion that was had at one of my former companies, almost verbatim. Were you listening in? :-)
Outsourcing, of course, was implemented, because the board wanted it. And, of course, it was a disaster. I got out before things got *really* bad, though. Strangely enough, I heard through the grapevine that they needed to bring in five (5!!) H1B's to take over my duties, and those five still couldn't do it.
I went through another IT outsourcing at a large Fortune 500 company. Basically, we changed employers and kept our desks. 85% of a 200-man IT dept (including me) quit within 6 months.
The end results were devastating for the company, the only way they survived was by throwing money (a billion +, if the rumor mill was right) at the problem until they were able to stabilize the situation. Everyone in management at the company who was involved in the outsourcing decision - from the COO down - wound up being fired over that one.
I've no idea why people do it. Arrogance, I suppose. "This has failed every other time, but only because *I* haven't tried it yet!".
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