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 like that.
We think much alike.
lol
I’m not going to complain about my severance package anymore. It was 5 months pay in exchange for a one year non-compete agreement. The non-compete went away when the attorney from my prospective employer mentioned the “L” word to the attorney of the previous employer. Litigate. They were willing to file a lawsuit to get me.
Had they called me then for advice, I would have told them to take a flying leap. But recently, my former boss, who had nothing to do with my untimely departure called for some advice for a presentation he was giving to an industry group. That I was glad to provide.
I’m not a code guy, but my wife was a COBOL programmer before we had kids. Your meme reminds me of a story she told me. She worked for a large car leasing firm that could place orders directly into the car companies systems. One of her co-workers was modifying a program and flagged a car order for a test. Naturally, she ordered the biggest and most expensive car Chrysler made at the time, plugged in a bunch of option and paint color codes, none of which probably matched and sent in the order.
Somebody at Chrysler saw the order, thought the test flag was a mistake and removed it. By the time she noticed, the car was in the order queue and it was determined to be cheaper to make it and scrap it than to try to remove it from the queue. Ooops.
-— 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.-—
So true.
My wife works for a major supermarket chain that changes hands regularly. The most recent acquisition was by an investment group. They thought of a novel idea —cutting staff and budgets.
But it wasn’t a novel idea. The store where my wife works was already badly understaffed. Long lines, messy shelves, postponed maintenance, etc.
Who knows how many loyal customers they’ve lost? But the manager keeps cutting and getting bonuses. The employees? Not so much.
If I was king I’d use profit-sharing as an incentive, like Costco and TJ’s. At TJ’s the employees are so attentive they’re like a bunch of Hare Krishnas. And the business is flourishing.
Load directory list into array DirArray
For i=1 to DirArray(x)
SuckWind = DirArray(i)
Drop table &SuckWind
Endfor
----
Delete procedure Whipitgood
Backup system overwrite
The H1B program is so evil it is not funny, we should do it like Japan where companies are free to hire foriegners as long as they have a visa, however they need pay them 25% more for that position, works out for them.
Sun Trust is insane for this sort of behavior. If I had a nickle in that bank, I would take it out immediately.
I have made it a point to OFFER to be available to former employers, but to BE REQUIRED might make my code a little less stellar.
I would hope I would not make any fatal coding errors, but you never know.
To be bested by "I don't always implement new financial systems, but when I do, I don't run them in parallel to the old systems."
How many folks on this forum know what a BOFH is without looking it up? How many people on this forum have ever been a BOFH?
Wow. I worked at a GM Assembly Division plant many years ago and saw something like this happen once or twice.
They didn't even try to remove the car from the line. They simply found the manifests in several parts of the plant (cushion room, paint, frame line, etc) and pulled what they could...like seats...and covered frames and such with blue tarps and let the thing ride to the final line...then they would move it aside. Mistakes happen. But to complete a car and then scrap it? Odd.
. . . Or train their replacements. Can you hear the clicking of the delete key as we converse here? All that documentation being flushed. Design docs getting hosed.
If I were a SunTrust customer I’d be running for the exits. Quite possibly the stupidest people ever to run a company.
What clap trap. Big cap manufactures LOVE regulations and taxes because it keeps the "little guy" start ups out of the market. The offshoring of manufacturing was simply to shave off a few pennies on the dollar by exploiting the huge wage difference between a first world country and a turd world country. The US consumer does not realize any savings and quality has suffered.
Sorta like...
would you really want to eat a cake that you forced someone to bake for you?
Zactoknife.
Sheee-uh. I don’t remember what the code does that I worked on yesterday.
You can call all you want but I can’t remember anything.
Or,
“Ok you need to go to your command line and type this in verbatim......’sudo rm -rf /’ That should fix ‘er right up.”
I agree with those who suspect there’s more to this story. As stated this is absolutely suicidal. It’s like telling your heart surgeon just before the transplant operation that you’ve wrecked his car and got his daughter pregnant and hey, I hope we can still be pals...
perhaps it should be considered as not severance but as a retainer
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