IT staff terminated as outsourcing grows. They reach "end of job"

the inquirer ^ | Tuesday 21 January 2003, 11:54 | By €uromole:

[Skooz]

I worked on a roofing crew in the 1980s. We had a big union job that took us a year and a half to complete. When that job was finished, we found new jobs. No big deal.

[TomSmedley]

Maybe Congress should change the calendar to the decimal system

Something like 100 seconds/minute...
100 minutes/hour
10 hours/day
10 days/week
10 months/year...

There are only 10 types of people in the world; those who understand binary, and those who don't.

[Red Jones]

gosh, dfwgator; your advice here is good advice. I'm trying to get into a job right now where I won't be doing programming, but I'll be interfacing with customers for a software company, hopefully interfacing with outsourced programmers too. and I know you're struggling too just like a lot of people. It's a bad market and it has a bad effect on most people.

[JoeGar]

I recently telephoned Dell tech support (from N.C.) about a software problem and was surprised to be serviced by a techie physically located in India. He did an excellent job walking me through the solution to the problem.

[nightdriver]

"(i.e. by simultaneously reducing taxes on corporations and placing "tariffs" on foreign employees employed by U.S. corporations for products serviced or manufactured for the U.S.)."

I suppose I'm a hypocrite for saying so, but I think this is a great idea.

What a lot of manufacturing corporations who outsource their fabricating facilities may not see coming is that these offshore companies will be competing with them with knock-off products of their own that will directly compete with them in the marketplace. It has been especially noticeable in the electronics biz.

So a lot of companies are just mortgaging their future health for a short-term gain.

[LPStar]

Having someone else do your work for you is a good thing.

Not if you can't pay your rent/mortgage, food, and utilities.

[Red Jones]

what you're saying is right. And what I learned is that even if their company does run on the software you wrote, if you solve all the bugs, then you'll be out of a job. Then they'll perpetually promise you that new work is just right around the corner so that you'll be available for the 2 days a year when they do need you.

[The Duke]

Our company has computer operations all over the world and I can tell you this. People from other cultures think differently than we do. They frequently take a rather relaxed attitude about problems than Americans. In other words they don't get the job done without the direct intervention of American workers. Management will frequently wax warm and fuzzy about Global this and Global that but don't have to really work with the end result. They believe that people are interchangable everywhere but it just ain't so.

I've got to agree with you there. These past couple of years I've been outsourcing my own software dev projects offshore for $10/$12 per hour, and I'm finding my significantly more pricey American programmer to be much more productive and in possession of a much more constructive attitude. I got my first hint when the guys in India kept calling my server a "PC". And then I noticed that their approach to debugging their programs always involved first rebooting the server.

Paying a server $10/hour to reboot can get a bit tiring, especially when it doesn't fix the problem. And of course if there are three guys standing around watching it reboot then it's really costing me $30/hour.

While I continue to outsource offshore, it has more to do with having an escape route in case the US implodes, and much less to do with cost mitigation.

[ex-snook]

"I recently telephoned Dell tech support (from N.C.) about a software problem and was surprised to be serviced by a techie physically located in India. "

Glad you could understand him/her. I called a Wall Street company today and kept pushing the phone buttons. The fellow who answered finally was hard to understand. Who knows what country he was answering from. It may be more than techies disappearing when they can 'can' the answers.

[SauronOfMordor]

The outsourcing managers will not be smiling when it's THEIR jobs that go overseas.

Stage 1: existing companies discover that they can get cheaper workers overseas, and outsource manufactoring and technical jobs to them. This increases profit, short term

Stage 2: the overseas workers, once they have gotten the knack of how to make sneakers, clothing and gizmos for the US market working under US brand companies, start their own independent outfits, and offer the exact same stuff for less money directly into the US economy via WalMart and catalog businesses

Stage 3: people discover these foreign-branded products are just as good as the US-brand (why not, they ARE the same products, made by the same people) and a lot cheaper. The US companies go bust.

Stage 4: the CEOs find themselves working at Burger King alongside their previously-laid-off workers

[SauronOfMordor]

So a lot of companies are just mortgaging their future health for a short-term gain.

The CEOs hope to be retired with their money stashed away someplace safe before the day of reckoning arrives. The CEOs don't care about the long-term future of their companies -- just about this quarter's stock options

[Red Jones]

no, I was just telling him about a job that I am trying to get now. I don't even know exactly what I'll be doing. All I know is it's a software company and they want somebody who both knows the industry they're selling to and knows something about software. As I used to work in that industry and then I became a code-banger and now am looking foropportunity, that's the job for me. I won't be doing programming, but the programming background will be valuable in that job it seems. I don't have a computer science degree and I don't know much about 'big-picture', architecture, specs, etc. Maybe I'll learn!

I used to sit with the customer, talk with them about what they want and write the entire datbase application myself. I've never worked on a team of software people, always a lone cowboy. Took so long to learn the skills, had to change languages once, two big learning curves. No way am I going to learn a new language in this market, sadly.

[Red Jones]

you forgot Step 5: CEO accidentally falls into deep fat fryer and dies.

[TopDog2]

As a 50 year old ex-programmer with a BS in Computer Info Systems who is only two months away from completing my MBA, your post gives me some hope of actually finding a job when I'm done with school...

[vollmond]

so what you do is physically take the specs from the customer, and physically WALK them over to the engineers?

Actually what he (or she) is doing is telling the clueless customer what their specs are, and then documenting them in a way that the non-bathing, Mountain Dew swizzling application developer crew can't screw them up too badly. It's an important job. It's even got an offical title: Information Engineer.

If you want to see a cat-fight, sit in on a meeting where the IE and AD are screaming at each other. Things you'll hear are "Implementing the one story without the other story makes this iteration useless!", and "The object doesn't want to do that!". Pay close attention to the Database guru gearing up to defend (in vain) the concept of lookup tables. He'll be shaking his head, knowing the problems that wait in ambush.

[nightdriver]

"The CEOs don't care about the long-term future of their companies -- just about this quarter's stock options."

Maybe companies should tie their executives' pensions to the health of the company. Company has hard times, the executive pensions disappear.