SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
One of the big Swiss banks, Credit Suiss, has just informed 58 of it's IT specialists that they are now employed by an Indian company. If they don't want to work for HCL Technologies, then they no longer have jobs. This takes effect at the end of this month.
I'm not even sure this is legal - Switzerland normally requires a minimum of 3 months notice. Probably the CS lawyers have found some loophole or other, like "selling" a whole department or something.
The bank has stated that the employees will receive HCL contracts for "at least 12 months". Which probably also means "at most" 12 months, because no Indian company wants expensive Westerners on its books any longer than necessary.
Of course, CS is a really good bank if you're in top management. Top management rakes in the bonuses, no matter how poorly the bank performs.
[ Originally reported by TagesAnzeiger (German), which stated the number of employees impacted as 100. -Ed.]
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:41PM (4 children)
What??? Not even a layoff? Only reassignment??? Without relocation????
Fuck your sensationalist non-news.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @10:29PM (3 children)
As someone who got through exactly this about 6 years ago (HCL included), I can attest this is:
a. indeed, not news. This is how HCL operates: "buys" an entire division
b. over time, the bought unit will be starved of budgets to the point of bare survival, the original employees will start finding other jobs and they'll be replaced by HCL specialists [computerworld.com]. The ones that last the longer are the Tom Smykowski-s
In our case, it was a division doing a commercial product. It was a first for HCL to try this thing outside IT services; the product ceased to exist in 2 years time, so I guess it was a last as well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @11:56PM (2 children)
Not all of us went through exactly this 6 months ago.
I think it's important to document it when an organization abuses IT professionals.
It seems to be a big mystery to the 1%ers and their propaganda department, the mass media, why certain demographics don't flock to careers in IT. It must only be because assigned males who work in IT are just terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:08PM (1 child)
Okay, I can't tell if this is Kuranai or RealDonald.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @03:00PM
well it didn't bring up "womyn-born-womyn" or "assigned at birth" so probably not kurenai
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:42PM (6 children)
I have really come to dislike all things indian. I don't feel I am a racist, but when most of your experiences with a race are negative, the sampling determines the learning. I suppose the indians felt the same way about the British, and by association all westerners.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by kaszz on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:59PM (4 children)
Well actually the Indians are also being abused. It's a two way abuse. It's important to pay attention to the middle man. That's were the true abuse stem from. Indians don't seem bad in the true sense albeit there's some clueless around but that may be a selection bias.
If H1B imports or anyone else could not be had for significantly lower salary then the employers would most likely not bother unless the serfdom of H1B rules in itself are so desirable. This is the loophole to close. There might also be a weakness in that the H1B replacement don't seem as good as the ones being replaced. So there may be a opportunity to make the scheme fall on their doing. One way that might accelerate this process is to refuse business and in particular any help to companies that employ the H1B tactic. Or offer assistance only at a extremely high price. And of course any 0-days found can go directly to full disclosure etc. Such that the IT department needs to be skilled and clever or fail badly.
Under the presumption that the majority American IT-workers are more capable the the H1B imports. It should be possible to make the market mechanisms work this out. Otherwise it's simple math, these skills can be had for a lower price and it's just to suck it up.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Snotnose on Tuesday July 04 2017, @11:49PM (1 child)
Yeah, it's not the Indians. I've worked with hundreds of them over the years, most of them are nice, hardworking people trying to better their lives without screwing anyone over.
The problem is the Cxx's. Both the Americans who sell out the American engineers, and the Indians, who sell out the Indian engineers. The Cxx's goal is to maximize the bottom line, which usually means screwing anyone they can to make the next quarter's goals.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:41AM
Between destroying jobs and killing the workers left behind ( https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=17/07/04/1159209 [soylentnews.org] ), they're the most highly compensated sociopaths around and almost fully insulated from any legal repercussion.
(Score: 3, Informative) by FakeBeldin on Wednesday July 05 2017, @07:47AM
Though the evils of H1B visa are aplenty, they really don't relate to this story.
This story is about IT folks working in Zurich. Switzerland does not have H1B visa. Moreover, the story is about people's jobs moving to a different company, not about outsiders coming in on questionable terms and taking jobs from Americans - or even from Swiss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @03:03PM
Simple economics says yes, these jobs go to Indians, but...
All things considered, that doesn't benefit our society.
This is why nations have tariffs, why nations support critical industry, and why some countries manipulate currency. A country is a group of people fighting to gain advantage over the rest of the world.
Some people are traitors to the team. Often they gain power, buying laws to the detriment of the others in their country. If this gets out of hand, the country fails.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:02AM
It's not the Indians, it's the Cxx who decide to oursource, At least aim stright, dumb motherfucker.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:43PM (11 children)
a) Find another job
b) Quit on the spot
c) Watch as the phone rings with "me ask you too describle how to do this!?"
d) Give a shit and let it burn ;-)
e) Enjoy the feeling!
Of course you can always help out but time is soooo expensive nowadays :p
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @08:51PM (10 children)
You assume there is another job for you in Indian Technology. Which leads to
Your time is worthless when you are jobless and destitute. Now, you will help out, or you won't get this pizza. Hungry yet?
(Score: 3, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:28PM (6 children)
If you had RTFA you would see that these jobs are to be kept in Zurich for the next 12 months.
These IT people will be Swiss, and have a job for the next year, giving them plenty of time to find another job.
As the comment above stated, there will be plenty of phone calls along the lines of "How does this work?" and "could you come back for a couple of weeks to help with this?"
I'm not sure CS have thought this through. (Aside from the obvious cost savings).
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:46PM (2 children)
Doesn't matter if they were given a year or a day. They are still out of a job and those jobs are now permanently removed from the Swiss economy. Fuck those greedy cunts at the top.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)
If they find a job again, it's not likely to be a tech job. If they don't find a job again, they'll be wishing they voted for basic income.
In 2013, eight million 5-cent coins (one per inhabitant) were dumped on the Bundesplatz to support the popular initiative for a basic income. [wikimedia.org]
In 2016, a referendum was held and 76.9% voted against basic income.
Switzerland is a rich asshole country full of rich assholes who believe poverty is for other people.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:26AM
Don't find another job. Make one and put the asshole company into Chapter 11.
Because now they are staffed with "me very good, what is your problem? I fix everything good.". And will not be agile enough to deal with it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:43AM (1 child)
Repeat several hundred times and there will be no jobs left for those former workers to get.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @03:07AM
That means The Onion, in the end, prove to have been telling the truth all along: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYaZ57Bn4pQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @04:02AM
Why sure...of course I'll tell thee how it works, my 'per call' fees are $10000 initial consultation, and $1000 per hour....
(or, just a plain FOAD, professional? No, satisfactory? Ehhh, maybe....)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:34PM (1 child)
If you know any good dirt about Credit Suisse, it seems like you should be able to leverage that into either:
+ a job with a competitor
+ whistle blowing about illegal practices
The first choice is likely to be more lucrative, the second more gratifying...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:34PM
Tee-heeee... good luck in your job with Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro or Infosys.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 06 2017, @12:59AM
Well, those jobs haven't run out yet. Despite your incredibly rosy and Pollyannaish optimism, somehow we continue to see jobs in high tech in the developed world. That's despite the US habit of chewing up and spitting out IT personnel in the US.
Don't be stupid. Just be less desperate than your former employer. You could always save money or something so that you can afford that pizza.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday July 04 2017, @09:31PM (2 children)
I got transferred to HCL a few years ago. I documented my experiences over at the green site at the time.
This comment is a placeholder. If I have time tomorrow I'll add some hopefully useful advice.
Just remember Hanlon's Razor, and HCL are being engaged because they have sold the client a very good story about cost reduction.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @03:34AM (1 child)
I recently did a contract gig at a company that had recently shifted its IT infrastructure outsourcing from IBM to HCL. The consensus was that things were far better with HCL (at that point in time) than they ever were with IBM.
Just a data point...
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday July 05 2017, @07:24AM
That doesn't surprise me. My experience was in Software Engineering, though, not IT.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Informative) by stretch611 on Tuesday July 04 2017, @11:13PM (6 children)
I was outsourced in 1999 only to have the outsourcer offshore the entire group one year later in 2000. Also with a different job in 2007 I was offshored. Both times I was able to get a new job in a short period of time and left before I fully trained my replacement(s). It doesn't matter... the chances of everyone in a group getting a new job quickly when this happens means that most groups will have a majority of the original developers teaching the replacements. The fact is I don't blame them, after all when the choice is going broke or keeping income for a few more months few people can afford to live without a paycheck.
In 2000, we were told that it was purely a cost reduction service. We were billed at $90/hour which included our management team in each hour. (i.e. if our manager had 10 devs reporting too him 10% of his pay was included in each developer hour; and 1% of his boss's pay assuming that they had 10 manager's reporting to him.) The indian developer was going to be billed at $30/hour for the same work. We were also told that the original contract in 1999 stated that a certain percentage of developers would be outsourced within one year, more the second year, and all would be gone within 3 years. Obviously my group and others were not told this when we were outsourced. I understand this is fairly typical and is done to avoid news saying that (insert company name here) is sending # jobs to India, because no one in the public knows the name of the outsourcing companies.
I was able to find a new job immediately and left for it before training my replacement. It was in a different group of the same company, so I essentially moved down the hall. With that in mind, I was able to talk to the people I left behind. I was working in COBOL/JCL on a mainframe at the time.
The first project the replacements had to do was remove a single JCL step for a print step that was no longer needed in 15 different jobs that were clones of each other. It would have taken me 8 hours to do including testing and the entire changeover process. They had 3 people working on it and they billed 40 hours each for a total of 120 hours to do the job I would have done in 8. Even with all that time they never even tested it, because when it went into production every single one failed. (for those that know JCL, they removed the steps, but never removed an override in the procs leading to the failure; something that a simple automated syntax check would have found.)
Lets do the math... 8hrs x $90 = $7,200 for my time. 120 x $30 = $36,000 for the Indian devs for the same project. So the project costs $18,800 more when using cheaper developers. And to top it off, the project failed with the offshore group when it would have been tested properly and worked if I did it.
Why the math works out... For the outsourcing company it works easily... More billable hours and more money billed equals more money they make... because you know they have their profit included in each hour. Even for the original company it works... As with most companies, few people in management truly understand development. They do not understand "you get what you pay for" and assume that I would have billed 120 hours also which would be $108,000 saving the company $72,000. They are happy and give themselves that $72,000 in executive bonus for being "so smart."
As usual, rank and file types are screwed, executives get paid more...
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:31AM
Hopefully you can help some other company that can put H1B cheats into a economic disadvantage?
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday July 05 2017, @01:42AM
If they actually got what they paid for, they should've been a lot better off having paid the $36,000 ;)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:20AM (1 child)
Is the math off a bit (10x)?
8 x $90 = $720 and 120 x $30 = $3,600 according to my calculator, or did I miss some details?
Also, $3,600 - $720 = $2,880
But yeah, way to make it 'cheaper', not . . . ;-)
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:58AM
Yes... I screwed up. My mistake.
Of course this is only one project. Over the course of a year, the amount would be even higher than my accidentally inflated numbers.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by BK on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:21AM
Powers of 10. :(
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @06:50AM
Funnily enough I had a similar experience, with the "they're a third of the cost, how can we lose?" argument coming down the pipe from above.
Hilariously it turned out the "they could be less than a third of the productivity" never seemed to occur to anyone - and having reviewed a couple of the projects that went through to outsourcing a third would be an optimistic measure. I later met one of the guys who was on the offshore team when he came to the UK to work (a very bright, talented developer) but he described the offshoring company as a place with the philosophy of "What you produce here is billable hours. Enough software to meet the bare minimum contractual obligation is a side effect."
One fun consequence of this was that the local support load for programmers to answer questions from the outsourcing, clarify specs additional planning, manage change requests etc meant that the local programmers wound up spending more time supporting the outsourced developers than they would if they'd just done the tasks themselves.
One team leader realised this, and just had the onsite team do development - He ran the outsourcing (as management demanded) but diverted all the support requests away from the programmers and threw the delivery of the offsite devs away when/if it turned up broken. I only noticed because we did a review, and it turned out they were outperforming all the other teams.
(anon-ed, for obvious reasons).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Whoever on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:36AM (6 children)
"It's"
It hurts my eyes!
Doesn't anyone know basic grammar any more?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:41AM
It's twitter/smartphone auto-correct world. No wonder jobs are getting oursourced.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @04:11AM (1 child)
Eye've bean bittern buy autocorrect serval thymes...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @12:03PM
see! "autocorrect" has already solved the humor problem other A.I.s are struggling with :D
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @10:28AM
Know.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 05 2017, @02:52PM
If only we had editors to proofread stuff that isn't direct quotes...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 05 2017, @09:03PM
> Doesn't anyone know basic grammar any more?
Maybe you meant:
> Does anyone know...
Anyway, here you go
line ::= number statement CR | statement CR
statement ::= PRINT expr-list |
IF expression relop expression THEN statement |
GOTO expression...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 05 2017, @07:38AM
Nothing to get upset about... Nothing you can do... Nothing to even discuss. It's just business. Let it go.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday July 05 2017, @09:59PM
A friendly HR girl was leaving my place of employment the other day. She run a "diversity report" for our enjoyment. I guess it was her way to say goodbye.
Anyway, 80% of our "international" American based IT with multi-billion budget were Indians, around 10% Chinese and the rest shared between other "protected groups" and yours truly white straight male of European origin. No "native" Americans around to speak of.
Keeps me wonder how log till the next gas chamber moment arrives...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.