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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: 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).