When I worked at Deloitte they made a similar decision to outsource to India instead of training staff to learn Python and automate the time consuming, low value work. That's when I decided to leave, best move of my career.
How was the quality of the outsourced work? Did they find an existing software house in India and send them specs a deadlines? Did they hire individuals?
They weren't outsourcing software development work, they were outsourcing the manual task of checking PDFs against XLS files. The quality wasn't the problem, the throughput and cost are. I wrote an app that parsed the PDFs but no manager wanted to learn Python to review the code, so they told me to move on :(
I heard Deloitte and such consulting firms barely reach 1.5 year of retention (as in, in average people leave in that time). So you're best move is also the most common.
I too have heard that those consulting firms "churn and burn" young talent. I'm a consultant at IBM so I don't know if it's actually much different though. I've seen decent turnover in my org.
I wonder Watson might have helped them to take such steps. Basically putting HR/Finance data into Watson hands and figure out optimum way of doing things with algorithms/forecasting etc.. Could be an interesting AI application.
Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name.
EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings.
They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
Although I would guess this happens in a more "low tech" way all the time: It's so easy to switch some lines in an Excel spreadsheet or mess up the formulas (hey, it happens even to Nobel prize winners) that I bet there are management decisions (including lay-offs) being made based on wrong / "buggy" data all the time... It just takes one overworked consultant and in many cases no one will question the numbers on the PowerPoint graph.
While clearly lazy / incompetent people who deserve to be laid off exist, I think one should stay humble and realize that a lot of how one's life works out is pure luck (or a lack of it), after all.
Yeah, having worked with Watson for Data or whatever they're calling it now, Watson is not as powerful as marketed. Watson is a way for IBM to appear to be on the edge of tech, because people do not understand the constraints of ML.
I'm in the same position, but the presence of all publicity and no real product is part of what leads me to believe that Watson is much like Deep Blue or AlphaGo: it was designed to solve an extremely specific problem, and its capabilities do not generalise readily to any other problem. This despite the fact that Jeopardy is a "general knowledge" quiz.
Imagine if Watson was an app. What would you do with it? As I understand it, it takes an oblique textual reference of some kind and turns it into a concrete, explicit reference. You talk about something and it figures out what you're talking about. That's great! It's a hard problem and it's extremely impressive that it's been solved.
But in practical value terms, that's just a toy. And when would it be more useful than Google Search, or Wikipedia, or Siri? Can Watson do anything, book a trip, set a timer? Well, that capability would have to be plugged in, along with voice recognition and speech synthesis. But can it reliably determine what I want it to do? Or even whether I want it to do anything? Can it follow a conversation? Is it even stateful? What, if any, role does the core Watson functionality play in the systems which eventually do these things?
And how does Watson generalise to other areas? IBM was looking at applying it to healthcare. How would this work? Presumably, here your "oblique textual reference" is a collection of data (symptoms and measurements) collected from a patient, and the end result is a diagnosis, like "What is rubella?". Now, firstly, how useful is that? Is that the hard part of being a doctor? What about carrying out the tests, what about prescribing treatment or choosing further tests? What about missing hints, e.g. can Watson handle visual data from simply looking at a patient? Or does the doctor have to inform Watson that the patient is leaning slightly to her right when she sits, and has trouble getting onto the bed? So does Watson's single trick actually help, does it even slightly alleviate the workload of a medical professional?
And secondly, how readily does Watson adapt from the world of general knowledge quiz answers to the world of medical diagnoses? Are these worlds even remotely structurally similar? Can they be modelled and correlated using the same basic structures? Is there some heavy modification and serious domain knowledge needed to alter Watson to do this? Or are the two problems basically on different planets, such that an entirely different machine needs to be built?
The same goes for applying Watson to business analytics, for example. In my mind, Watson is a machine which, as it currently exists, best case scenario, can look at all of your financial graphs and go "Ding! You're in a recession." And then nothing else. This may be of some use, but I doubt it.
All of this is ignoring the backend, which is that Watson in reality is this monumental pile of expensive, high-performance hardware and IBM Research code - and we all know how much research code ever resembles a working, saleable product. All of that to handle one real-time quiz game. You're going to shrink that until it fits in one office? Or you're going to have a server farm full of them serving requests at great expense?
I feel like people perceive Watson as a hair's breadth from strong AI, and IBM doesn't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. But I think the really valuable stuff in Watson - advances in computing techniques which I don't really know anything about but I'm certain must be there - is far less tangible, and is going to be very difficult to extricate from Watson itself, let alone monetize.
C'mon dude/dudette .. you are on Hacker News. Read up on what Watson is .. don't just take marketing press for granted. You (and other commenters) are sort of saying Hadoop/Map reduce is going to gain sentience and enslave us all. If your comment was about DeepMind, at least there is some interesting stuff there like Deep Neural Networks :-p
Does anyone have any information on what sort of teams they are moving? The image in the article references Watson, but I would be willing to bet teams working on that sort of research are staying in the US. I would bet its the sort of "maintenance" teams that are moving offshore, as they are seen as cost centers.
It's surprising they mention regulatory work (around data privacy) going offshore. I saw that happen at another company I worked for and it didn't go well. When the feds realized there's no one in person they can talk to and hold responsible, those jobs all came right back less than a year later.
Sad, but it's happening everywhere. I have nothing against the best people being employed irrespective of their country of origin. But I really feel ill at ease when companies like IBM say quality does not matter at all and let's just cut costs as recklessly as possible.
Why? You get what you pay for. Most of the stuff I've reviewed from outsourced companies is pure garbage. These companies are simply shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.
Some companies e.g. banks have no choice but to keep using IBM products as their whole infrastructure relies on IBM mainframes and tools. Companies like IBM just want to milk cash cows like this and 'maximise shareholder value'. So they try and get everything done as cheap as possible. On a PowerPoint and in an investment prospectus it looks great.
If it is happening everywhere, then how come it is still so easy to get a tech job and why is it so hard to find good developers here in the United States?
Corporations have to answer to the board. The board acts in the interests of investors/stakeholders and will eventually have to deal with 'extracting value' from the company to meet short-term investor demands at the expense of long-term sustainability.
To make matters worse, the CEO/board can justify higher levels of compensation if they greatly expand the size/scope of the company. Whether or not the growth matches the market trends. Just look to all the comments of employees complaining how their job is to warm a seat and/or maintain excess/unnecessary administration overhead.
The exception are companies like Facebook that refuse to cede decision making to the board. It pisses off investors when the company fails to extract value at a rate matching investor expectations but I bet FB will fare much better in the long-term. Unlike companies like Yahoo/IBM that morphed into pump-and-dump chop shops of underutilized talent.
Isn't that what venture capital supposedly promises. Workers who are vested in the company are hyper-motivated to see it succeed.
In theory, it's a great idea. Who wouldn't love to be an early employee of the 'next Microsoft' and win the successful business lottery?
In practice there are some very serious caveats:
1. Non-preferred stock may be rendered worthless after multiple rounds of seed funding.
2. Some stock come with additional restrictions. Such as requiring the person to maintain employment for an extended period of time.
3. Many can't afford the tax costs that come with exercising their options when they get the chance.
4. In some cases you may end up with a net negative of stock earnings after paying the taxes.
5. Exercising early can help avoid some of the tax pain but then you're essentially betting on the future success of a company with a high risk of failure.
Basically, working for a startup at significantly below market salary is joining the game of high stakes poker for the rich. Except, unlike poker the game comes with a minefield of additional risks.
If the employees were 'true' stakeholders working as a partnership then everybody wins. Unfortunately, that very rarely happens and sometimes relationships go sour during the death march to potential success.
When money is involved, the only thing that guaranteed is that people will play fucky fuck games for an advantage if they think they can get away with it.
This is the new reality - it's hard to argue against a >10x disparity in median salaries compared to your outsourced replacement, even if it might be a failure in the long term.
Do you think you could you persuade IBM's board (a proxy for their shareholders) that as a US worker you really deserve >10x the pay of an 'equivalent' worker in some other countries?
History will continue to repeat itself across corporate behemoths. The process is just too compelling with a short-term profit motive in a globalized economy.
Xenophobia is a common reaction to this. It misses the point. There are great people amongst your 'replacements' who are hired. There will also be terrible people. The same would happen if the process was entirely contained within one country. Imagine trying to hire the bulk of a skilled companies' workforce in one go. It's a disaster.
The kicker is that just like acquisition, outsourcing is rarely successful. The upfront financial benefits are clear. The true costs are from a change a workforce - lost knowledge, skills, quality and ethos (The things that really power a company to success). By the time they realize their mistake - it's too late, and a new management who haven't learnt the lessons will have already been rotated in.
Companies die of old age. Big blue is playing chess with the reaper.
IBM has literally no disincentive to do this, either de jure or de facto. The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask. And IBM employees, like most tech workers, don't think they need to act (read: bargain) collectively and thus have no recourse. Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor, companies will continue to treat their employees as fungible, on an increasingly global scale.
>Until the tech industry wakes up to the reality that they _are_ labor
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
When you feel like you can sum up a few million opinions as the result of a stupidity that you personally do not suffer, the odds that you are correct in your assessment approach zero.
Programmers eagerly work in EA style sweatshops producing games and other software with massive unpaid overtime, or count themselves lucky that IBM kept them for just a few extra months to train their replacements.
IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
But more to the point, if you desire a work/life balance you absolutely can find a programming job that will allow it. It'll pay less than the unpaid overtime job, but it exists, and will still pay more than most occupations.
> But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through.
I used to work for one of these IBM-like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.
I disagree - I think that the right-wing opinion machine has been successfully busting unions and scapegoating labor for so long that the tech industry doesn't see the value-add of the union itself. I view it a bit like the anti-vax movement. Nobody today is dying of polio, so the necessity and urgency are lost. (And Americans are spectacularly bad at learning from history because exceptionalism)
I assume you're referring to the current fascination with socialism? You know, that great political innovation that lead to a hundred million murders in the 20th century.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You should look into the history of unions. You might be surprised at their non-progressive / non-egalitarian origins. You don't need a "right-wing opinion machine" to besmirch the name of unions; you simply have to look at the long history of state-union corruption.
Socialism did what? Some despot puts Socialist in the state name and that makes it socialist? So North Korea is a shining example of democracy because it's right there Democratic People's Republic.
Does your 100million lives include the many millions the USA has helped see to their deaths?
I used to work in IT at an investment bank. We got no overtime, and had to work all hours - 9 hours a day, sometimes starting at 7 AM, weekend work, pages in the middle of the night.
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
I've never met anyone nor worked with anyone who thought they were better than someone else because of their job. Maybe that's something you want to believe, but it isn't true. A great deal of the engineers I work with in the bay area are socially conscious to the tech sector's impact on the community. And really they're harmed by it too, a software engineer can't afford to buy a house either.
If what you really believed was true there's no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.
I am not a programmer (although I can program) but I do a fairly important job at the company (that I own) that takes a great deal of thought, training and experience. So yes I do feel that I am "better" than a postal worker or a garbage man a job that doesn't take a great deal of thought, training, intelligence or experience or quite frankly in most (but not all cases) motivation. Of course there are people who are garbage men or postal workers that are there because of luck not intelligence or effort, but there are also people who grew up middle class like I did that aren't doing anything significant in their career either.
This idea that all of us are equal (we are not even factoring in luck) is really just a modern day PC version of the way the world is not.
LOL. I'm friends with sons of a garbage man. They are highly unionised with a bulletproof health plan, pension plan, college savings plan, etc. And if the city tries to take away even one of those things... ever see trash spontaneously combust when its been left to sit in its own juices for weeks.
The guys that haul trash have got it exactly right. It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth and when they demand they get it. If I lose Facebook for an hour its a bummer. If the trash isn't hauled away its a health hazard.
> so they know their worth and when they demand they get it
> It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth
Well not exactly. They have a union in most cities and some of those jobs the pay is so good there is a waiting line to get the job actually. And since they can strike in many contracts they have quite a bit of leverage (what you are saying).
Link below is without overtime pay. In some cases with overtime the pay can easily be 6 figure. I can assure you that there are many takers for this job, although perhaps where you live that might not be the case of course.
I mean no offense by this, but how old are you? I ask because I used to believe the same thing, but as time passed I realized that being special and having specialized knowledge are not one and the same. Very few of us are truly special.
Well I'd rather not say how old I am but I will say that I am not young by HN standards.
The issue is not whether one is special but special relative to someone who does that type of menial repetitive job.
And just that I think I have more capabilities than the average garbage man or postal worker. And I grew up in a time when it was ok to say something like that by the way.
So, while I find your attitude rather repgnant, the truth is that you just refuted the parent comment's claim. Which, quite frankly, isn't hard to do (I've encountered the attitude frequently myself, and occasionally have to check myself from adopting it).
But the HN Hivemind doesn't want to hear this, apparently.
You just told a lot of people that there's no difference between them and a garbagemen. I think you're pushing the point that unless you own a company, you're not "equal" to the people that do (and one assumes you don't mean that employees are better than entrepreneurs).
It doesn't even matter whether you're right or not but you can't attack people's self-worth and expect to be rewarded for it.
Sort of like if I were to say that all company owners and management are fraudulent exploitative criminals.
It's one thing to recognise abilities and capabilities. Or even to volunteer that somebody else as a greater human, particularly than yourself.
To self-nominate yourself as "more worthy" than others seems a road down a slippery and ugly path.
Then again, my worthy ancestors have fought on both sides of numerous bloody disagreements over this very concept.
More generally, and I mean this quite generally, I tend to find externally imposed tests far preferable to internally imposed ones. Human eugenics is internally imposed. The incestuous processes of party politics and academic mutual admiration societies strike me as similar. Likewise, to venture into more locally fraught, if less literally gut-spilling ground, defenses of Web or application layout and design which concern themselves with everything but what actual users actually need.
There's also the possibility that someday you'll find yourself less able, or perhaps just recognised and rewarded, than you are now. Will a deaf, or blinded, or crippled, or sick, or depressed, or senile you be less worthy than you are now? Be careful how you answer that, because the loads imposed should you find yourself there are all the more crushing.
Go out there. Do your fucking job, and do it well, for as long as you can.
Are you better in terms of intrinsic worth as a human being? No, they're just as human as you are.
Are you better in terms of physical strength or stamina, as mattwood asked? No.
Are you better morally than them? (Remember that "morally" includes not just overt acts like theft or murder. It also includes things like pride.)
Or is it merely, as you said in your reply to mattwood, that you think you're better mentally? (And perhaps in terms of achieving financial results.) But of all the possible axes of measurement, why did you pick that one to be the definition of "better"? (Cynically, I wonder if you didn't pick it because it's the one you win on...)
Yes. And I really don't see why you'd bring up pride, since if that's something that comes to your mind when you think about moral superiority, then you're barking up the wrong tree with the rest of 'em.
Doctors have the AMA bargain for rules in statehouses and Congress. Same with lawyers and the American Bar Association. The trial lawyers are particularly adept at lobbying and "campaign contributions".
I'm pretty sure people in these professions consider themselves pretty special.
Perhaps if there's so much resistance to the idea to an IT union, we should buff up the IEEE so it can be a "professional association" on the level of the AMA or the ABA, at least.
But unlike with service jobs that need to be done locally like a garbageman or electrician, what good does a union do against outsourcing jobs that can literally be done anywhere in the world?
Demanding to the employer: "Either keep our jobs in this country or we're going to stop working!", seems like it would just accelerate the offshoring.
the companies can be taxed to the point that it would cost the same to have an American employee or one in a foreign country. Companies want "globalism" but they don't want to pay for it.
I don't see how that could work since companies would either contract out overseas work, or hire overseas workers through a subsidiary, so instead of IBM hiring 1,000 foreign call center workers, they'll pay "Joe's Call Center" a negotiated fee to run a call center, without IBM writing a single foreign paycheck.
This sounds like a corner case in the hypothetical law, which is addressed by wording the law more carefully, not jettisoning the idea.
If every company is taxed heavily for outshoring work, it would be impossible for Joe's Call Center to employ 1,000 people and make enough profit for them to be competitive vs just hiring the workers directly.
Joe's Call Center is incorporated in India and run by Indian management. IBM just hired them for Call Center services.
Unless you forsee taxing all companies for all oversees work, I don't see how that can work.
And I'm not sure how you can effectively tax a company for all overseas labor, for example, a computer is made up of thousands of components with thousands of suppliers, how can you tax IBM for the low-paid subcontracted labor that mines the minerals that are sold to a manufacturer that makes the plastic that's sold to another manufacturer to create the dielectric for capacitors that's sold to another subcontractor that makes the capacitors that are sold to another subcontrator that glues them on the big tape reels that are sold to another subcontractor that loads them into the pick and place machines that are used by another contractor to build a board that's used by another subcontractor to build a computer for IBM.
How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation? It's easy to look at the simple case and say "Tax overseas workers!" but it's actually quite complicated to come up with rules do actually do so since there's no clear line that divides employees and non-employees. And if you draw that line, the company will move its workers to the otherside of the line.
How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation?
Start with the low-hanging fruit and target specific industries. Call center, direct marketing, etc. Perhaps a tax break for not tasking, directly or indirectly, an offshore company for any primary business need. (The law has the benefit of not being code - a judge can see through most avoidance schemes)
There's probably a nontrivial healthcare cost benefit in reducing the collective country's blood pressure from being able to talk to someone they can understand when they need help..
I hear this all the time. If it could have been sent overseas, it would have been already.
The reason H1Bs are popular is it allows cheap workers whom can be managed in the US onsite. The management that uses H1Bs doesn't want to move the whole department overseas; if they did, they themselves wouldn't be needed. Executives grow their departments as big as possible as a political goal.
One leverage workers have is refusing to train their replacements. That's just cruel. IBM probably forces them to do it by threatening their severance package. But if there was collective refusal that power balance could be tipped.
That seems like pretty weak leverage, since refusing to transition the work won't stop the outsourcing. Even if a worker refuses to tell anyone how the Widget Orders get entered into the computer that orders them, someone can reverse engineer the process and figure it out.
"Even if a worker refuses to tell anyone how the Widget Orders get entered into the computer that orders them, someone can reverse engineer the process and figure it out"
Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.
The process might be disrupted seriously. But - who would care?
Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.
Or they fly him in from overseas and say "Hey, see that stack of forms? You are your team have to figure out how they get entered into the computer so we can make more Widgets"
Here in Germany, Nokia was forced to either find alternative jobs for the employees of a plant they were closing down or to return to the local government all the subsidies that had gotten to built the plant.
The difference is that as skilled tech workers, when we are laid off we can find new work as fast as we want to.
I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)
It isn't like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.
I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.
Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
> Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
If this is actually true, in any situation where this happens, you are being underpaid, because it implies the employer is getting more out of your employment arrangement than you are.
I know what you meant, it is just the semantics of economics are precarious and a lot of people would fight tooth and nail to be in a position to bargain for more because of a situation where an employer values the worker much more than the worker values the employer. You want equilibrium where the worker gets as much from the employer as they can, which is when employer and work both get as much out as one another.
Well, it usually starts out being more equal when the job first starts. Over time, however, your value goes up faster than you get raises (which is why you get the largest raise when you change jobs).
No employer could ever stay in business if they paid employees as much value as the employee brings in. A $100K engineer may work on features worth a million dollars a year, but that doesn't mean that an employer could pay that employee a million dollars because the employer has many overhead expenses -- office rent, paying for servers, marketing expenses, paying the sales guys that bring in the million dollars a year, paying other support employees, putting money in the bank to ride through lean times, investing in new products/features that may never make money, etc.
The only way an employee can be paid as much money as he brings in for the company is if he is self employed.
That doesn't seem implausible, but I generally prefer lower pay for stability (or other soft benefits like more political capital). There is an equilibrium salary at which it is just barely worth it for my employer to keep me; there is another lower salary where it it is obviously worth it for my employer to keep me, and therefore still worth it for them to keep me despite me being burned out for a week, or having a bad day and having yelled at someone important, or having just broken something in production, or whatever. Or despite them having a tight budget and a soft or hard requirement to cut payroll by some fixed amount, as seems to be the case here.
Almost all of them in tier 2 and 3, specially if living outside the capital.
There is no shortage as such, what there is, are the conditions that many companies offer, where sometimes is better to not even have a job than working endless hours almost for free.
And if you want names for countries, in Portugal unless you are living in Porto or Lisbon there is a very thin possibility to land a developer job. And there aren't enough companies in those cities to employ everyone.
A large majority has been forced to go away to other countries.
Edit: And those that are above 40 have even a harder time finding something as a developer, because you are supposed to just be a manager.
I went through the same downturns as you, and while the companies I worked for went out of business, I was still able to find new work easily - and STILL had trouble finding qualified people when I was hiring.
Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
Every skilled craftsman in every generation in the history of civilization has made this claim. Why do you think your position of privilege is any more lasting than that of weavers or threshers?
Threshing is about as far from a skilled craft as you can get whilst still having a name for the activity. You can describe how to thresh in less than a minute, and it's pure labouring drudge work.
Most skilled trades lasted as skilled for thousands of years - way more than average working life. I do not need programming to last that long - just my working careers (35 years). Right now it looks like I will be fine.
I honestly don't think collective bargaining is the right approach. But professionalization of software engineering could lead to more long term stability. This is what doctors, lawyers, accountants, and actuaries do.
Professionalization also helps in screening potential employees. Right now it's kind of a crapshoot unless you have some firm informal signal that the potential hire is quality. Usually that signal is past employment at well-known firm with high standards.
I don't know... as a self-taught developer who has built a successful career with no formal training or certification, I would really hate having any sort of formal licensing or certification system.
>> The threat of H1-B applications being denied is either laughable or [there aren't enough of them anyway] depending on who you ask.
The ironic part is we have close to 10 million people out of work (not including those who have permanently fallen out of the workforce) - you think at least some of those people could fill those jobs?
Why shouldn't the global economy seek to make labor fungible? Why shouldn't Indians and Hungarians have the same opportunities to work that I do? I think putting other people who are trying to produce value at a disadvantage for personal gain is a bad thing.
Yes, some people get to buy new yachts when they stop buying labor from American workers. We could prevent them from buying labor from other workers, or we could do something about the yachts.
Highest paid people in our society are doctors and lawyers.
Are there special laws to subsidize importing them or new laws to deregulate these profession?
We should not emulate the legal protectionism that those industries have pursued. The legally imposed shortages in these industries raise prices and make everyone else poorer. I want no part in that. The aim of our industry should be to make everyone else wealthier by producing zero marginal cost goods that solve people's problems.
We should celebrate when problems become cheaper to solve.
Interesting take on it you have.
What can American middle class workers do about stagnant real wages? Productivity is up, but it's been a while since we've had a raise.
If you believe that too much of the gains from progress have accrued to capital, you can fight to redistribute those gains. Protectionism is redistribution too, it's just poorly directed.
Personally, I'd rather see the wealthy fund more public goods. Few people are struggling, and we should support them. Other than that, let's pursue abundance together instead of trying to adjust relative wealth.
This kind of arguments make me a bit apprehensive. People work in the tech industry are mostly OK with globalization and free markets as long as it does not affect their jobs. I wonder how many people wanting collective bargaining for the tech industry would be OK with increased costs that come with collective bargaining in the manufacturing sector.
It is worth noting that the companies IBM is competing for IT Services type work is TCS and Infosys for whom most of the workers are in India. It is difficult to see how IBM will be successful in the IT services industry if they don't adopt a similar low employee cost model.
Are there many/any companies that take the "automate yourself out of a job" credo seriously? That is, realizing the benefits of designed automation, produced by experienced developers who want to ascend from their initial roles by delegating that work to a well engineered system? I guess it's possible to outsource jobs while rewarding employees who are able to raise the tide for everyone, but it kind of sounds like IBM and most big tech companies see it as a zero sum game that is winnable by driving down labor costs.
IBM is particularly dysfunctional in this regard. I keep in touch with a lot of friends at IBM and a common story is that they'll cut headcount by one on a local team and hire two or three people overseas. The overseas people will require so much handholding to produce correct work that it consumes in entire person's time locally, negating any potential cost advantage and causing massive delays, as simple work items require corrections taking multiple round trips between people in different time zones.
I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.
2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue).
These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.
I assume for your first rule, it is only for a new job? I wasn't going to leave my startup job with the options right when we started to really grow and be successful.
It's a ballpark feel for the org. An admitted problem with my theory is that I've only seen behemoths (massive, nasty publicly traded beasties) and start-up to mid/small orgs with only 1-200 ppl having access to source control and/or servers.
If an org can grow beyond the tribal size & still maintain trust & agility - please share! I've got a good theory about how Spotify operates (see https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...) but I don't know if they've effectively crossed or exceeded this scope of personal trust & relationships.
The problem with that is there are certain parts of IT where you would never, ever, ever have a job if you adhered to that. Security, for example. If the company is under 150 employees, they probably don't have a security team. They probably aren't developing security applications or products. If they aren, they're probably not very successful (or are about to be bought out by a big company).
And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco.
Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.
Backing this up with more anecdata, I have had zero problems finding excellent offers at firms where technology is "the product" not just a cost to be cut, and far from the valley at that!
But because my anecdotes are just as good as anyone else's, the place where I started my career has plenty of 20-30 yr veterans in their IT department, and they are a warehouse company with an IT staff of over 200 people but their tech doesn't directly make them any money at all.
That's a long stable career in IT in a department bigger than what he wants the entire company to be where IT is a cost center. If you're limiting yourself to tiny tech companies, you're missing out on a lot. Maybe company size and products sold aren't necessarily a good indicator of your career success...?
I think using Dunbar's number, a theory, to support an actual belief you have is a rather large mistake. It's akin to a confirmation bias, but even worse, because it's not even a fact you're relying on.
Your point #2 is idiotic. There are 300K employees at IBM. It's essentially like hundreds if not thousands of mini-companies within IBM. I work at IBM in a division that generates revenue, a lot of it.
My #1 goes to my personal experiences on group communication, trust, learning opportunities, transparency & "evolution of technology". I've ALWAYS had horrible experiences just even trying to do my job or make a small improvement with technology groups in large organizations. I've NEVER had problems getting my job done, improving things or finding an opportunity to do/learn something new in a "small" 1 ~ 200 member technology group.
I don't see why #2 is idiotic. Simply put, don't look like a cost to be cut & you're less likely to be.
Again, FWIW - these are my own personal and admittedly biased "rules" they've served me well. Your mileage may vary;)
TBH, I've seen a lot of companies doing this recently. Cargill has been going through the same thing and they've been actively culling people who are close to be fully vested (20 year mark I believe). One friend who got their job "moved to the India office" said she lost over 400K in pension money because she was let go 6 months prior to her 20 year mark. After she started talking to other employees, she found close to a dozen mid-level managers who were all within 2-5 years of hitting the same mark.
Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs.
It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back.
I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse.
I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.
True story about IBM Global Services. I was working with a client that was integrating web services with another third party. IBM GS were responsible for managing third party's network.
Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later.
We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response.
Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up.
"Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.
"Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give.
They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client".
They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame.
Agreed, this sounds like an Indian outsource tech center problem that is universal rather than an ibm specific problem. Cultural differences rather than language?
My experience is with Infosys. They definitely stream information from architect->tech lead->coder one-way. There is no channel back if something doesn't make sense.
That's not just IBM's outsourced vendors. The desire to do the minimal amount of work to adhere to the exact wording of contracts seems to be prevalent. For us, it takes us 3 to 4 weeks to have a single VM created. And even then its usually done wrong. When asking them to do the partitions different, the response is that they're unable to change the script. A month to simply have a script run.
This goes a long way to explaining that Gartner report from last year which say Marketing departments IT budgets will exceed IT departments IT budgets by 2017.
We're seeing this a lot - doing projects directly with marketing department, largely so they can completely circumvent internal IT department's and their apparent stonewalling on seemingly simple requests.
(Of course it also means we're seeing things like completely outlandish requests that indicate fundamental security/privacy misunderstandings ("What do you mean you can't import our entire customer database into the WordPress site you're building and hosting cheaply for us?"), as well as last minute compliance intrusions ("Oh, you need this to live on a big-corp.com subdomain? That requires a security audit and risk assessment and mitigation document! How on earth have you got this far without knowing that?")
It happens very slowly. I have a similar story but with simple VLAN changes taking weeks and endless forms. Sorry to hear people losing their jobs but yeesh what a horrible company IBM is. This is a company that pivoted to a services company as well.
Could also be a compliance thing where they were told "If it's not on the form, don't implement it". And it's up to the requestor to specify everything they want opened. Having the network team second-guess what was requested could leave unwanted security holes when they have to make assumptions about a request.
Though I don't understand the problem you experienced -- HTTP runs over a bidirectional TCP connection, if they got your request, then packets for that session were already flowing in both directions (the TCP session wouldn't set up otherwise). The only way I could see what you described would be if they had a proxy or some sort of deep inspection firewall in the middle that was blocking the return response.
> Could also be a compliance thing where they were told "If it's not on the form, don't implement it". And it's up to the requestor to specify everything they want opened.
Sure thing, do exactly what you're told.
That doesn't preclude you from firing back a message to say "Hey, this request is unusual and almost certainly wrong, are you sure this is what you wanted?"
When a nurse sees an order for 10000 mg of a drug that's never normally administered above 200mg, it's not their job to correct anything, but it is their job to ask the doctor "Hey, did you mean to write 100.00mg? Is this actually correct?"
I get the compliance thing but surely in cases where they can see that a request is very likely to be wrong I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect them to send off an email or give you a call to double check if it is really what you wanted.
I was about to say just this. It is why I will not work in large enterprises again if I can help it. Something that should take 5 minutes can end up taking weeks and still not be done correctly.
I'm not sure why you're being down voted if other big enterprises didn't have this issue they would not put up with IBM having this issue. It is all about minimal work, CYA, and minimal thinking. It is why I always tell people that anyone who can really do IT (probably most on this site), will always have a job.
Hell, as someone client-facing who works at IBM, I've had experiences with a ton of other vendors who do the same thing. I'm having a hard time getting one firewall change put in through a client's outsourced datacenter from one IP address to one other IP address, one port. Ticket keeps getting closed as complete, until we say it's not and they reopen the ticket. Rinse and repeat. It's been three weeks of this.
If you're outsourcing your operations, that's what you have to expect. They're not going to be as invested in your success as your own employees would be.
> "Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.
Question sounds reasonable - could be a fire & forget scenario.
Problem isn't the question but that it takes a week between iterations. If you had to order lunch and it was a week between asking for your steak and being asked if you want it medium or well done then the question isn't the problem
I was their Corporate Webmaster in the 1990s (effectively CTO, but not quite). The networking support teams had this in place back then. If you did not say you wanted bi–directional traffic, then you would not get bi–directional traffic.
They were incredibly dependent on their filter rules, and their process assumed the filter rules were always correct and accurate.
One night I got confused about which window I was in and ssh'd into my desktop machine (on the internal 9/8 network) from one of the ibm.com backend servers (on the open internet). A "routine update" caused routes for 9.0.0.0/8 to be advertised on the open internet. Although I had a short escalation path it still took an hour from when I discovered the hole to get anyone in Global Services to accept it as a problem.
Well I had similar experience IBM people. We had one small change request for our IBM websphere MQ setup. It was raised when I joined the project and they could not complete it by the time I left after 1 year. Multiple times they canceled our request ticket. And this whole setup was managed by IBM in their data centers.
Had the same experience with a large communication equipment manufacturer (who you'd think would understand firewall rules better!). This is pretty normal to be honest.
I doubt there are many companies who are 100% on top of things, but I get the sense that's more down to the department or the individuals you're dealing with. There are people who don't think things through everywhere. I certainly wouldn't bear a grudge against IBM for too long!
I had that happen with Infosys. They do exactly what you tell them to do, good, bad or stupid. You never get feedback that something doesn't make sense. So in the end you look stupid to your managers because you didn't write a good spec.
Now I avoid dealing with outsourcers as much as possible unless I have 100% understanding of the issue and can describe it precisely.
Hey I am sorry if you are impacted by downsizing, but there are better ways of handling this than disparaging the tech community in India. I have worked in both US and India for more than one company and can tell you there is no discernible difference in the quality of the work that gets done between US and India. And even if I take your point that IBM are fools who doesn't know what they are doing, how to you explain Amazon, Microsoft and Google hiring thousands of developers in India. Microsoft's largest developer shop outside US is in India. Your experience can be due to a variety of different things from person at the other end doing exactly what he is supposed to do just to not poke holes in a secure infra to assuming that the firewall access list is state-full and allows return (HTTP response) traffic to pass by default. And there is no guarantee that a person based in US won't do the same thing.
There are bad coders everywhere and it takes years of deliberate practice to be good at anything, including programming. Those people who did not put in the work, don't make it through grueling interviews at Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other such companies. People who do make it however are just as good as programmers anywhere else in the world.
The difference is in motivation. What motivated me to go into tech is that I liked it. What motivated many of my Indian colleagues over the years to go into tech was, by their own admission, societal pressure. Which one do you think produces better outcomes? This is the case regardless of the occupation, lawyer, plumber, programmer or teacher - if you're passionate, chances are you're better at what you do than someone who isn't.
This is why Trump is so popular. If you expand this to include blue collar workers that have been savaged over the last twenty years, you can see the vein of anger that he is tapping into.
trumps appeal is many faceted. He draws those with the bully mentality - people who would attempt to make themselves better by beating down those who might be above them.
he promises things he knows he can not deliver, but that fit the needs of the people that would vote for him. they can't risk that he might actually be able to deliver and no one else is making those promises, and so they take a chance.
like buying lottery tickets with your last dollar.
You really need to read Trump's book to interpret him. His extreme statements are the opening positions for negotiating a deal. Start out asking for 3x what you want, then you can give up stuff you don't really care about and make the other side feel like they have "won" something.
I would only make one ammendment to your statement - "people who would attempt to make themselves better by beating down those who might be BELOW them."
It's amazing that those who are near the bottom of the ladder will spend more time making sure those that are underneath them stay there rather than look above them.
IBM doesn't make much of their own software. They bought lotus notes, they made rational clear case a massive product by buying other companies and cobbling it together. There is literally not a single company that is adding lotus notes or rational to their enterprise development suite. Their dwindling profits are accumulated from older companies who cannot or will not put up the cost to transition to latest tools. However every month another one of those companies finally bites the bullet and replaces those outdated tools. Aside from Watson when was the last time IBM MADE SOMETHING? Maybe they have but I haven't heard of it.
I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?
IBM is fairly active in the hardware space - Blue Gene supercomputers and POWER processors have a pretty solid presence in the HPC space. To produce those products they do quite a lot of basic science in semiconductor and nanotech research.
I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.
I was not aware of that. Thanks for informing me. If they had no value they would collapse and that has not happened. But I have wondered about their sub par products that are not growing and this does seem to be finally coming back to haunt them.
Plenty bro. Guess what? When you're bought, you now are a part of that company. Anything that purchased company makes is now made by IBM. What hope is there? Are you kidding me? Have you seen Berkshire Hathaway? Have you ever heard of Berkshire Hathaway?!
Maybe I wasn't clear enough. What has IBM either made or bought that is GROWING and has big upside?
What have they bought that is fairly recent and is highly popular? Lotus notes and rational are older applications. Who the heck uses DB2 instead of Oracle/MySQL/Postgres? When was the last time you heard of a company becoming a new customer of DB2? Of choosing DB2 over the other database products on the market?
Maybe they do make stuff but I have not heard of them buying anything relatively new on the market that is popular. Oracle is always buying new companies and adding them to their offerings (Workday, BigMachines to name a few). What is new that IBM bought that is GROWING? Lotus Notes, Rational and DB2 are not GROWING.
Berkshire Hathaway buys companies that are growing. Name a company that IBM bought that is adding new customers.
Any company that supports cloud. Revenue of cloud department is 8%-10% of IBM's revenue. It grew from last year. It's projected to grow yet again this upcoming year. We've continuously added on customers in several of the cloud companies that were purchased. I'm in one of those cloud companies that was purchased. Our customer count is going up leading to our revenue going up, contributing to IBM's overall cloud push.
Disclaimer: I am a (US) IBM employee, but my opinions are 100% my own
Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning.
Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered.
I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.
Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.
Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market.
It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.
I don't think you can put a static time on how long you should be at a company. If you're at a company that is still growing, increasing revenues and/or profits, increasing head count which leads to relatively fast promotions and bonuses and "going the right way", it's very likely worth staying at. Why introduce unnecessary risk? The trick is knowing when to abandon ship and to get out before it's a depressing place to be. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be willing to talk to other companies. But I'd not always recommend the grass is always greener.
Yeah I should have clarified that "two, maybe three years" was not for leaving a company, but rather how long I think you should remain in one job. Moving from junior to associate programmer, going from analyst to engineer, even moving from helpdesk to development, it's a step up. In IBM terms, if you're a band 7 for three years, it might be time to look at other options.
If I am Associate Middleware Software Engineer at Company X for four years, IMO, that's a little too long.
Fellow ibmer here. I'm in a growth area too. I feel safe for the next few years but have the same outlook as you. I meet people who have been with the company for 30+ years. I can't fathom how I could be with any company for that long given the current conditions. So I will probably end up putting in a few more years and moving on to something else before I get caught in a "resource action".
It's interesting that we all, or so many of us, think 'you just have to accept it', as if it's a law of nature.
Today, I had a revelation: Trying to grasp the revolt of working class Americans against both the Democratic and Republican parties, it suddenly struck me: Why should that group 'just accept' globalization? (Or immigration or deregulation or the free market pricing of everything from health care to college ...)
So far all the benefits have been accrued by a very narrow subset of society, while working class life has become harder and well-paying jobs and social mobility more scarce. Probably not coincidentally, the people benefitting are those who had a seat at the table when the rules were written. Everyone else, per both parties, would see the benefits magically 'trickle down' - but of course they haven't, and it's been decades.
So why should working class voters take that deal?
Because fighting it is like punching a hurricane. It's based on fundamental forces that won't change no matter how hard you fight. If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.
Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
I strongly disagree. Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries. In the UK, there's a good chance they will with draw from the EU. Worldwide, progress for the WTO is dead. In the US, Trump and Sanders generally are against globalization, and even Clinton has rejected the TPP (on the campaign trail; we'll see what happens if she gets elected).
Provide some evidence that globalization, especially in its current form, is irresistable.
> Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
But that hasn't helped the working class, so why should they want to do that? So even more wealth can accrue to the wealthy few?
> If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.
> Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries.
I'm not saying it's impossible to punch a hurricane.
I'm saying you can only harm yourself. Like the U.S. did with tariffs to turn a sudden recession in the 1920 into the Great Depression (aided by subsequent massive government spending crowding out industry investment).
Job security at any big company is about finding a niche and making yourself indispensable. It's easier to find a new niche from an old one, when everyone else is spending most of their time worrying about today.
I can't think of two many companies that are more irrelevant to the future of computing. What does IBM actually do anymore? Seems to me they just need legions of consultants and cheap developers to bleed their customers under the guise of offering "solutions."
I think IBM Marketing Cloud might have a future if they don't screw it up. It's really 50/50 at this point. Some of the products (UBX) are good, but the architecture / API design / quality seems suspect at times. They've improved on Silverpop massively since the purchase and re-brand, but it still leaves plenty to be desired. If they gave the team that built UBX free range to re-build Silverpop from the ground instead of skinning it better they would have a serious competitive product on their hands.
Between that and Softlayer / Bluemix / Compose / Cloudant they have a serious cloud offering if they do some consolidation.
Establishment Republicans and Democrats agree that this is good, this is the way things should work in the globalized world. This kind of thing explains the rise of both Trump and Sanders.
"Resource Action." That's even worse than my previous corporate cog job where they called it a RIF, "Reduction in Force." Who sits around and justifies themselves by coming up with idiotic terms like this?
I currently work at a multi-national corporation that has offshored a vast majority of its development and infrastructure. Any savings in cost of payroll is absolutely outpaced by a massive increase in expenditure required for project overruns and failures due to lower quality of work, terrible communication, lack of real SME's, and worthless organization. The upper management's reaction to this was to bring in consultants who are considerably more expensive than local talent and are often laughably ineffective. Especially since they have to fly back home every single Thursday. The sense of impending failure among the local employees for every single project is palpable.
In the bigger picture of things 'expensive' is a highly relative. You have to also factor in risk and the other secondary costs.
Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys.
For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that should have been more than capable of doing the work we provided.
Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months.
Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally?
It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged.
You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend.
The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere.
This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations.
It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option.
Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed.
Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.
Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.
Yeah it's either train and get severance or leave now. However, IBM just reduced the severance from 2 weeks per year of tenure to a standard 1 month. At that point I'm not sure it even matters.
When this happened at a company I worked at, the line from management was, "Stay for two months and train this person and your severance is 6 months' salary. Don't train them and you leave in five minutes with 6 weeks' severance."
it is happening on the same way for EMC now. My team,me and lots of people were gone for the deal with Dell. They've been transferring all the work to China. Right now, what i heard from my co-worker, the laid off is still ongoing.
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Don't do it guys, really don't....
Just like in the movie Brazil - they ruin that guys life because a bug got in the type-machine which was putting out the papers for whom to go after, and it made the machine spell the wrong name.
However, if you have not seen this documentary, I highly recommend you watch it, called "Human Resources": http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/human-resources/
EDIT: What they SHOULD use watson for is to determine of those being laid off from the current position, how suitable they would be to internally apply for the one of 25,000 openings.
They should limit Watson to tell them who should be RA'd to a new job - not who should be let go. Obviously those NOT scored to stay by watson are in the set of pink-slips implicitly.
While clearly lazy / incompetent people who deserve to be laid off exist, I think one should stay humble and realize that a lot of how one's life works out is pure luck (or a lack of it), after all.
Imagine if Watson was an app. What would you do with it? As I understand it, it takes an oblique textual reference of some kind and turns it into a concrete, explicit reference. You talk about something and it figures out what you're talking about. That's great! It's a hard problem and it's extremely impressive that it's been solved.
But in practical value terms, that's just a toy. And when would it be more useful than Google Search, or Wikipedia, or Siri? Can Watson do anything, book a trip, set a timer? Well, that capability would have to be plugged in, along with voice recognition and speech synthesis. But can it reliably determine what I want it to do? Or even whether I want it to do anything? Can it follow a conversation? Is it even stateful? What, if any, role does the core Watson functionality play in the systems which eventually do these things?
And how does Watson generalise to other areas? IBM was looking at applying it to healthcare. How would this work? Presumably, here your "oblique textual reference" is a collection of data (symptoms and measurements) collected from a patient, and the end result is a diagnosis, like "What is rubella?". Now, firstly, how useful is that? Is that the hard part of being a doctor? What about carrying out the tests, what about prescribing treatment or choosing further tests? What about missing hints, e.g. can Watson handle visual data from simply looking at a patient? Or does the doctor have to inform Watson that the patient is leaning slightly to her right when she sits, and has trouble getting onto the bed? So does Watson's single trick actually help, does it even slightly alleviate the workload of a medical professional?
And secondly, how readily does Watson adapt from the world of general knowledge quiz answers to the world of medical diagnoses? Are these worlds even remotely structurally similar? Can they be modelled and correlated using the same basic structures? Is there some heavy modification and serious domain knowledge needed to alter Watson to do this? Or are the two problems basically on different planets, such that an entirely different machine needs to be built?
The same goes for applying Watson to business analytics, for example. In my mind, Watson is a machine which, as it currently exists, best case scenario, can look at all of your financial graphs and go "Ding! You're in a recession." And then nothing else. This may be of some use, but I doubt it.
All of this is ignoring the backend, which is that Watson in reality is this monumental pile of expensive, high-performance hardware and IBM Research code - and we all know how much research code ever resembles a working, saleable product. All of that to handle one real-time quiz game. You're going to shrink that until it fits in one office? Or you're going to have a server farm full of them serving requests at great expense?
I feel like people perceive Watson as a hair's breadth from strong AI, and IBM doesn't want to disabuse anybody of that notion. But I think the really valuable stuff in Watson - advances in computing techniques which I don't really know anything about but I'm certain must be there - is far less tangible, and is going to be very difficult to extricate from Watson itself, let alone monetize.
Just off the top of my head. Unsourced hunches.
IBM rule #2: See IBM rule #1.
Truly a race to the bottom.
And totally agree that most of it is garbage.
To make matters worse, the CEO/board can justify higher levels of compensation if they greatly expand the size/scope of the company. Whether or not the growth matches the market trends. Just look to all the comments of employees complaining how their job is to warm a seat and/or maintain excess/unnecessary administration overhead.
The exception are companies like Facebook that refuse to cede decision making to the board. It pisses off investors when the company fails to extract value at a rate matching investor expectations but I bet FB will fare much better in the long-term. Unlike companies like Yahoo/IBM that morphed into pump-and-dump chop shops of underutilized talent.
In theory, it's a great idea. Who wouldn't love to be an early employee of the 'next Microsoft' and win the successful business lottery?
In practice there are some very serious caveats:
1. Non-preferred stock may be rendered worthless after multiple rounds of seed funding.
2. Some stock come with additional restrictions. Such as requiring the person to maintain employment for an extended period of time.
3. Many can't afford the tax costs that come with exercising their options when they get the chance.
4. In some cases you may end up with a net negative of stock earnings after paying the taxes.
5. Exercising early can help avoid some of the tax pain but then you're essentially betting on the future success of a company with a high risk of failure.
Basically, working for a startup at significantly below market salary is joining the game of high stakes poker for the rich. Except, unlike poker the game comes with a minefield of additional risks.
If the employees were 'true' stakeholders working as a partnership then everybody wins. Unfortunately, that very rarely happens and sometimes relationships go sour during the death march to potential success.
When money is involved, the only thing that guaranteed is that people will play fucky fuck games for an advantage if they think they can get away with it.
Do you think you could you persuade IBM's board (a proxy for their shareholders) that as a US worker you really deserve >10x the pay of an 'equivalent' worker in some other countries?
History will continue to repeat itself across corporate behemoths. The process is just too compelling with a short-term profit motive in a globalized economy.
Xenophobia is a common reaction to this. It misses the point. There are great people amongst your 'replacements' who are hired. There will also be terrible people. The same would happen if the process was entirely contained within one country. Imagine trying to hire the bulk of a skilled companies' workforce in one go. It's a disaster.
The kicker is that just like acquisition, outsourcing is rarely successful. The upfront financial benefits are clear. The true costs are from a change a workforce - lost knowledge, skills, quality and ethos (The things that really power a company to success). By the time they realize their mistake - it's too late, and a new management who haven't learnt the lessons will have already been rotated in.
Companies die of old age. Big blue is playing chess with the reaper.
Never going to happen. The great conceit of the tech world peons is believing they're above the simple garbage man or postal worker. After all they create such value. Admitting a union would help acknowledges they're not special.
IT workers could demand protection from the same abuses that custodians and delivery drivers fought for and earned decades ago. But then the industry might need to admit their collars aren't as white as they pretend.
But more to the point, if you desire a work/life balance you absolutely can find a programming job that will allow it. It'll pay less than the unpaid overtime job, but it exists, and will still pay more than most occupations.
You're fucking insane if you think the plight of the average programmer is anywhere near what custodians go through. I used to work for one of these IBM-like offshoring firms before I knew better and the quality of their work is simply garbage(there's some good people in there of course). For example, I was called in to troubleshoot a faulty URL - I asked them for it; they linked me to a localhost page. Other joys included network engineers who didn't know what port SSH runs on and Java programmers who literally copy-pasted straight from the web.
[1] http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/fs17e_computer.pdf
Because the union scandals of the 60s and 70s never happened, of course.
I assume you're referring to the current fascination with socialism? You know, that great political innovation that lead to a hundred million murders in the 20th century.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
You should look into the history of unions. You might be surprised at their non-progressive / non-egalitarian origins. You don't need a "right-wing opinion machine" to besmirch the name of unions; you simply have to look at the long history of state-union corruption.
Does your 100million lives include the many millions the USA has helped see to their deaths?
I couldn't resist.
Maybe a mix of Glass Door with Adhocracy or Liquid Feedback
https://liqd.net/software.html
http://dev.liquidfeedback.org/trac/lf/
The electricians all left at 5 PM. They belonged to the IBEW and had pension plans, job security with seniority etc. IT used to bitch about how they'd leave at 5 PM when we had to start doing some work. They would have stayed past 5 PM, but the super wealthy bank would have had to pay them (not us) overtime, and they almost never did that.
The other IT people would also moan about how stupid they were compared to us. How stupid are they? They leave at 5 PM, or get overtime if they do, they have job security, they don't have to work all hours or are paid well if they do any how, they had pensions and job security based on seniority. Who were the real fools?
If what you really believed was true there's no way that someone like Barbara Lee could be in office with such huge wins every two years when so many of her constituents are the same people that work in the area you think is so terrible. Why are you even posting on HN? This is a technical news site.
This idea that all of us are equal (we are not even factoring in luck) is really just a modern day PC version of the way the world is not.
As an aside, I always leave the garbage man Gatorades because frankly the job looks like it sucks.
The guys that haul trash have got it exactly right. It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth and when they demand they get it. If I lose Facebook for an hour its a bummer. If the trash isn't hauled away its a health hazard.
> It's a hard job that no one wants to do so they know their worth
Well not exactly. They have a union in most cities and some of those jobs the pay is so good there is a waiting line to get the job actually. And since they can strike in many contracts they have quite a bit of leverage (what you are saying).
Link below is without overtime pay. In some cases with overtime the pay can easily be 6 figure. I can assure you that there are many takers for this job, although perhaps where you live that might not be the case of course.
Examples:
New York:
http://salarygenius.com/ny/new-york/salary/garbage-man-salar...
Cincinnati:
http://salarygenius.com/oh/cincinnati/salary/garbage-man-sal...
The issue is not whether one is special but special relative to someone who does that type of menial repetitive job.
And just that I think I have more capabilities than the average garbage man or postal worker. And I grew up in a time when it was ok to say something like that by the way.
But the HN Hivemind doesn't want to hear this, apparently.
It doesn't even matter whether you're right or not but you can't attack people's self-worth and expect to be rewarded for it.
Sort of like if I were to say that all company owners and management are fraudulent exploitative criminals.
Were you expecting upvotes ?
To self-nominate yourself as "more worthy" than others seems a road down a slippery and ugly path.
Then again, my worthy ancestors have fought on both sides of numerous bloody disagreements over this very concept.
More generally, and I mean this quite generally, I tend to find externally imposed tests far preferable to internally imposed ones. Human eugenics is internally imposed. The incestuous processes of party politics and academic mutual admiration societies strike me as similar. Likewise, to venture into more locally fraught, if less literally gut-spilling ground, defenses of Web or application layout and design which concern themselves with everything but what actual users actually need.
There's also the possibility that someday you'll find yourself less able, or perhaps just recognised and rewarded, than you are now. Will a deaf, or blinded, or crippled, or sick, or depressed, or senile you be less worthy than you are now? Be careful how you answer that, because the loads imposed should you find yourself there are all the more crushing.
Go out there. Do your fucking job, and do it well, for as long as you can.
But let others tell you you're a good person.
It's one of the better ways to be one.
Are you better in terms of intrinsic worth as a human being? No, they're just as human as you are.
Are you better in terms of physical strength or stamina, as mattwood asked? No.
Are you better morally than them? (Remember that "morally" includes not just overt acts like theft or murder. It also includes things like pride.)
Or is it merely, as you said in your reply to mattwood, that you think you're better mentally? (And perhaps in terms of achieving financial results.) But of all the possible axes of measurement, why did you pick that one to be the definition of "better"? (Cynically, I wonder if you didn't pick it because it's the one you win on...)
Yes. And I really don't see why you'd bring up pride, since if that's something that comes to your mind when you think about moral superiority, then you're barking up the wrong tree with the rest of 'em.
Demanding to the employer: "Either keep our jobs in this country or we're going to stop working!", seems like it would just accelerate the offshoring.
If every company is taxed heavily for outshoring work, it would be impossible for Joe's Call Center to employ 1,000 people and make enough profit for them to be competitive vs just hiring the workers directly.
Unless you forsee taxing all companies for all oversees work, I don't see how that can work.
And I'm not sure how you can effectively tax a company for all overseas labor, for example, a computer is made up of thousands of components with thousands of suppliers, how can you tax IBM for the low-paid subcontracted labor that mines the minerals that are sold to a manufacturer that makes the plastic that's sold to another manufacturer to create the dielectric for capacitors that's sold to another subcontractor that makes the capacitors that are sold to another subcontrator that glues them on the big tape reels that are sold to another subcontractor that loads them into the pick and place machines that are used by another contractor to build a board that's used by another subcontractor to build a computer for IBM.
How far down the chain do you plan on going with taxation? It's easy to look at the simple case and say "Tax overseas workers!" but it's actually quite complicated to come up with rules do actually do so since there's no clear line that divides employees and non-employees. And if you draw that line, the company will move its workers to the otherside of the line.
Start with the low-hanging fruit and target specific industries. Call center, direct marketing, etc. Perhaps a tax break for not tasking, directly or indirectly, an offshore company for any primary business need. (The law has the benefit of not being code - a judge can see through most avoidance schemes)
There's probably a nontrivial healthcare cost benefit in reducing the collective country's blood pressure from being able to talk to someone they can understand when they need help..
(Only sort of kidding about that last bit...)
The reason H1Bs are popular is it allows cheap workers whom can be managed in the US onsite. The management that uses H1Bs doesn't want to move the whole department overseas; if they did, they themselves wouldn't be needed. Executives grow their departments as big as possible as a political goal.
Someone could reverse engineer this, but they fired him too.
The process might be disrupted seriously. But - who would care?
Or they fly him in from overseas and say "Hey, see that stack of forms? You are your team have to figure out how they get entered into the computer so we can make more Widgets"
Here in Germany, Nokia was forced to either find alternative jobs for the employees of a plant they were closing down or to return to the local government all the subsidies that had gotten to built the plant.
I have worked for a few companies that have gone out of business. Looking for work afterwards is mostly a screening job, picking the work I want to do out of the various offers. Every time, I have been hired for more money than I was making before (it is common knowledge that changing jobs is the best way to get raises)
It isn't like I am some hotshot developer, either. I am not a networking type person, so all of my contacts are just people I have worked with at previous shops. The reason it is so easy to find work is because there are simply more jobs available than qualified workers.
I know this because I have been on the other side, too (trying to hire people). It is really hard to find quality developers, because they always have multiple offers.
Why would workers in this situation want or need to collectively bargain? Every place I have worked needs me more than I need them.
If this is actually true, in any situation where this happens, you are being underpaid, because it implies the employer is getting more out of your employment arrangement than you are.
I know what you meant, it is just the semantics of economics are precarious and a lot of people would fight tooth and nail to be in a position to bargain for more because of a situation where an employer values the worker much more than the worker values the employer. You want equilibrium where the worker gets as much from the employer as they can, which is when employer and work both get as much out as one another.
The only way an employee can be paid as much money as he brings in for the company is if he is self employed.
I know quite a few countries where being a IT person won't matter one tiny thing.
It is job hunting and begging like everyone else.
When the location doesn't matter, it is all about the price.
There is no shortage as such, what there is, are the conditions that many companies offer, where sometimes is better to not even have a job than working endless hours almost for free.
And if you want names for countries, in Portugal unless you are living in Porto or Lisbon there is a very thin possibility to land a developer job. And there aren't enough companies in those cities to employ everyone.
A large majority has been forced to go away to other countries.
Edit: And those that are above 40 have even a harder time finding something as a developer, because you are supposed to just be a manager.
Having been through two tech downturns, and unemployed at points in both of them, I can guarantee you the job environment you describe is temporary.
For now. We've had a good few years.
Every skilled craftsman in every generation in the history of civilization has made this claim. Why do you think your position of privilege is any more lasting than that of weavers or threshers?
At that point, I will need to learn a new skill (and/or retire).
Professionalization also helps in screening potential employees. Right now it's kind of a crapshoot unless you have some firm informal signal that the potential hire is quality. Usually that signal is past employment at well-known firm with high standards.
The ironic part is we have close to 10 million people out of work (not including those who have permanently fallen out of the workforce) - you think at least some of those people could fill those jobs?
Most of the applicants would provide negative value if hired.
Yes, some people get to buy new yachts when they stop buying labor from American workers. We could prevent them from buying labor from other workers, or we could do something about the yachts.
Let's try these first, see how it works.
We should celebrate when problems become cheaper to solve.
Personally, I'd rather see the wealthy fund more public goods. Few people are struggling, and we should support them. Other than that, let's pursue abundance together instead of trying to adjust relative wealth.
You have an interesting take on it; I'll respect that and leave it at that.
I don't have anything against overseas labor and I've worked at companies where the overseas dev teams are first class citizens and produce work that's comparable to the work produced here, but IBM is not one of those companies.
1.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org who's membership is greater than Dunbar's number (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number)
2.) If at all possible, don't take a full time job in a technical org that is viewed as a cost center (e.g. the code you write/systems you maintain don't generate revenue).
These are no guarantee of job stability, but the violation of rule #1 (e.g. big honkin' tech == dumb decisions & middle mgmt morons) or rule #2 (e.g. you are a cost to be managed & cut) are far more likely to lead to job instability. Jut my personal experience & $0.02USD.
If an org can grow beyond the tribal size & still maintain trust & agility - please share! I've got a good theory about how Spotify operates (see https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-cult...) but I don't know if they've effectively crossed or exceeded this scope of personal trust & relationships.
And I would wager that 80% of all IT employment is done at companies where IT is not their main source of income. At that point, you're automatically a cost center. Your second rule is saying "never work anywhere that doesn't produce technology as their main business", which forces everyone to live in San Fransisco.
Besides, IT is not a cost center for IBM, it's part of their core business. And they still lay people off.
SF is hardly the only place on the planet where tech is their direct business.
That's a long stable career in IT in a department bigger than what he wants the entire company to be where IT is a cost center. If you're limiting yourself to tiny tech companies, you're missing out on a lot. Maybe company size and products sold aren't necessarily a good indicator of your career success...?
Your point #2 is idiotic. There are 300K employees at IBM. It's essentially like hundreds if not thousands of mini-companies within IBM. I work at IBM in a division that generates revenue, a lot of it.
I don't see why #2 is idiotic. Simply put, don't look like a cost to be cut & you're less likely to be.
Again, FWIW - these are my own personal and admittedly biased "rules" they've served me well. Your mileage may vary;)
Ex: You work on a project with ~20 people, 3 or 4 teams report to one manager.
Completely agree. Just don't take a full time job in an org that is viewed as a cost center, period.
Also, I've seen a LOT of companies to do this and it never ends well. This is usually a harbinger of metrics slipping, profit goals missed and shaky investors getting out. Which in turn means the company is in a slide. Moving their stuff overseas is a way to show investors they're trying to cut costs.
It never works. I can name a half-dozen companies off the top of my head that did this and it actually made the situation worse not better. Some of those companies are still struggling to make it back.
Here are some off the top of my head:
1 - IBM
2 - Honeywell
3 - Cargill
4 - Thomson Reuters
5 - Best Buy
6 - Wells Fargo
I'm actually somewhat surprised by this move by IBM. Most companies I know of wised up to the fact that the total cost of ownership of the system goes up with outsourcing and you get a sub par product and as a result stopped outsourcing any kind of core development en masse.
I myself have seen a few of the outsourced projects fail as well with a couple of exceptions where the core team was not outsourced but some of the "busy work" type development - CRUD etc - was outsourced and then integrated into the core product. Still was painful logistically and savings weren't all that great at the end of the day.
Our client gave IBM the IP addresses to be white listed. They filled in a lengthy time consuming form that got sent through layers of IBM management till some ops team in India finally implemented the change one week later.
We started testing. It didn't work. We went back and forth for weeks. Finally we put a conference call together with all parties. Live on the phone we sent a series of SOAP requests over the wire. "Yes, we can see the requests", came the answer. We saw no response.
Finally whilst on the phone call, one of the IBM Tech's piped up.
"Did you want this traffic to go in AND out?", he asked.
"Well, HTTP traffic isn't going to be of much use if we don't get a response to our request you idiots", was the answer I wanted to give.
They pulled out the initial firewall request form. The request was to "allow traffic from our IP addresses in through the firewall to reach the client".
They took that absolutely literally, and nobody thought to question it. They also absolved themselves of any blame.
I detested IBM from that day on.
Maybe it's a language barrier?
We're seeing this a lot - doing projects directly with marketing department, largely so they can completely circumvent internal IT department's and their apparent stonewalling on seemingly simple requests.
(Of course it also means we're seeing things like completely outlandish requests that indicate fundamental security/privacy misunderstandings ("What do you mean you can't import our entire customer database into the WordPress site you're building and hosting cheaply for us?"), as well as last minute compliance intrusions ("Oh, you need this to live on a big-corp.com subdomain? That requires a security audit and risk assessment and mitigation document! How on earth have you got this far without knowing that?")
Though I don't understand the problem you experienced -- HTTP runs over a bidirectional TCP connection, if they got your request, then packets for that session were already flowing in both directions (the TCP session wouldn't set up otherwise). The only way I could see what you described would be if they had a proxy or some sort of deep inspection firewall in the middle that was blocking the return response.
Sure thing, do exactly what you're told.
That doesn't preclude you from firing back a message to say "Hey, this request is unusual and almost certainly wrong, are you sure this is what you wanted?"
When a nurse sees an order for 10000 mg of a drug that's never normally administered above 200mg, it's not their job to correct anything, but it is their job to ask the doctor "Hey, did you mean to write 100.00mg? Is this actually correct?"
I'm not sure why you're being down voted if other big enterprises didn't have this issue they would not put up with IBM having this issue. It is all about minimal work, CYA, and minimal thinking. It is why I always tell people that anyone who can really do IT (probably most on this site), will always have a job.
If you're outsourcing your operations, that's what you have to expect. They're not going to be as invested in your success as your own employees would be.
Question sounds reasonable - could be a fire & forget scenario.
Problem isn't the question but that it takes a week between iterations. If you had to order lunch and it was a week between asking for your steak and being asked if you want it medium or well done then the question isn't the problem
They were incredibly dependent on their filter rules, and their process assumed the filter rules were always correct and accurate.
One night I got confused about which window I was in and ssh'd into my desktop machine (on the internal 9/8 network) from one of the ibm.com backend servers (on the open internet). A "routine update" caused routes for 9.0.0.0/8 to be advertised on the open internet. Although I had a short escalation path it still took an hour from when I discovered the hole to get anyone in Global Services to accept it as a problem.
I doubt there are many companies who are 100% on top of things, but I get the sense that's more down to the department or the individuals you're dealing with. There are people who don't think things through everywhere. I certainly wouldn't bear a grudge against IBM for too long!
Now I avoid dealing with outsourcers as much as possible unless I have 100% understanding of the issue and can describe it precisely.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487035155045761420...
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/beh...
http://www.rozinskiy.com/why-india-outsourcing-is-doomed/
Those are from the top of the fold of the Google search "quality of Indian tech workers."
[1]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/reversing-t...
[2]: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/agenda/#step7
he promises things he knows he can not deliver, but that fit the needs of the people that would vote for him. they can't risk that he might actually be able to deliver and no one else is making those promises, and so they take a chance.
like buying lottery tickets with your last dollar.
It's amazing that those who are near the bottom of the ladder will spend more time making sure those that are underneath them stay there rather than look above them.
I feel bad for anyone losing their job but if your company does not make anything and is this large what hope is there?
I agree with you in general though - IBM is all about the lock-in. zSystem, for example, is basically a product for mainframe users (i.e. banks) who are petrified of updating their software and will pay whatever it takes to get an incrementally faster replacement. It literally lets you run your System/360 programs that you wrote 50 years ago, and System/360 was designed to directly replace physical tabulator machines. So your program logic may be the best part of a century old. It's basically the IBM-est product.
What have they bought that is fairly recent and is highly popular? Lotus notes and rational are older applications. Who the heck uses DB2 instead of Oracle/MySQL/Postgres? When was the last time you heard of a company becoming a new customer of DB2? Of choosing DB2 over the other database products on the market?
Maybe they do make stuff but I have not heard of them buying anything relatively new on the market that is popular. Oracle is always buying new companies and adding them to their offerings (Workday, BigMachines to name a few). What is new that IBM bought that is GROWING? Lotus Notes, Rational and DB2 are not GROWING.
Berkshire Hathaway buys companies that are growing. Name a company that IBM bought that is adding new customers.
Shipping jobs overseas sucks. I live in the Midwest where most cities were hit by manufacturing going overseas, and my own family was impacted hard by it, like most people's were. I work in IT, so of course I know how much offshoring sucks. And I know what I'm about to say is going to be controversial. I'm not saying it to be glib or to downplay the pain that losing your job inflicts upon the whole family. What I'm saying is a warning.
Because this kind of stuff isn't new. It's not like this is the first time anyone has ever heard of sending jobs to other countries. And in terms of layoffs in general, IBM has 500,000 employees and is constantly restructuring itself to stay competitive in the ever-changing tech market. When mainframe and storage had a big layoff last year, my response as an IBMer was "we still have mainframe and storage people?" We spun off (or spun down) those parts of the business a long time ago, you had to have realized that your days were numbered.
I work for a hot part of IBM. A part of IBM that makes the company a lot of money. My job is fairly secure. But I know it won't be like that forever. Hell, it won't be like that for more than a handful of years. Because things change constantly. Right now I'm working on a project that will automate quite a bit of my work. And I'm hoping to take the skills from I've learned from that and using them to launch into the next hot thing.
Yes, when it's my turn to be laid off I will complain so loudly that they will hear me in whatever offshore country happens to take my job. But to be honest, by then I will be working somewhere else, doing something else. Because this isn't a new thing. Everyone knows that companies offshore and outsource and lay off employees they don't need anymore. And if you read the article, it seems like these people knew it was coming, but stayed until the end anyway.
Layoffs suck. Offshoring sucks. But have you seen IBM stock lately? I've never gotten a bonus and I've never gotten a raise, because those two things only happen when we're making money. There is no way in any universe that you could look at your job at IBM and think "yeah, this will hold me until retirement". That's not a reality in today's job market. My grandpa worked at the same factory his whole life from the day he graduated high school to the day the factory moved to Mexico. Between that and the five more years he worked until he retired, he had five different jobs. That's the reality of today's job market.
It sucks, but you have to just accept it. Two years, maybe three. If you're still at the same job after that, you're probably cheating yourself.
If I am Associate Middleware Software Engineer at Company X for four years, IMO, that's a little too long.
It's interesting that we all, or so many of us, think 'you just have to accept it', as if it's a law of nature.
Today, I had a revelation: Trying to grasp the revolt of working class Americans against both the Democratic and Republican parties, it suddenly struck me: Why should that group 'just accept' globalization? (Or immigration or deregulation or the free market pricing of everything from health care to college ...)
So far all the benefits have been accrued by a very narrow subset of society, while working class life has become harder and well-paying jobs and social mobility more scarce. Probably not coincidentally, the people benefitting are those who had a seat at the table when the rules were written. Everyone else, per both parties, would see the benefits magically 'trickle down' - but of course they haven't, and it's been decades.
So why should working class voters take that deal?
Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
I strongly disagree. Protectionists have been elected many times in many countries. In the UK, there's a good chance they will with draw from the EU. Worldwide, progress for the WTO is dead. In the US, Trump and Sanders generally are against globalization, and even Clinton has rejected the TPP (on the campaign trail; we'll see what happens if she gets elected).
Provide some evidence that globalization, especially in its current form, is irresistable.
> Instead of fighting forces of nature, we should use them. E.g. reducing corporate tax.
But that hasn't helped the working class, so why should they want to do that? So even more wealth can accrue to the wealthy few?
> If standard of living is imbalanced, it will eventually find its level.
And in the long run, we are all dead.
I'm not saying it's impossible to punch a hurricane.
I'm saying you can only harm yourself. Like the U.S. did with tariffs to turn a sudden recession in the 1920 into the Great Depression (aided by subsequent massive government spending crowding out industry investment).
https://www.compose.io/
Between that and Softlayer / Bluemix / Compose / Cloudant they have a serious cloud offering if they do some consolidation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11263317
Not sure if this applies to your company but I have some prior experience as one of those SME/consultant/contractor guys.
For one particular multi-national company whom we did a lot of work, they had an entire dedicated team of (underutilized) engineers/technologists that should have been more than capable of doing the work we provided.
Aside from the hour or two of daily PM work, the entire staff would disappear for the rest of their shift and reappear just in time to check out. To this day, I still have no clue where everybody would go. I'm not talking about an isolated incident, I saw the same pattern take place over the course of months.
Why was this allowed? Why was the company willing to pay us a premium to do work that could have been handled internally?
It was a non-union shop. The company had established a very firm and well defined scope of work. Adding additional responsibilities could screw up the balance and put the company and it's daily operations at risk. In the bigger picture of things, paying contractors/consultants a premium + expenses to do the extra work is an order of magnitude less expensive than the possibility of unionization. Just the cost savings on HR overhead (ex managing disgruntled workers, hiring new people) alone probably made up for what we charged.
You should've seen the amount of hell raised when the coffee provided was downgraded from Starbucks to a cheaper blend.
The whole work environment felt a lot like some sort of bizarre Mexican standoff between worker and company interests. The company would have a very difficult time maintaining operations and hiring replacements if their workers were pissed off enough to leave. Meanwhile, as much as their workers liked to complain, they had been working under such limited responsibilities for so many years that -- in terms of engineering and/or raw technical skills -- most of them would be useless elsewhere.
This may in part explain why many large corporations show a strong preference for H1-B workers. Not only are they incapable of unionization but they keep the senior staff motivated by fear of their jobs being replaced/outsourced. Whatever the overhead cost/complexity, it pales in comparison to disrupting operations and/or being bent over a barrel on union/compensation negotiations.
It also explains the preference for hiring millenials. Millenials have been screwed since day one. Starting from ridiculous education loans/costs. Extending to being forced to work unpaid/underpaid internships to make up for lack of unrealistic industry experience requirements. The idea of a company/union providing any form of protection is so far from our reality that we don't even consider it as an option.
Tired of being screwed by your company? Pack up and move on to another company. Resume shows lots of movement? Too much ambition is bad for business. Can't deal with the stress/complexity of regularly changing jobs? Better learn to enjoy being screwed.
Engineering for many industries is a cost center and hell hath no fury like a team of bored senior engineers with an over-inflated sense of entitlement.
Outsourcing can be used to reduce risk, avoid management complications, and shift CapEx (ie permanent employees) to OpEx (ie disposable contractors). Offshoring sucks but there's virtually no legal risk involved with firing overseas workers en masse. H1-Bs cost the same as local workers but have so many legal limitations that they're essentially the modern equivalent of indentured servants.
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