No the commenter you're asking, but I've never had a constructive conversation with "those types" - the kind who go out of their way to talk about getting laid off from a tech company.
Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in highschool, so I used to hear these tirades. What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. Now the cynic in me says if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck. Regardless, it has always struck me a bit like talking to that xenophobic uncle at Thanksgiving type scenario. Nothing good to come.
> probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck
More probably these decisions are made at a very high level and the individual abilities of these workers aren't even taken into consideration. The real lessons here are never trust your employer, loyalty is a two-way street and always have an exit plan.
Exactly. I was having this conversation with fellow employees. He brought up that they have a 1.5 - 2 year plan to phase out his entire department and moving everything overseas. I was just shocked that he was literally watching time tick by until his job was over. He was been with the company for 8 years.
I asked why he stayed and it came down to security. He has kids and needs the insurance.
I hear that while it can be depressing to stay while the department is transferred overseas, companies will often sweeten the deal to make it worth your while- despite the fact they are getting rid of you, they still need the transition to happen gracefully, and to transfer knowledge to the new team.
Great point here. Never stop interviewing, always maintain your network connections, and make sure development that you do is associated with your personal brand so that it's portable. There's always a company willing to pay you more, treat you better, give you more interesting assignments, or ALL OF THE ABOVE.
I suppose, but to turn around and complain about how you haven't been able to find work for the past 5-10 years seems to indicate there might be something beyond "I got laid off because of outsourcing."
That something is usually "my skillset became overly specific to my employer, so that once I was laid off, I had nothing of value to anyone else." There's a lesson in that too: even people who were quite talented and hungry in their younger years can find themselves pigeonholed into a corner when they tie their fate to a single big company.
> What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners.
I don't think the purpose of their tirade was to provide you with career advice. It sounds like they were bitter that they invested time and energy in their career and they were resentful of managers replacing them with an option that seemed cheaper. They probably grew up in a time where you could work for a company for life. I bet IBM seemed like a great place to work when they started.
Can't you empathize with them even if you find yourself making better life choices?
Can confirm about IBM. Dad spent the majority of his career at IBM as an engineer working on various mainframe platforms (and some AS/400 stuff later on); he mentioned that in the 70's an IBM check was about as good as gold; they were all promised pensions and that they'd be taken care of out into retirement, hence why there were many "lifers" like dad. The culture back then was such that if you changed jobs every single year, "there must have been something really wrong with you, since you couldn't hold a job down." Fast forward to the late 2000's and IBM had kind of been turned on it's head; Dad was real close to retirement and hoping to get out with a pension while he still could but got cut a year before he could retire, when IBM moved a huge swath of it's big iron resources to Indian firms, which is a hell of a shame. I've met a lot of these guys, and while it's unfortunate that many of them can't adapt, I think there's a serious lesson to be learned here, as they got pretty screwed by their employer. This is the reason unless I have some very personal involvement in something I'm doing, I won't break my back for my employer, I won't work 80 hours a week, I won't deal with someone jerking my chain, because you better bet few (if any) employers will ever do the same for you, and I'd hate to get later into life like that and realize I committed a huge part of my life uncompensated to an organization that didn't ever really care about me. I think that's at the root of what has torn a lot of these guys (and gals) up, is that's not how it was seen 40-50 years ago.
Yeah, I have had a number of reasonable conversations like this with people.
For a lot of people, I think part of the purpose of the conversation is offering a warning (combined with a bit of venting). That they aren't explicitly saying, "And the moral of the story is..." doesn't mean there isn't something that we can't learn from it.
if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck
The alternative hypothesis is that you are overqualified. You may not have been overqualified when you took the position but now you are. De-skilling is a very real phenomenon in the workplace.
The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy.
"The xenophobic uncle has seen more than you and may well be the wiser man. Sometimes the country on the other side of the border is the enemy."
Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries, but many don't see it this way. As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer. They can take open source, which many engineers and good developers toiled away on for years, and pay what I call a 'software mechanic' considerably less money (and they don't need nearly as much experience) to add features to it. It makes outsourcing very easy and a realistic option.
I predicted this 10 years ago when everyone said free software was the future and Stallman somehow thought that all developers would become government workers (his dream was to have all software "free" and have the government pay developers salaries for the good of everyone).
I just don't understand why people in the tech community try so hard to give all of their leverage away to big companies.
> Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries
The flip side is that open source fueled the web explosion.
Example: you don't need a multi-million dollar IT team to have a storefront, because you don't have to hand-build a framework. How many people here are making over $100k/yr doing computer stuff for a business that wouldn't have dreamed of hiring someone to do computer stuff twenty years ago?
Without open source, we'd probably just have a small priesthood building WebObjects front-ends to mainframes, and only Fortune 500 companies would be able to afford a web presence.
> Open source has also cut many jobs and devalued salaries,
[citation needed]
Obviously, choosing an open source model limits the opportunities for monetizing software development through licensing fees. I don't see the evidence that it has actually, in fact, "cut many jobs and devalued salaries", however.
> As businesses get more tech savvy (which is happening fairly quickly), they realize that they don't have to pay software engineers to build software any longer.
Non-software business avoided doing that directly even before open source was particularly popular, by paying other people for COTS software licenses, support, professional services, custom development, etc. Having worked in an enterprise firm at the time, while we had large license fees, the hammer to get people to pay them wasn't that "if you don't pay, we'll sue you for copyright infringement for using the software without a valid license", it was "if you don't pay, you lose the support that's bundled as part of your license agreement".
Support, professional services, custom development that's different features desired by the general market, etc., is what most business pay for with software, no matter what the licensing model is. Open source doesn't affect that at all. And the people that can be most effective at selling that, even with open source software, are the people who are actually deeply involved in developing the software. Which is why, even with open source software, the firms that make their revenue selling support to enterprises are still paying core developers on the project -- so, in effect, the end users are still paying for the development of the software, just like they always did. (Of course, open source means that the companies that want to can just get the source and provide their own support -- but many of the big users doing that, it turns out, also and up paying their own employees to work as core developers on the upstream project.)
>if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck
Or the company is short-sighted, undervalues the skill and experience of onshore jobs and overvalues the $$ they're saving on paper. I bet a buffalo nickel you've never personally seen how offshoring affects a team/department.
It doesn't matter how good you are when your whole department or office is axed. The wheat is thrown out along with the chaff.
if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job
What actually happened in many cases was executives thought low wage unskilled workers could do your job, and over the course of a few years discovered whoops, no, they really can't. Jobs are then repatriated. Then a few years later some executive gets a bright idea... It seems to be a cycle these days.
I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble, which is especially ironic considering that its proponents are usually very liberal (and thus love to talk up how pro-worker and considerate of their privilege they are, except when it concerns xenophobic straw conservatives). But I digress, so let me tell a story instead.
My dad was working in $TECH_FIELD for a subsidiary of a multinational megacorp ($BIGCO; you might have heard of them). Said subsidiary had decided to branch out into providing $CERTAIN_KIND_OF_TECH_SERVICES to $OTHER_BIGCOS.
My dad's team was one of the few that got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them every step of the way, fighting to gain control over a certain aspect of his account (for the power and influence, of course), then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit. Say, a team would receive the job of designing $TECH_SOLUTION, but the deadline would loom and my dad's team would never, ever receive the design from the design team for him to implement, so it would end up being all on him and his teammates to design and implement $TECH_SOLUTION.
So it was just under a dozen people with my dad, working their asses off to provide services to this particular account. A friend in middle management let slip once that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy about the service they were receiving.
After a few years of depressingly poor management and vicious office politics, $BIGCO decided it was time for a change, and brought in a new CTO to turn the ship around. Naturally, said CTO decides that the best course of action would be to lay off almost the entire team working on the only profitable account in the whole fucking division, and replace them with offshore contractors. Only a few months before a critical infrastructural change required by the contract needed to be completed, and just over a year before the contract was to expire. I'm sure you can see where this is going.
My dad was one of the few spared from this show of gratitude, and was promptly tasked with training the offshore workers. Pretty straightforward, right? Employees are just cogs. It doesn't matter if they've spent decades, almost their entire working careers, mastering this field. You can just take any random college graduate and bring them up to speed in a month, right? Better yet, get an offshore one that costs a 10th or a 20th of what a Red Blooded American would demand, and pocket the difference. That's like, free money!
Wrong. Said contractors barely spoke English, and knew less about $TECH_FIELD than I did. As futile as it would be to train a western college grad up to the required proficiency before the deadline, it is downright impossible to do the same with language barrier erected in front of you. My dad and the rest of his team would spend hours on the phone with the outsourced workers, trying to walk them through a process, starting from very basic first principles that anyone with their degree in their field should know, and... silence.
Needless to say, my dad and most of the other remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP. $BIGCO realized their incompetence too late, tucked their tail between their legs and tried to hire back the laid off team members, but unlike most of the stories you had scoffed at, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer was appalled when they realized what had happened, and when the time came, decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division.
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Ok, so what can we learn from this? Let's consider a few (not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities:
1. (Some) corporations are mind-boggling stupid, with the foresight of a goldfish, and greed that would make Ebeneezer Scrooge blush. They will happily ruin a profitable business to save a few pennies in the short term.
2. (Some) offshore firms from third world countries know this, and build their business around pulling fast ones on these stupid corporate executives. They tell them everything they want to hear about how the workers in $COUNTRY are just as good as the ones in America, but will work for pennies on the dollar, and so much harder! Then, when they seal the deal, they go out and hire a bunch of newly minted college grads with zero experience in said field, and tell them to play the part while they cook up some nice resumes. Yeah, I said it. It's stupid enough to begin with to fire 75% of a business, leave it in the hands of a few college grads, and expect everything to work out. It's downright suicide when you consider the rampant degree and resume fraud that these offshore firms perpetrate, and how brazenly corrupt many universities from the third world are. And the beautiful thing is, the language barrier makes it extremely difficult for management to tell that anything is wrong until it's already too late.
3. Of course not all foreign workers, or even all foreign workers from the third world, are like this. When people talk about incompetent offshore workers taking their jobs, this is the kind of downright fraudulent practice they speak of, not the honest workers that really are just as good as their western counterparts (and will probably end up moving as soon as they can...)
4. Don't be intellectually lazy and lean on the perception of racism or xenophobia. Said stupid corporations will also happily fire older workers with decades of experience for clueless American college grads, and ruin businesses that way. It never occurs to them that you can train young employees while the old guard keeps things running smoothly, because they're seeking the petty short term profit at the long term detriment to the business. Why?
5. Corporations are managed by psychopaths. They ruin their businesses in these ways because the go-getters all want the short term boost in profitability that will promote them up the corporate ladder quickly enough that they won't have to deal with the consequences. Even if it destroys the company, these psychos will have long since bounced to another job beforehand. Said psychopaths wage wage war in the office. An interpretation that I didn't initially consider of my dad's story was that maybe said CTO or one of his new managers was deliberately trying to justify axing the division by destroying the only profitable team. So it's also entirely possible that in many cases of offshoring, the "incompetent" actions of the corporation at large is really just one person trying to snuff out someone else vying for the promotion they want.
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So, all of this giant wall of text considered, my point is that, well, there are a lot of reasons beyond employee incompetence why a corporation might offshore a worker. It's intellectually lazy and downright rude to imagine some straw factory worker screaming "DEY TOOK ERR JEERRRBS" and shut off your brain every time you hear someone complain about the practice.
As for the question of "what about the guy that got offshored and has been unemployed since," I have more stories (some my own, some from others) I could tell, but since I've already overstayed my welcome, I'll be explicit: Economic downturns suck. Getting laid off or offshored during one could very well leave you unemployed for years, during which no one is willing to hire you. Even when the economy picks back up, it's going to look bad on your resume if you spent years unemployed (or employed in an unrelated field). It's even worse if you're older, and ageism kicks in.
In this scenario, you'd probably need to change careers to survive. As programmers, this doesn't sound so bad to us, because we know (knock on wood) that some kind of programmer will be demand for the foreseeable future, and we should always be able to change a technology "stack" or platform or whatever and find a new job doing very similar things. But not everyone is as fortunate as us. For most people, having to change careers means throwing everything away and learning something new. If you need to do that to keep the lights on, you do it, but it gets harder and harder to do so as you get older. So don't be so hard on people that made the wrong choice and picked a career that disappeared from under them.
IMO, shorter comments much more clearly express ideas.
I hate this attitude. It reeks of privilege and naivety of the working world outside the speaker's bubble. But I digress.
team got their work done without trying to play "the game" too hard. Almost everyone else in the company would fight them to gain control over a certain aspect of his account then never ever doing any work towards it, forcing my dad's team to pick up the slack for everyone else while they took the credit.
A friend in middle management let slip that they were the only profitable account in the entire division, and their customer was the only one happy A new CTO decides to lay off almost the entire team on the only profitable account in the whole division and replace them with offshore contractors. Remaining members of the team got out of there ASAP.
Said contractors barely spoke English...
$BIGCO tried to hire back the laid off team members, but, they were all able to get new jobs in the mean time. Service quality plummeted, the customer decided not to renew their contract. A few months later, $BIGCO decided to get out of $BUSINESS and laid off the rest of the division.
Overreacting much? His summary of your comment actually got me interested enough to read the whole comment, which I would otherwise have never read (it's not exactly a unique story).
I would like to add some constructive criticism: it seems like you are idealizing your dad in this story (his team was really the only one in this really big company making any money), which is a very normal thing to do, but it is not needed to make your point. Also, you are dehumanizing "corporate people" by calling them psychopaths. They are not (usually) psychopaths, they have feelings and empathy, but are just very good at rationalizing those feelings away. I think it is important to recognize that they are no different from you or me, since that might prevent you from doing the same thing in the future.
> They are not (usually) psychopaths, they have feelings and empathy, but are just very good at rationalizing those feelings away.
I'm really glad you made this point, and I'll add that we have to remember that most people can be induced to make callous decisions with the wrong incentive structures and the right pressures from their management. In some environments, behavior we might deem callous is merely institutional for others for pragmatic reasons.
All too often, we forget that when building institutions (commercial, government, etc.), it's critical we don't inadvertently construct systems that give people incentives to do the wrong thing. We have to stop labeling normal people as psychopaths and remind each other we can all act callously under normal circumstances. Not exceptional circumstances, but normal pressures from management and colleagues.
Of all the ones I've spoken with, it followed the pattern of "BigCo outsourced jobs to those darn Foreigners, and I got laid off, and it will happen to you too!". In particular I worked with a former DBA for IBM at a grocery store in highschool, so I used to hear these tirades. What I never heard was any constructive career advice, or any details other than the outsourcing and cheap foreigners. Now the cynic in me says if low wage, and probably lower skilled workers can take your job, you probably suck. Regardless, it has always struck me a bit like talking to that xenophobic uncle at Thanksgiving type scenario. Nothing good to come.