Sprint may send hundreds of tech jobs overseas

Good post, Iowa. I enjoyed it. Except for the "long posts" part; I hated that! LOL

First, let me clarify something that was nagging on my mind before but I did not remember to correct previously. Iowa, I wasn't putting you in my bin of "bad guys," FWIW. Not that you should care if I do, but I wasn't, ok? (My family is partly from Iowa, and I can't picture a bad guy from Iowa, except those scary Maharishi people who take over towns.)

Also, I don't put all "toppers" in the "bad guy" bin. Not by any means. I just am not impressed by the character of most of the people running our country's corporations or political systems or sports teams or other people that your typical fool is admiring for no good reason. There are plenty of good people that you'll find anywhere, though, usually people who buck the trend.

I don't think it's a few jobs -- overseas outsourcing or offshoring or whatever keeps turning up in the business news. But is it bad for America?

You've got a class of people who are without a good-paying job. These are mostly spenders, big consumers, and they're holding on tight now. Their former co-workers have one more thing to be worried about. If it wasn't just a plain layoff, now the entire unit could be outsourced. That saps morale. People do stupid things when their nervous. You might expect them to be most productive, so as to keep their job, but instead they gossip and fidget and worry.

If this IS the beginning of a trend of taking similar jobs overseas, then I really cannot imagine how America is supposed to respond. I don't have figures, but do you realize how many people have been training for I.T. careers? Many left other defunct or declining industries, and the theory was that more and more Americans would be doing I.T. to compensate for the loss of other jobs. Now they lop that off, too? I just don't see how America can recover from that. Hopefully it won't happen, or somehow America will recover.

I speculate a lot; true. Which example were you referring to?

About me being too cynical. The skeptic will say that his/her critic is being far too trusting or generous. Hmmm... Bill & Arnold are making a lot of dough. Bill gets lambasted in the press for not donating. Arnold is rumored for years (long time, anyway) to be considering running for political office. Suddenly Bill & Arnold begin donating to charities on a new scale altogether. Hmmm... There COULD be another reason for the radical change in behavior. Maybe they had a religious conversion, or went on a trek to Nepal, or safari, or whatever. But, and I quote myself, "I don't know the hearts of these men, so hopefully I am wrong, but it seems insincere since it is so recent."

My point was not to slam these 2 men, but to demonstrate that the toppers are interested in conquest and wealth and power and prestige. They rarely fail to exploit others in order to get their dinero ($$$), e.g., Jim Bob Moffett. That the outsourcing helps 3rd world IT guys is merely convenient to them in their goal to gain what they want. It is not the true reason for their decision to outsource overseas. (I don't mean to imply that we shouldn't still consider it. Just be wary of the tiger's arguments.)

Sorry to hear about your experience with going into business, Iowa...

Good point. The question is one of truth. Is only top-down knowledge true, relevant truth? Or is bottom-up knowledge also true and relevant? And is only general, policy questions -- are they the only relevant ones? Or can specific situations be considered?

My knowledge is mostly specific and bottom-up, so, like that's pretty much all I can contribute to the discussion. If that doesn't do it for you, then so be it, bro.

My knowledge of Sprint was largely bottom-up. I could see their need for knowledgable software engineers, as well as for creating knowledgebases to retain the knowledge that seeped out every time a contractor or employee left. Their systems were in disarray, and to a great extent political forces caused the problem to remain a problem. Also, management failed to recognize the problem adequately, and failed to use downtime within the development teams to help resolve it. (Really, the development teams probably did not have enough knowledge to do so.) In part, though, the problem begat itself. It had reached the level of taking up so much time, in order to help frustrated customers, that the real experts who could solve these kinds of problems were sticking their thumbs in 100 different holes.

Sprint's solutions to this was to move into unproven technology after unproven technology. The problem was not that we were using Fortran or Pascal, friend. It was that the proven, solid technologies of Cobol and Natural-Adabas were not being used properly.

The next solution of Sprint was to lay off a slew of their experts -- the ones who were told to make all those customers happy by fixing problems. They also laid off solid programmers who were on development teams, and unproven ones that you wondered why they were hired if only to lay them off?

Now, Sprint's next solutions is to take a functional area and move it overseas. Will this help them? I've already given reasons why it won't.

If the people at the top cared about the company and its employees and shareholders and customers, then they could find the money to keep some of these seemingly critical people on. Maybe targeted layoffs at mid-level management could be used to break up the political strangleholds that caused the problems to begin with. Maybe the CxO's could should some integrity and take one for the company? That wouldn't prevent all layoffs, certainly, but it could help.

When they walked me out the door, I'm not thinking, "What is my family going to do?" No, I'm thinking, "What is Sprint going to do without us? How are they going to maintain this code?" (This is not pompous; I'm just VERY impressed with the other people I saw being laid off at the same time.)

 

Lol... they have decided to stop fighting with Fairfield and incorporated a new town called Vedic City. Now that's a masterplanned community.

Japan was my first example. Germany and Europe as a whole could be another example. We helped rebuild some of these countries and moved jobs to these countries. That helped the world economy, which also helped us. We then had a reliable partners in trade. Because we are involved in a world economy, we are affected by other countries, so the other countries having a strong economy helps us as well. The world economy is not a zero-sum game.

Well, I don't think I have too much more to add that hasn't been said. I think we all agree that the technology industry is oversaturated with qualified workers. If you have been layed off in that industry, it is probably not because you are not qualified. It simply means that the investment in technology has died down. Amazon.com is not worth $230/share anymore. Yahoo is not worth $200/share. I thought about going into computer science, but the market was oversaturated in 1999. It's even worse now. There are clearly signs that not everyone who wants to be in the industry can be in the industry.

I really enjoy hearing these stories of management from people who worked there. I think you'd be hard pressed to find people happy with Sprint's management techniques. Maybe this will change. But everyone suffers when management gets it wrong. Remember, managers have incentives to make more money. If people are getting layed off, then they don't have the human resources to make as much money as they had before. Hopefully this latest downturn will make the industry more robust for the next downturn. Some industries that downsized in the early '90s are still doing fairly well. The technology industry is one of the most unstable industries in the economy. The future is as clear as mud. Good luck to all those out there.

 

ROTFL There were good lower-level managers that I worked for. There was a culture there that they weren't responsible for, and that was impossible to overcome and be able to stick around.

Feedback wasn't honest enough -- poor performers were tolerated. In one instance, a rising star (supposedly) turned her code over to me when she switched teams, and it became clear that months of work had produced diddly-squat. Her code didn't do what she said it would do, what the specs said it should do, and guess who had to do my job and hers. This was her only assignment. I don't know that she was penalized in any way.


Well, like it or lump it, we've all got to adjust to the changes in our economy and personal situation. That's a given, so grousing doesn't help (except for others to possibly learn from it). Move on and find a new place and/or new way to contribute!