Utility Sets IT Department On Path To Self-destruction 478
dcblogs writes "Northeast Utilities has told IT employees that it is considering outsourcing IT work to India-based offshore firms, putting as many as 400 IT jobs at risk. The company is saying a final decision has not been made. But Conn. State Rep. and House Majority Leader Joe Aresimowicz, who is trying to prevent or limit the outsourcing move, says it may be a done deal. NU may be prompting its best IT employees to head to the exits. It also creates IT security risks from upset workers. The heads-up to employees in advance of a firm plan is 'kind of mind mindbogglingly stupid,' said David Lewis, who heads a Connecticut-based human resources consulting firm OperationsInc, especially 'since this is IT of all places.' The utility's move makes sense, however, if is it trying to encourage attrition to reduce severance costs."
Because it's worked so well for others in the past.
Re:Ok (Score:5, Funny)
They have a right to those monopolies. By cutting costs they are able to deliver services to the taxpayers at a reduced rate. Everyone knows that when they cut costs they drop rates?
Re:Just a moment! (Score:5, Funny)
Just outsource your mayhem coding, it's cheaper and quicker.
Re:Middleman (Score:5, Funny)
Hardware from China and software from India.
MBA's from the US
Judges from Italy
Maple Syrup from Canada
and
Putin from Russia to oversee the project on horseback.
It's a small world, after all....
Re:Why would you even? (Score:5, Funny)
royally screwed - and not in the good way
So Elizabeth, not Kate?
...
Queue the Brits w/ mod points
Re:Middleman (Score:5, Funny)
>>Hardware from China and software from India.
>MBA's from the US
>Judges from Italy
>Maple Syrup from Canada
CHANTING CHORUS: Oil from Canada! Gold from Mexico! Geese from their neighbor's back yard! Boom, boom! Corn from the Indians! Tobacco from the Indians! Dakota from the Indians! New Jersey from the Indians! New Hampshire from the Indians! New England from the Indians! New Delhi from the Indians! ... ... ... ...
BABE: Indonesia for the Indonesians!
SOUND: Cannon shot.
JOE: Yes, and Veteran's Day
DC: But we couldn't do it alone!
SOUND: Morse Code sending under.
JOE: No! We needed the Hope, the Faith, the Prayers, the Fears
DC: The Sweat, the Pain, the Boils, the Tears!
JOE: The Broken Bones!
DC: The Broken Homes!
JOE: The Total Degradation of
BABE: Who?
EDDIE: You! The Little Guy!
--
BMO
LURLENE: Where are you from?
BABE: Nairobi, Ma'm. Isn't everybody?
Re:part of the formula (Score:4, Funny)
In fact the employees will carefully document everything about their jobs, and even in a fit of generosity, their previous jobs, in a summary (or résumé, as the French say). They may even have other employers proofread it to get an objective measure of how clear, thorough, and concise it is.
Fun story from today about outsourced IT.... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh oh oh! I can tell a story!
I'm part of the support dept of a big cloud-service company. As a result, I'm supposed to help customers with their problems with our service. Two weeks ago, I ran into a request from a customer about white listing our IP addresses. Turns out they outsourced their IT department to one of the big outsources, with "Sam", senior network engineer with 20 years of experience, in charge of the problem. Here's what I ran into:
* guy doesn't read documentation I send him
* guy doesn't listen to what I tell him about our infrastructure
* guy demands we put him in touch with our network engineers because he doesn't like talking to anyone put network engineers
* guy spends a week demanding to talk to our network engineers, and ignores everything we send his way.
* guy suddenly asks a question we answered a week ago, and is finally good to with his whitelisting project.
* guy makes change to his VPN, and end-users on VPN suddenly can't reach our service. But his users on their regular internal network are fine. Guy demands again to speak to a network engineer on our side.
* guy spends a week asking for a network engineer on our side, without doing a single investigation on his side.
* Today, guy suddenly gets an epiphany that there might be some configuration on his side that might cause packets to not be delivered to his VPN users.
* problem suddenly gets fixed.
So after two weeks of Mr. Senior Networking Engineer with 20 years of experience doing diddly squat to resolve something that was obviously a configuration issue, making all kinds of stupid demands, asking questions that either were nonsensical or already answered and escalating the issue to the c-suite on all sides, it turns out that he didn't check his own configuration. Not fucking once. I was ready to fly over to where ever he was hiding and cattle-prod him into doing some work.
In the meantime, yeah, I'm going to enjoy tomorrow's call.
This story, combined with pretty much 90% of my other experiences with outsourcing IT to India, has me convinced that this is probably the single worst thing a company can do. On the upside, I'm pretty sure I have little competition from Indian outsourcers.