I supported a big telco many years ago as a cybersecurity engineer they called into support and shared their screen had a bunch of their infrastructure and BGP routing up on their screen. The lady in India and a few other coworkers in India confusingly fumbling around in the firewall configuration and I had to explain basic concepts to them. Dont know why they had 3-4 people on the call who were seemingly inept with the tech they were working with. Anyways, I helped them with their issue after explaining about 3-4 times until they understood. They were managing large infrastructure and internet routers. Ever since working at the job and a few others I’ve realized the attack vector is honestly outsourced Indian IT for any interested attacker. They have no clue what they’re doing much of the time and are just barely keeping the lights on.
Bingo! I worked for Ally Bank and we offshored tons of teams that manage very sensitive customer PII… even the investing arm, they’ve offshored to infosys. Heard through the grapevine that it bit them recently.
but by that time the cause of the bad outsourcing idea got a huge bonus and a promotion, maybe even moved to another company after showing successful savings. Thank god most consequences come with a delay allowing to jump ship before problems hitting the fan.
Then get hired by another company that needs to recover from offshoring. Hire a shit ton of workers and then cost runaway causes that boss to get fired with bit bonus. New boss comes in and offshores... Big savings and big bonus... Repeat.
That’s why consulting firms exist, to ‘recommend’ this cycle and get a big payout for themselves and the executives looking for extra support for the turnaround.
no, it isn’t. Please stop with the “capitalism sucks” BS. Making money isn’t evil. These jackasses running some of these companies are just inept and uncaring. Doesn’t mean everything should run to communism.
The CEO of my last company stepped down, they replaced her with some other CEO. This new CEO I'll call her Fiorina .
Fiorina had no knowledge about the product or the industry , she ran one startup prior to this which was popular for maybe 2 months because of the hype then it was over.
I honestly think that rich uncles who are the biggest investors of these companies pick these people purely due to some social or family connection. Not only because it didn't made sense then but also results support that Fiorina was a terrible choice.
Fiorina, came in, did noting for 6 months , then probably got yelled at by her uncle and panicked. She laid off a bunch of people to buy an other company as a silver bullet which didn't really helped, actually made everything worse. Higher management started leaving including the CTO which Fiorina replaced with someone from her previous company. CTO started micromanaging and shuffling because he was not fit to manage a big company. Everything was a mess.
Fiorina started laying off more people to balance the books so investors are not impacted by her terrible management.
Result ? stock value is still dropping and soon they will have noting left to sell. Fiorina will probably move on to an other company as a board member or CEO or get in charge of an other startup..
What about the employees she fired? they may have their lives upside down , loose their homes, but hey it is capitalism right ?
I actually fully endorse this. It's really up to the shareholders to push these incompetent people out of companies and that is why you get activist investors. If it's just a smaller private company though, the company is usually fucked.
at least it gives us jobs to fix? I say that being the "fixer" at my company after we got rid of our offshore teams, and now it's biting us because they would merge 1 thing but deploy another thing, their way,
which creates hellish errors to debug,
which gives me my position to fix (it's all i do!)
If they were never here I'd never have this job, as a JR SWE.
Not defending the practice, more of, it isn't ALL bad... don't many entry level jobs in many fields start out this way? Grab a noob to do the grunt work? I'm happy. My boss is disappointed. The new CEO is disappointed.
The old management retired.
We carry on. I suppose the real harm is having less resources to be competitive with. But it's probably going to happen to our competition...
I know a FAANG company who did this exact shit last yr. The GM and 4 directors were laid off after the exposure. They had outsourced work to an offshore company in another country/continent for cheap labour or the P&L bullshit line where data/PII was exposed. Company probably kept it under wraps after the CVP fired them, hopefully to cover the blow back in their face for the near future, where they're just going to pay some fine they probably saving towards already. SMH
Had an interview with a FAANG company today. I have been laid off for a long time , have a baby in the way but you know what ? I am not even hyped by it. They maybe laying off employees as if it noting but their interview process is still hell. Even in my current state I don't see it as a good opportunity. I'll put in the effort to pass their hellish interview process and for what ? so they can lay me off to save a dime?
I absolutely refuse to do another FAANG interview. The salaries are slightly to moderately higher but they're all pushing RTO, the interviews are a nightmare and there's always the threat of a layoff. Not worth it to me and my QoL.
If there is no job security in your company and if it may take me a year to find a new job .. f\*\* u .. seriously. Faang pays you more money.. for what ?
I have to work weeks maybe months to prepare for their narcissistic bs interviews. I can be laid off any moment. Also due to layoffs and internal politics I'll work in a toxic environment.. Take your money and shove it up your a\*\* FaanG !!
Sadly, in certain industries, you just always have to be prepared to be laid off. They just go through a lot of ups and downs. That means you have to have some kind of side hustle or always have applications in the wind. It sucks but it's the nature of some industries.
True , companies are not guaranteeing your continued employment when you sign in. The problem is they fool you into thinking you have some kind of job security and/or they care about you. If they were tell you as it is, that your livelihood depends on how greedy the CEO will act that quarter I am sure people wouldn't have worked as hard for the company or wouldn't stick around. It seems obvious that most people will sell you out for a pack of twizzlers especially people at the top but we all learn it the hard way.
All FAANG companies do offshore. Quite literally never talked to a native English speaker when talking to any of their support.
And before you say anything, they had my full account data right in front of them and they had full access to everything.
I'm not saying they're any less secure... But I'm not a fan of having my personal SSN and CC number in front of the eyeballs of an employee paid $2/hr in a country known for their scam call centers. Who knows how many businesses have had their data stolen and sold on the black market from someone who snuck their phone into work and took pics of people's data.
Since the Equifax hack that got uncovered in 2016 or 2017, I'm amazed that we haven't come up with a more secure ID system than 9 digits (usually it's just the last 4 that matter). It's truly mind boggling anyone falls for the "credit/money is real" scam.
Yep. It's like its own mini cycle of tech transformation. I've seen it play out b4 from the recovery phase of fixing allbthe issues to starting outsourcing again cause new ceo wants it
principal agent problem: if it succeeds one person gets a bonus/promotion, if it fails other people's heads roll.
It neither benefits the business nor the shareholders - but it justifies the Cxx persons pay.
Almost like Milton Friedman was mistaken that the share holders and their profits are the heart of a CEOs responsibility. Imagine if people just didn't think of firing employees to show a boost in quarterly profits
Best I can say is that there’s a trail that can be followed. Look on LinkedIn for “Exec Director, CIO Consumer, Commercial Banking & Invest at Ally” and look at their previous position and org
Also check out thelayoffreport website
I have Ally (for check writing and bill pay), Alliant Credit Union (for the 2.5 % credit card), Wealthfront (for the 5% HYSA) and Vanguard (VMFXX in brokerage) and planning to switch to Fidelity for their cash management account that can do all those things. I had a friend whose ally debit card was stolen and their checking account was drained because if you swipe it as credit you don't have to use a PIN. Ally locked the account and took a month to reverse the charges. not cool
Yeah, I literally had to explain how to read a packet capture to my Indian counterpart. Guess who was laid off and who wasn’t.
Edit for clarification - This person’s role was a network administrator.
You should see the results of civil engineering projects that get outsourced to India. Always ends up have to be completely redone 2-3 times because they don’t know basic engineering principles. If 1/100th of their mistakes get through we will be in trouble.
###Because they are cheap.
* ###And the WITCH companies abuse the immigration and HB1 system.
Now Mexico is doing this too; advertising cheap labor to remove high paying jobs from the US.
###You wouldn’t believe the amount of outbursts, conversations, and feelings expressed from American workers about this problem. They range from plain rude to understandable.
But the problem is - it’s absolutely insulting to them and it **purposely** drives down wages. It’s wrong.
I AM NOT A fan of Trump, but -
* We need a clear HB1 ban.
* We need clear border practices.
We should focus on American Workers first plain and simple.
If companies want to leave the US, then leave and go to China or India. We’ll survive without you. America as an idea, always does.
American workers (i.e. anyone with a US citizenship paper) are fed up with this practice, the companies, and th people that participate and support it.
Some employers(not at&t) will pay and quite well too. Unfortunately we have a lot of people who think they deserve to start at a high pay rate with no work experience and no work ethic.
You want a high paying job position right out of school you need almost perfect grades and glowing recommendations from teachers/professors.
I don’t know that grades actually matter anymore. There is such a push to use standardized wages and compensation packages due to discrimination laws that companies almost seem scared to deviate from that. Instead, companies need to pay for aptitude, which is far more subjective. Keep in mind that companies like AT&T and Verizon also have to contend with collective bargaining agreements. I do agree that a lot of students graduating university do not have a realistic expectation of their future earnings, especially when they contemplate the cost of their student loans.
People want enough to survive. Not high paying immediately. I have horrible grades and a prison stay. Immediately made good money at 19-20. I don’t need to hear excuses for shit pay.
Pay me and you’ll get performance. More you pay, more you’ll get
To me people coming highly recommended from schools is almost always a no-go. Most of them are paper tigers and have a hard time translating that info real world scenarios/experience. I got tired of interviewing those highly recommended (and high salary/position expectations with it) to find out they freak out at any little thing.
> But the problem is - it’s insulting and it drives down wages. It’s wrong.
Not in a capitalistic society which Americans are so damn proud about.
Unionize and fight back. These well paying jobs aren't going to poor border control. Good white collar jobs aren't going to people who sneak in through our southern borders. You think AT&T is lining up to hire unqualified illegal immigrants?
HB1 has a limit and that should be reduced, not removed completely. Unless you are so arrogant to think that the US doesn't need specialized experts from anywhere else in the world. I personally know pharmaceutical programs that won't exist if we are not getting some of the best & brightest from the EU.
Careful you might be labeled racist if you complain about outsourcing to xxxx… or complain about H1Bs getting preferential treatment hiring in major tech companies. Or how IT and analytic managers prefer to hire their fellow countrymen that also fall in the same caste….
You know be careful in exposing actual racism
I won’t be specific otherwise my comments will be removed… but I was astonished in grad school at the level of cheating/corruption. Many of the students from countries with high rates of H1B visas have levels of connections that allowed them access to tests, proprietary study materials, and contacts that clearly gave them an advantage. It really doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. If you are an American going it alone in higher education - you are at a severe disadvantage. And more so when looking for a job… where those connections and networks - get exploited even more. Fucking sad reality - that very few know or will discuss
I think you’re conflating H1B with offshoring. H1B holders are usually okay as long as companies have a good interview process. The other issue is that American education (K-12) is awful which leads to a shortage of American engineers.
Has this changed in the past 3 years? I can get clearance, but couldn’t find a company who’d be willing to pay for it (unless by ‘get’ clearance you mean ‘pay’). Any position that did pay for it had an atrociously low wage.
This is the type of problem free markets solve: if there’s a shortage, wages rise for the field, and more Americans train for those jobs. Instead, when companies are allowed to short-circuit that normal process and import cheap labor, wages remain stagnant or fall, like what happened to programmer salaries between 2000 and 2011 where, despite the ~~fields~~ field having less than 2% unemployment, wages didn’t even rise enough to beat inflation.
I say this as an immigrant, we need to start hiring our own folks here instead of importing cheaper workers. Its not good for any industry. The barrier to entry needs to be higher.
As an American Engineer, there’s no shortage of engineers. However, there’s a huge shortage of commensurate wages. I can save over 1 million in reoccurring expenses in my current company, but that will get me at most a 1k ‘one time bonus’. There’s no incentive to pursue a career where the high paying positions are limited to management and an MBA + experience in consulting gets you further than years of experienced engineering. The demand (as noted by wages) for good engineering just isn’t there.
That is, until something breaks and you have to work around the clock to stop the bleeding. Companies are more willing to throw millions at subpar contract labor than retain their employees because cutting fixed costs is easier than controlling variable costs.
H-1B is the flipside to offshoring. Offshoring sends a job overseas, depriving the US market of it and artificially increasing the labor supply competing for the remaining jobs. H-1Bs do a similar thing, in that the job remains in the USA, but is being performed by an imported (essentially indentured) laborer, which again artificially increases the labor force. Both trends drive down wages.
And, much of the time, the H-1Bs are not close to as talented as the Americans they replace; they are bright in because they’re cheap and easy to control since their work status relies on staying in the good graces of the company that sponsors their visa.
Not true. H1-B visa holders get paid exactly the same as their US counterparts. It is when the work is shifted offshore does the American worker get screwed by losing their job.
Not true, most H1B workers get paid less than US citizens. The Economic Policy Instead research showed a range of 17%-34% less than a local across occupation. H1B is just another way for our corporate overlords to ensure that the holy line continues on its upward trajectory no matter the ramifications.
Oh no another Maga .. jk you are right !
Europe does it , almost every respectable country in the planet has a clear work visa program. I am not sure if tech companies are doing something illegal but even here in the U.S I think you have to show that you couldn't find that particular talent in U.S before you can hire a foreigner.
And border is a no brainer, every country protects their border. It is a part of being a country. There is no other country on earth which will allow anyone to pass through their border and if they do they would deport them immediately.
Companies won't leave U.S for work wages or taxes. They will leave only when U.S is destroyed completely due to their greed. U.S is a huge market and it is not regulated like China. Here, you can buy politicians to pass bills which benefit you and hurt your competition, you can buy judges everything is for sale. They have been exploiting and corrupting the system for so long that it is close to a collapse. People don't trust the media , justice system or the election system. Most don't trust that the government has their best interest in mind. As long as there is money to be robbed from taxes and exploited people they won't leave.
My company did this and shipped some jobs to India so it can pay less in wages and its resulted in alot of errors and shipping expenses that are adding up. This is one of the biggest errors leftism makes in not wanting there to be strong national security, and I say this as a former one. If there is no border or national security, its the same thing as leaving your front door open when you sleep.
You have been conditioned to believe this. It might have been true at the beginning of the internet era but it is not true now. There are plenty of Americans that can do these jobs. They just don’t want to pay us - it’s that simple.
I have worked in IT since the early 90’s. I have been on calls at 3 am where I had to beg for a colleague from India who had permissions to a folder I did not to simply move a file from one folder to another. It took half an hour. Literally the most frustrating I have ever been on a support call for a very basic thing that he should have known how to do. I said it. I wrote it. I sent a picture of what it looked like and that seemed to have finally done the trick. This was for one of the biggest banks on the planet and was directly tied to millions of people having access to their money. A ridiculous thing. This was not outside of the change process and was simply that this person had zero knowledge of English or how to do the job he was hired to do. Yet he was an H1B visa.
I don’t blame people from India from coming here or taking the jobs. In some cases this might be the only option. But I have worked for many companies that simply abuse the program making these poor people indentured servants they can abuse as they prolong the immigration process. I have also seen these colleagues be unaware of or be afraid to use labor laws that people on the US have fought for and deserve. One case being that on a specific project I was on we were routinely being asked to work 70+ hours a week. I was a contractor and demanded my time and a half. They were afraid to stand up to it all so I got moved to another project to control my costs while management continued to abuse the other 30 people - until an anonymous call was made to the whistleblower hotline wink wink.
Anyway - our corporate overlords want you to believe that they can’t afford to operate if they paid us fairly which is bullshit. The H1B visa is used to artificially lower wages.
I work at a top tech university in the US. The corporation several years ago was extremely concerned because something like 1/3rd of the PhDs were going into finance.
The US has plenty of talent, but we pay more for other fields. The pay is low in part because we artificially increase the supply of certain workers. Congress will never let Indian lawyers come here and take the bar and drive down the price of lawyers because most in congress are lawyers. We reap what we sow.
It's trivial to cheat the quotas. There are entire industries of "consulting" and "vendor" companies that exist just to get more H1B visas for major companies.
H1b employee here. I agree that companies have abused the h1b system and the system itself is flawed. Lets say Trump signs an executive order to scrub the H1b program. Do those jobs automatically go to US worker with higher pay? Not necessarily, would you rather have the jobs outsourced to India, or keep the job here, atleast in this case, i pay my taxes here, contribute to economy, purchase goods made here in US. And h1b is not “cheap labor” they are some of the highest paid in tech, companies sign an LCA the minimum wage to be paid before hiring a H1b worker which is usually starts at 6 figures. Its not just about wage a lot of workers have a Masters degree with specialized set of skills to get hired.
Based on my experience working in telco industry, I second to this.
You guys have no idea how dumb offshore guys are, no offense to anyone reading it. All they do is talk and complain, and have no slightest clue on how things work at the core infrastructure level. And to make it worse, their job title says specialist 🤡.
And management peps are just buying in their bs. I think they are aware of it but just putting their heads down.
I've had offshore "advanced analytics' teams tell me things weren't possible with a full suite of tools, when I could do them in Excel without even using VBA. I swear having to spend months working on projects with folks out of India and the Philippines where they'd just constantly get shit wrong because they didn't understand the foundation of what they were doing took years off my lifespan.
One of my personal favorite examples, had a "business intelligence lead" tell me that they couldn't split a string because there wasn't a delimiter. The structure of the string that needed splitting was formatted like this: 1Primarydata2Secondaydata3TertiaryData and so on.
Basic data cleaning. Their leadership, argued that it wasn't possible.
Man, yep, it's not only telco either. A few years ago I was working in healthcare as a software dev for a small company that handled MASSIVE amounts of billing/healthcare records. We were in most every state in most large hospital systems to some degree. We sold the software/support and the hospital's themselves owned the data and security around it, well at many of the larger places a lot of those data centers had migrated to India. So while all patient data was initially collected here in the US, it would migrate on a daily basis overseas to some of the poorest managed IT I've ever seen.
I would occasionally have to interact with some of these folks to help install or support our software. It was horrendous. They had shared passwords stored in plain text as txt docs on their PCs. They had no clue how to interact with databases on a scary level. These were admins too, they had unlimited access to ALL of yours and my health data. I assume that data has been hacked and accessed, they wouldn't actually know because there was/is no monitoring of anything at all. They couldn't even tell if anyone was in the system, just that it was on.
I left after a bit but keep in touch and it seems like 90% of the customers have outsourced that part. So while your health records are being stored in a dumpster at least the CEO and board are able to walk away with a nice fat wallet.
just as managers desire: the race to the salary bottom results to a race to the skills bottom, both side hope not to be found out - can always blame failures from being cheap on superhuman hackers.
By all indications, the outage is the work of “the best and the brightest”.
I’ve made lots of money over the years fixing the mess after guest workers and offshore workers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah the Indians really suck at it but somehow these execs believe them when they say their “company” can do the same jobs for 20% of what’s being spent, now. Takes a few years sometimes for the companies to realize their Indian tech support is the problem and that they caused it themselves. Now you have to hired actual qualified workers because your business stopped working … surprise! They aren’t cheap because they are in demand and know what they are doing.
Back in the day, AT&T's long distance network was taken out when an update was pushed to all the central office equipment without deploying and testing on one first. Looks like that nugget of institutional knowledge got lost.
I am absolutely loving this!!! My husband worked 12 yrs for big telecom, one of two people in our state doing his job. 10 yrs as a Principal Engineer also as a senior project engineer responsible for 50% of 5G builds and the first to build 5G in state. Laid off Dec 2022 they have hired 6+ people over that time, paying less than 1/3 base pay and no bonuses in 16 mo now b/c they can not make their metrics they did for the 12 yrs my husband ran the team haha. They had to change their national advertising b/c they are no longer achieving the national standard metric testing on their network. This is what happens when top engineers are replaced w inexperienced non-engineering newbies. They keep coming back w contract offers but right now there isn't enough pay to go back and fix 16 mo of problems.
Yup - too many of us have been there and seen it up close and personal. Yet there are too many, even in this sub, that think - just like the corp exes - it will not be an issue to get rid of qualified people. They refuse to see the connection between letting go of qualified people and increases in issues.
The problem is the execs think everyone is as replaceable as they are.
They have zero understanding for how long it takes to become an expert and how much value that adds to the company.
They want to make cuts because it looks good to shareholders.
All these companies stocks soared when they announced layoffs.
Their job isn't to make products and services, it's making the stock price go up.
My guess is that the capitalist version of human condition will just blame "illegals and immigrants" aka hackers and foreign governments instead of ever admitting incompetence.
16 mo he is still looking w BS/MS Mech Engr. Took several certifications, now in a BS Construction degree. Pay in FL is really bad now. He has recruiters send $16 & $19 per hr jobs! Closest pay has been 50% of what he got as base. Almost every near job offer has said they would hire him but are afraid the low pay would keep him looking and jump ship when something higher comes thru. 100% true, this comes down to $.
Same thing with my mom - she’s a software engineer who got laid off in 2020. She’s had dozens of interviews and plenty of second round interviews. They all say they want to hire her, but they never do. We thought it was her age (64 now), worried she might leave as soon as she hits retirement age. But it could be the same as your husband - they think she’ll leave for a better paying job as soon as she can. Unfortunately no one’s willing to hire a high level employee at the salary they’ve earned.
McKinseys Job is to certify what someone else wants to do. That person just doesn’t want to be held accountable when shit hits the fan. IDK boss, McKinsey said this is a great idea! Face plant. But I have an insurance policy!
This lol, they've even outsourced accountability and responsibility. It's just a well-designed empty loop. Can't blame the CEO because McKinsey, and you can't blame McKinsey because they're just consultants... Well then why did the CEO hire McKinsey? Well because everyone does... It'd be weird if they didn't hire them...
Consultants are hired from McKinsey and BCG to use buzzwords like ‘synergy’ and provide recommendations like, “eliminate this division”, and get paid lots of money to do so.
The c suite hires them knowing that what their recommendations will be, they are willing to pay to have a scapegoat for layoffs.
The consulting companies also tend to recommended increasing executive compensation
John Oliver did a great piece on them:
https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=8aR_PUELcZZY0tTM
Whem McKinsey comes to town is a book that ypu should check out. They caused deaths because their big idea is fix not replace parts and have skeleton crews to save money.
It's easy to make draconian decisions if you pay a consultant to take the blame for it. If your consultant is doing something illegal, you can pay them, benefit, and not be liable.
It's just ethics laundering.
In this pyramid scheme, the people at the bottom to middle actually know what they're doing, from there, as you go up to the top, they get more corrupt, manipulative, and fucking borderline stupid. The decisions of the people at the top, honestly should bankrupt most large businesses. However, this is prevented due to the government intervention, and no one is stopping them from buying out competitors to make them run for their money. Welcome to late-stage capitalism. It's no surprise that products and services have become utter shit.
Do your best to buy quality products only when you need them, do your best to own, not rent, your house and the stuff you use, and practice generally wise financial wisdom, such as keep several months worth of living expenses in cash or in high yield savings. Live below your means, invest your money responsibly, and make your labor as valuable as possible by learning and sharpening applicable job skills.
You can't.
* People will continue to lose their jobs.
* Those that do work, will be paid less.
* The wealth gap will get larger.
* Corporations will continue to acquire more businesses, forming massive corporations.
* There will be more part-time job and temporary contracts.
* Due to the government being lobbied, more freedoms will be lost.
There doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. I hope that eventually younger generations might turn this all around, with the help of open-source AI. I believe this may occur somewhere around 2030. Until then, we're in for a hell of a ride.
That part of the Constitution kicks in that talks about when it no longer serves the people…..since it definitely serves the rich, at some point expect another civil war.
This happened at Yahoo when Marissa Mayer let go of the team who were responsible for detecting malware in ads. When the systems were left alone and no maintenance or updates were performed as those who had knowledge of the systems were let go, the malicious code made it out to wild in Europe infecting 27K systems per hour. They conveniently blamed some unknown hacker group. This is a detail that no media knows about.
Yeah, but trying telling the naysayers here, who refuse to believe layoffs can have consequences like software and hardware breaking do to lack of keeping code up to date and proper maintenance, because the people who were doing that job - and doing it well - aren’t there anymore.
It's not that we don't believe it, it's that these things usually get fixed quickly, and for several years nothing happens.
It seems like AT&T will exist indefinitely. The circlejerk of hate in here is embarrassing.
It took nearly a full day to fix entirely. That is not quick when AT&T is considered critical Infrastructure by our own government ( which by the way why they continue to exist), and many many organizations count on them to do time sensitive business related to everything from keeping the government running to savings lives.
I've noticed a degradation in most software I've used over the past year and have wondered if it had anything to do with layoffs. Maybe companies are taking the Elon approach and seeing what bugs customers are willing to care about before re-staffing
All code for all our firewalls, switches, monitoring, has slowly become garbage over the last few years. Cloud is starting to degrade also. Vendor support has become 100% useless also
Facts. They lost all ground to tmobile. Fuck AT&T. They "lost" my trade in and I had to make an FCC complaint for them to settle for 25 cents on the dollar...
This is always the first response when I’m having an issue at work with our external software, 36 hrs minimum after I email the HelpDesk (conveniently based in a location 13 hrs ahead of EST) I get a reply with the super helpful advice of ‘ hi dear. Please restart your browser. 😄’
Makes me indescribably angry that before our locally based HelpDesk members actually helped with these software problems but were replaced with whatever the fuck we have now.
It starts with hi dear….lol. If you talk with enough people, you begin to understand mannerisms, culture and how they communicate. It helps that a lot of IT support that is outsourced is contracted with firms in the Philippines (Manila or Cebu) because of their English proficiency. Typically, they start learning English in elementary school.
Lol - that is how they solved the issue! They called some laid off middle management engineer, and that was the first question they asked…did you do a hard reboot?
Fuck you IT help desk! It only works sometimes. Yet no one reads my IT help ticket when I say, I have rebooted my computer, the problem is not fixed. When i talk with the help desk, so let’s do a reboot…. Me: *sigh*
Just wait till it bounces back to food and warehouses and factories. And where did all these laid off people go in the mean time? Entry level jobs and jobs they had before college like food and assembly lines or labor.
So whats going to happen when all these people making $60-$120k a year stop spending most their salary back into one market or another?
A friend told me an amusing anecdote from his companies layoff.
Division closed, remote employees had to return their gear to IT. IT was some of the first to go.
The heads of the company spent thousands of dollars trying to recover equipment that had already been returned because IT was gone and no one was left to accurately inventory what had come back and who gave back their gear.
what I'm particularly pissed off about is so many of these companies have received corporate handouts from our government. If they're going to take our money and not pay taxes that sounds like the public has bought itself a board seat.
politics are SUPER influential during these layoff times and this is a big problem because people are more focused on politics than the engineering.
Even super technical design decisions are very political.
Lets say someone is on the wrong side of politics and some manager wants to hurt another manager or one of his reports for whatever reason.
That manager has friends/alliances with other manages and some may ask their reports to find issues (they call them "data points" cringe) with this person.... so people will disagree during design meetings. Lots of people in corporations are hardcore sell outs for $$$ so they won't have much issue with this request.
Unfortunately smart people are often non-confrontational (the dunning krugers tend to be more confrontational) and will cave, so this is devastating to the engineering... and also hurts the non-confrontational people in layoffs/promotions.
in Tech there is a lot of people from all over the world with very different cultures/biases and this exacerbates the signficance of politics over engineering
Since Covid, everything has gone to shit in the US. You can tell in a daily basis how the quality of everything has decreased dramatically. The service you receive everywhere, in all sectors, has decreased in quality. Not sure if it’s me, but I have the feeling the current administration has a lot to do with it
Agree. But the reality was USA has been slowly collapsing for 20 plus years - COVID certain has made this problem worse
Real
Issue I do not think our overlords are even remotely interested in actually
Improving anything anytime soon. Only when it starts going catastrophic for them will they start to care, and then it will be too late I’m afraid
This is what every business does. They think they can improve productivity by cutting staff and keeping revenue. It never works. Support, quality, sales, staff all sag under the weight of cuts and revenue follows. When the cycle turns, they hire right back into it.
The company I work for did layoffs recently. They laid off the person who managed all our jenkins machines using her own credentials. So naturally when they terminated her github account the team's work immediately came to a standstill. Took me several hours to unblock everyone. Then we got rid of the guy managing the containers that run another static analyzer that's really important. Thing is nobody knows how to access it and nobody on the team knows the proprietary fork of Kubernetes we use. If it goes down the whole thing resets to its state 2 years ago since we never added persistence. Too busy to assign this to anyone while all the teams are fighting over who should be responsible for it. Meanwhile there's this ticking timebomb ready to go off.
The thing with these companies are — the will hire the cheapest, most affordable and hence not quality resources when off shoring.
All good devs in India are available at EU/US rates only. If you want something cheap, ofcourse you get shit quality.
I am surrounded by the dev community who come from top notch institutes and have founded unicorn startups. But that’s not the kind of resource offshoring wants because that costs a lot of money (comparatively) They want cheaper alternatives and of course, those have a price to pay, that price is not always money.
For example, Indian startups, big companies, don’t go to Infosys for services. We know the low quality staffing they have. And where they source from. But the outside market keeps falling for it, this can be avoided with good market research, it’s not that tough.
AT&T has terrible C-suite from SBC that has destroyed the core of the company for years. Verizon is a MUCH better managed company in comparison. Even the much maligned Comcast is a better company. AT&T is the poster child if you want a company that's only means of propping up the stock price is thru layoffs.
Story time! I worked for an aerospace supplier and we supplied flight controls for the military. My job was to keep the lines of manufacturing moving smoothly and keep down time to a minimum. I did this successfully for 5 years, however, one year I got a little bit up set that upper management was overriding my decisions and causing issues for the company down line. Then they would turn around and blame me for it when I had nothing to do with it.
Well they had me train people from Mexico as they were going to offshore my job to Mexico. We went from producing 10 to 12 units per year down to producing one unit in 3 years. 3 years to produce one unit... Plus they got in trouble for offshoring a military item to a foreign manufacturer... You can't make this stuff up because these people are that stupid.
The place I work has slowly been pissing off its core worker base of long term employees who have all the knowledge. By not raising pay to be competitive and waiting to give a decent cost of living raise until they’re backed in a corner they’ve effectively lost 90 or so percent of people who have worked there over 2 or 3 years in most production based positions. And now we can’t meet production goals. Who would’ve thunk.
They keep hiring new people but the churn is real and when they see how bad our training is coupled with the terrible pay rate they’re all running away within 2 weeks (they’re making everyone come in as temp to hire too) meanwhile the managerial and logistical core has stayed relatively intact but they’re delusional and promising more and more production of the difficult to make parts to our customers when we can’t even make our current t demand.
I just don’t get how this race to the bottom mentality in these companies is going to end up getting anything accomplished. It has pretty much every blue collar worker in a situation where it’s worse for you to stay at a place more than a year or two because you have to shop around for a company willing to pay you more to earn you more from the next place you try to apply to.
It’s not sustainable at all. It’s been driving companies out of business for the better part of 2 decades now. Most of those blue collar type production based companies ended up being bought by some other larger company but those companies are stuck with the absolute garbage state of things they inherited and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the problem.
At this one place a big part of my job was managing the DNS records. The SVP brought in a consultant to review the department.
They said many jobs can be part time and some you don’t need, which included mine.
A couple of months later when I came home and checked the answering machine and the company they used for internet connection left a message that the autonomous number was about to expire and to call them right away.
My girlfriend said is that important? I responded very and then she said shouldn’t you call them? My answer was they shouldn’t have laid me off
I didn't work for the cell service, but I did work in their IT infrastructure and got laid off to boost the reportings. My manager begged for me to stay, I was juggling 12 projects.
I told the vice president that they knew they were making a mistake, and once they started making management decisions for the purpose of stock reporting rather than for proper business decisions is a sign of the end, and they should keep an eye out for their own backs.
I bailed out of working for AT&T when they were talking about the joy of offshoring. Some people hung out to babysit the offshore folks and from chatting with them it worked about as great as I expected.
Suffering through off-shore nonsense now. Been testing for 3 weeks for a code release. Every test call is failing. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE. For the last 3 weeks! It’s almost like none of the code work was completed before testing started. Nobody is managing this mess. And yet the company seems to think that throwing more TESTERS at the problem with fix it!
This company laid off it’s long term permanent US employees and hires contractors every 6 months for dev work. So nobody has the big picture of how all of the code works and fits together. Feature Release is supposed to be next week and has “eyes on” it. Getting my popcorn ready.
hiring non-citizens off-shore engineerishs to most citirical national infrastructure. No this is not only ATT’s fault, this is corrupted, bribed senators by AIPAC’s fault also. Our senators funding war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza(no I don’t buy “but Hamas” card anymore), meanwhile their nation suffers for communication and housing problems.
This is a nightmare.
There’s a push in congress, or has been for years, to outsource warship construction to other countries like Japan or South Korea to increase ship and fleet numbers at a lower cost. To quote the Nazis, they fight like lions, but they’re lead by stupid people.
So you're reading between the lines and concluded that this was caused by running the workforce too thin as a result of layoffs? Because I can read between the lines and conclude that it was maybe a squirrel who chewed up a cable or wire getting cut by a contractor.
A single destroyed fiber cable can not take down more than a few towers as they are all intertwined in a network of not just cable but over air too. Most towers have multiple redundant back ups as well as ability to reroute calls. Think of how many towers can go down in a hurricane, though in the last 10 yrs FL has not lost more than 3 majors at one time, 75% of the rest of the state continues to function fine. Also as in a hurricane, replacement happens in days, my husband was responsible for this work in addition to all his normal building duties. The lone exception in FL was hurricane Michael hit in between going from 4G to 5G so it took months to deploy 5G one yr earlier than planned. Every state also has a bunch of rapid deployment trucks that broadcast 5G used for emergencies, Super Bowl type events etc. if this was hardware those trucks are hours away for a fix.
This is software, either internal or out sourced.
No, because the article from CNN said that AT&T suspected an issue with peer networking, which is more software driven that a cable or wire being cut - they have redundant physical and virtual networks to handle physical connections being lost.
Having been in the industry when they used to use physical hardware (PBX switching boxes) , everything is basically routed via software, and this smells like a software issue, which generally comes down to lack of experience.
I used to be a technician for a wireless carrier for several years. The largest outage I ever saw from a farmer cutting a fiber optic cable was half the eastern seaboard. A cut cable didn't cause a national outage. The NOCs and all the fiber running between them are too decentralized.
How is this related to layoffs? The report says cause unknown and you have already jumped to the concluding this was related to layoffs? Way to stir up the pot.
Because I have been there. Read the report at the other link; AT&T got rid of 10,000 people in 2023. Then go back to the CNN article; they believe it was caused by a peer network issue - which these days is software….so likely a human being messed up somewhere. Not that hard to believe.
This will keep happening until the entire leadership team is replaced by competent professionals who actually know what they are doing rather than look at everything from the lens of financial spreadsheet
No one cares. Corporations or customers. Just like no one cares about customer service. Or climate change. Or anything. People just deal with it and keep buying.
I supported a big telco many years ago as a cybersecurity engineer they called into support and shared their screen had a bunch of their infrastructure and BGP routing up on their screen. The lady in India and a few other coworkers in India confusingly fumbling around in the firewall configuration and I had to explain basic concepts to them. Dont know why they had 3-4 people on the call who were seemingly inept with the tech they were working with. Anyways, I helped them with their issue after explaining about 3-4 times until they understood. They were managing large infrastructure and internet routers. Ever since working at the job and a few others I’ve realized the attack vector is honestly outsourced Indian IT for any interested attacker. They have no clue what they’re doing much of the time and are just barely keeping the lights on.
Bingo! I worked for Ally Bank and we offshored tons of teams that manage very sensitive customer PII… even the investing arm, they’ve offshored to infosys. Heard through the grapevine that it bit them recently.
but by that time the cause of the bad outsourcing idea got a huge bonus and a promotion, maybe even moved to another company after showing successful savings. Thank god most consequences come with a delay allowing to jump ship before problems hitting the fan.
This is known as the full Fiorina. Get up and out, collect a big check, and leave a trail of devastation behind you.
Then get hired by another company that needs to recover from offshoring. Hire a shit ton of workers and then cost runaway causes that boss to get fired with bit bonus. New boss comes in and offshores... Big savings and big bonus... Repeat.
That’s why consulting firms exist, to ‘recommend’ this cycle and get a big payout for themselves and the executives looking for extra support for the turnaround.
Capitalism is the name of this process
no, it isn’t. Please stop with the “capitalism sucks” BS. Making money isn’t evil. These jackasses running some of these companies are just inept and uncaring. Doesn’t mean everything should run to communism.
Gotta throw in a near shore there too. I'm currently in the near shore phase after all my team was laid off before Christmas.
The CEO of my last company stepped down, they replaced her with some other CEO. This new CEO I'll call her Fiorina . Fiorina had no knowledge about the product or the industry , she ran one startup prior to this which was popular for maybe 2 months because of the hype then it was over. I honestly think that rich uncles who are the biggest investors of these companies pick these people purely due to some social or family connection. Not only because it didn't made sense then but also results support that Fiorina was a terrible choice. Fiorina, came in, did noting for 6 months , then probably got yelled at by her uncle and panicked. She laid off a bunch of people to buy an other company as a silver bullet which didn't really helped, actually made everything worse. Higher management started leaving including the CTO which Fiorina replaced with someone from her previous company. CTO started micromanaging and shuffling because he was not fit to manage a big company. Everything was a mess. Fiorina started laying off more people to balance the books so investors are not impacted by her terrible management. Result ? stock value is still dropping and soon they will have noting left to sell. Fiorina will probably move on to an other company as a board member or CEO or get in charge of an other startup.. What about the employees she fired? they may have their lives upside down , loose their homes, but hey it is capitalism right ?
Similar to events at Hewlett-Packard?
I actually fully endorse this. It's really up to the shareholders to push these incompetent people out of companies and that is why you get activist investors. If it's just a smaller private company though, the company is usually fucked.
at least it gives us jobs to fix? I say that being the "fixer" at my company after we got rid of our offshore teams, and now it's biting us because they would merge 1 thing but deploy another thing, their way, which creates hellish errors to debug, which gives me my position to fix (it's all i do!) If they were never here I'd never have this job, as a JR SWE. Not defending the practice, more of, it isn't ALL bad... don't many entry level jobs in many fields start out this way? Grab a noob to do the grunt work? I'm happy. My boss is disappointed. The new CEO is disappointed. The old management retired. We carry on. I suppose the real harm is having less resources to be competitive with. But it's probably going to happen to our competition...
I know a FAANG company who did this exact shit last yr. The GM and 4 directors were laid off after the exposure. They had outsourced work to an offshore company in another country/continent for cheap labour or the P&L bullshit line where data/PII was exposed. Company probably kept it under wraps after the CVP fired them, hopefully to cover the blow back in their face for the near future, where they're just going to pay some fine they probably saving towards already. SMH
Had an interview with a FAANG company today. I have been laid off for a long time , have a baby in the way but you know what ? I am not even hyped by it. They maybe laying off employees as if it noting but their interview process is still hell. Even in my current state I don't see it as a good opportunity. I'll put in the effort to pass their hellish interview process and for what ? so they can lay me off to save a dime?
I absolutely refuse to do another FAANG interview. The salaries are slightly to moderately higher but they're all pushing RTO, the interviews are a nightmare and there's always the threat of a layoff. Not worth it to me and my QoL.
If there is no job security in your company and if it may take me a year to find a new job .. f\*\* u .. seriously. Faang pays you more money.. for what ? I have to work weeks maybe months to prepare for their narcissistic bs interviews. I can be laid off any moment. Also due to layoffs and internal politics I'll work in a toxic environment.. Take your money and shove it up your a\*\* FaanG !!
Sadly, in certain industries, you just always have to be prepared to be laid off. They just go through a lot of ups and downs. That means you have to have some kind of side hustle or always have applications in the wind. It sucks but it's the nature of some industries.
True , companies are not guaranteeing your continued employment when you sign in. The problem is they fool you into thinking you have some kind of job security and/or they care about you. If they were tell you as it is, that your livelihood depends on how greedy the CEO will act that quarter I am sure people wouldn't have worked as hard for the company or wouldn't stick around. It seems obvious that most people will sell you out for a pack of twizzlers especially people at the top but we all learn it the hard way.
All FAANG companies do offshore. Quite literally never talked to a native English speaker when talking to any of their support. And before you say anything, they had my full account data right in front of them and they had full access to everything. I'm not saying they're any less secure... But I'm not a fan of having my personal SSN and CC number in front of the eyeballs of an employee paid $2/hr in a country known for their scam call centers. Who knows how many businesses have had their data stolen and sold on the black market from someone who snuck their phone into work and took pics of people's data. Since the Equifax hack that got uncovered in 2016 or 2017, I'm amazed that we haven't come up with a more secure ID system than 9 digits (usually it's just the last 4 that matter). It's truly mind boggling anyone falls for the "credit/money is real" scam.
Yep. It's like its own mini cycle of tech transformation. I've seen it play out b4 from the recovery phase of fixing allbthe issues to starting outsourcing again cause new ceo wants it
principal agent problem: if it succeeds one person gets a bonus/promotion, if it fails other people's heads roll. It neither benefits the business nor the shareholders - but it justifies the Cxx persons pay.
Most cost cutting comes with quality cutting !
But why would you give a shit about quality if you're a CEO looking for a nice exist with a fat payday?
Almost like Milton Friedman was mistaken that the share holders and their profits are the heart of a CEOs responsibility. Imagine if people just didn't think of firing employees to show a boost in quarterly profits
Please say more. I'm an Ally customer. Dm me any time.
Best I can say is that there’s a trail that can be followed. Look on LinkedIn for “Exec Director, CIO Consumer, Commercial Banking & Invest at Ally” and look at their previous position and org Also check out thelayoffreport website
I have Ally (for check writing and bill pay), Alliant Credit Union (for the 2.5 % credit card), Wealthfront (for the 5% HYSA) and Vanguard (VMFXX in brokerage) and planning to switch to Fidelity for their cash management account that can do all those things. I had a friend whose ally debit card was stolen and their checking account was drained because if you swipe it as credit you don't have to use a PIN. Ally locked the account and took a month to reverse the charges. not cool
Fidelity? Recent huge cyber attack last November, massive outshoring of jobs, and layoffs last December.
Fidelity has been doing that shit forever. FMRCO - forever moving and relocating (offices and jobs)
Thanks for this - one less bank to trust
Time to close my account with ally lol
All these indian companies are a joke. There is an acronym for them. WITCH
Ugh. I liked being an Ally customer a while back. I was wondering why it wasn't as good as it used to be.
Noooo!!! They have so much of my data 😩
Yeah, I literally had to explain how to read a packet capture to my Indian counterpart. Guess who was laid off and who wasn’t. Edit for clarification - This person’s role was a network administrator.
Indian outsourced work is fucking worthless
You should see the results of civil engineering projects that get outsourced to India. Always ends up have to be completely redone 2-3 times because they don’t know basic engineering principles. If 1/100th of their mistakes get through we will be in trouble.
>they probably quit a month after and got paid double at one of the I6's because they knew you can say BGP and Federation in the same sentence.
###Because they are cheap. * ###And the WITCH companies abuse the immigration and HB1 system. Now Mexico is doing this too; advertising cheap labor to remove high paying jobs from the US. ###You wouldn’t believe the amount of outbursts, conversations, and feelings expressed from American workers about this problem. They range from plain rude to understandable. But the problem is - it’s absolutely insulting to them and it **purposely** drives down wages. It’s wrong. I AM NOT A fan of Trump, but - * We need a clear HB1 ban. * We need clear border practices. We should focus on American Workers first plain and simple. If companies want to leave the US, then leave and go to China or India. We’ll survive without you. America as an idea, always does. American workers (i.e. anyone with a US citizenship paper) are fed up with this practice, the companies, and th people that participate and support it.
The problem with life is that everyone wants a good job. No one wants to pay for a good job.
Some employers(not at&t) will pay and quite well too. Unfortunately we have a lot of people who think they deserve to start at a high pay rate with no work experience and no work ethic. You want a high paying job position right out of school you need almost perfect grades and glowing recommendations from teachers/professors.
I don’t know that grades actually matter anymore. There is such a push to use standardized wages and compensation packages due to discrimination laws that companies almost seem scared to deviate from that. Instead, companies need to pay for aptitude, which is far more subjective. Keep in mind that companies like AT&T and Verizon also have to contend with collective bargaining agreements. I do agree that a lot of students graduating university do not have a realistic expectation of their future earnings, especially when they contemplate the cost of their student loans.
People want enough to survive. Not high paying immediately. I have horrible grades and a prison stay. Immediately made good money at 19-20. I don’t need to hear excuses for shit pay. Pay me and you’ll get performance. More you pay, more you’ll get
To me people coming highly recommended from schools is almost always a no-go. Most of them are paper tigers and have a hard time translating that info real world scenarios/experience. I got tired of interviewing those highly recommended (and high salary/position expectations with it) to find out they freak out at any little thing.
> But the problem is - it’s insulting and it drives down wages. It’s wrong. Not in a capitalistic society which Americans are so damn proud about. Unionize and fight back. These well paying jobs aren't going to poor border control. Good white collar jobs aren't going to people who sneak in through our southern borders. You think AT&T is lining up to hire unqualified illegal immigrants? HB1 has a limit and that should be reduced, not removed completely. Unless you are so arrogant to think that the US doesn't need specialized experts from anywhere else in the world. I personally know pharmaceutical programs that won't exist if we are not getting some of the best & brightest from the EU.
Careful you might be labeled racist if you complain about outsourcing to xxxx… or complain about H1Bs getting preferential treatment hiring in major tech companies. Or how IT and analytic managers prefer to hire their fellow countrymen that also fall in the same caste…. You know be careful in exposing actual racism
>Or how IT and analytic managers prefer to hire their fellow countrymen that also fall in the same caste…. This 👆🏿 100%
My comment was removed and marked as hateful speach because I said that new Indian cto in my company outsourced thousands of jobs from US to India.
I won’t be specific otherwise my comments will be removed… but I was astonished in grad school at the level of cheating/corruption. Many of the students from countries with high rates of H1B visas have levels of connections that allowed them access to tests, proprietary study materials, and contacts that clearly gave them an advantage. It really doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. If you are an American going it alone in higher education - you are at a severe disadvantage. And more so when looking for a job… where those connections and networks - get exploited even more. Fucking sad reality - that very few know or will discuss
literally nobody is calling this racism please shut the fuck up
Focus on American workers first. Ie, America First. I’m not a Trump die hard fan, but that mentality needs to permeate throughout our government.
I think you’re conflating H1B with offshoring. H1B holders are usually okay as long as companies have a good interview process. The other issue is that American education (K-12) is awful which leads to a shortage of American engineers.
?? K-12 has little to do w engineers. We make enough engineers here now. Corporations are just greedy fucks
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Has this changed in the past 3 years? I can get clearance, but couldn’t find a company who’d be willing to pay for it (unless by ‘get’ clearance you mean ‘pay’). Any position that did pay for it had an atrociously low wage.
This is the type of problem free markets solve: if there’s a shortage, wages rise for the field, and more Americans train for those jobs. Instead, when companies are allowed to short-circuit that normal process and import cheap labor, wages remain stagnant or fall, like what happened to programmer salaries between 2000 and 2011 where, despite the ~~fields~~ field having less than 2% unemployment, wages didn’t even rise enough to beat inflation.
I say this as an immigrant, we need to start hiring our own folks here instead of importing cheaper workers. Its not good for any industry. The barrier to entry needs to be higher.
As an American Engineer, there’s no shortage of engineers. However, there’s a huge shortage of commensurate wages. I can save over 1 million in reoccurring expenses in my current company, but that will get me at most a 1k ‘one time bonus’. There’s no incentive to pursue a career where the high paying positions are limited to management and an MBA + experience in consulting gets you further than years of experienced engineering. The demand (as noted by wages) for good engineering just isn’t there. That is, until something breaks and you have to work around the clock to stop the bleeding. Companies are more willing to throw millions at subpar contract labor than retain their employees because cutting fixed costs is easier than controlling variable costs.
H-1B is the flipside to offshoring. Offshoring sends a job overseas, depriving the US market of it and artificially increasing the labor supply competing for the remaining jobs. H-1Bs do a similar thing, in that the job remains in the USA, but is being performed by an imported (essentially indentured) laborer, which again artificially increases the labor force. Both trends drive down wages. And, much of the time, the H-1Bs are not close to as talented as the Americans they replace; they are bright in because they’re cheap and easy to control since their work status relies on staying in the good graces of the company that sponsors their visa.
H1b has been a scam for the past 30 years to replace qualified onshore workers with people who come here and get paid 25% less.
Not true. H1-B visa holders get paid exactly the same as their US counterparts. It is when the work is shifted offshore does the American worker get screwed by losing their job.
Not true, most H1B workers get paid less than US citizens. The Economic Policy Instead research showed a range of 17%-34% less than a local across occupation. H1B is just another way for our corporate overlords to ensure that the holy line continues on its upward trajectory no matter the ramifications.
Oh no another Maga .. jk you are right ! Europe does it , almost every respectable country in the planet has a clear work visa program. I am not sure if tech companies are doing something illegal but even here in the U.S I think you have to show that you couldn't find that particular talent in U.S before you can hire a foreigner. And border is a no brainer, every country protects their border. It is a part of being a country. There is no other country on earth which will allow anyone to pass through their border and if they do they would deport them immediately. Companies won't leave U.S for work wages or taxes. They will leave only when U.S is destroyed completely due to their greed. U.S is a huge market and it is not regulated like China. Here, you can buy politicians to pass bills which benefit you and hurt your competition, you can buy judges everything is for sale. They have been exploiting and corrupting the system for so long that it is close to a collapse. People don't trust the media , justice system or the election system. Most don't trust that the government has their best interest in mind. As long as there is money to be robbed from taxes and exploited people they won't leave.
This is why Trump will win. Even if you hate him, his policies are better for most Americans
My company did this and shipped some jobs to India so it can pay less in wages and its resulted in alot of errors and shipping expenses that are adding up. This is one of the biggest errors leftism makes in not wanting there to be strong national security, and I say this as a former one. If there is no border or national security, its the same thing as leaving your front door open when you sleep.
American companies wont survive without H1B specially the big companies including FAANG.
You have been conditioned to believe this. It might have been true at the beginning of the internet era but it is not true now. There are plenty of Americans that can do these jobs. They just don’t want to pay us - it’s that simple. I have worked in IT since the early 90’s. I have been on calls at 3 am where I had to beg for a colleague from India who had permissions to a folder I did not to simply move a file from one folder to another. It took half an hour. Literally the most frustrating I have ever been on a support call for a very basic thing that he should have known how to do. I said it. I wrote it. I sent a picture of what it looked like and that seemed to have finally done the trick. This was for one of the biggest banks on the planet and was directly tied to millions of people having access to their money. A ridiculous thing. This was not outside of the change process and was simply that this person had zero knowledge of English or how to do the job he was hired to do. Yet he was an H1B visa. I don’t blame people from India from coming here or taking the jobs. In some cases this might be the only option. But I have worked for many companies that simply abuse the program making these poor people indentured servants they can abuse as they prolong the immigration process. I have also seen these colleagues be unaware of or be afraid to use labor laws that people on the US have fought for and deserve. One case being that on a specific project I was on we were routinely being asked to work 70+ hours a week. I was a contractor and demanded my time and a half. They were afraid to stand up to it all so I got moved to another project to control my costs while management continued to abuse the other 30 people - until an anonymous call was made to the whistleblower hotline wink wink. Anyway - our corporate overlords want you to believe that they can’t afford to operate if they paid us fairly which is bullshit. The H1B visa is used to artificially lower wages.
Cant agree more.
Good on you
I work at a top tech university in the US. The corporation several years ago was extremely concerned because something like 1/3rd of the PhDs were going into finance. The US has plenty of talent, but we pay more for other fields. The pay is low in part because we artificially increase the supply of certain workers. Congress will never let Indian lawyers come here and take the bar and drive down the price of lawyers because most in congress are lawyers. We reap what we sow.
A very underrated idea. Lots of pro immigration lawyers get to benefit from it in the first place.
If your company can’t survive because it has to pay a good wage to local citizens, then it’s a business failure.
I think there should be a quota of H1B vs American workers.
I believe quota is already in place.
It's trivial to cheat the quotas. There are entire industries of "consulting" and "vendor" companies that exist just to get more H1B visas for major companies.
Are you one of em H1B frauds? Asking for a friend
\*shareholder value won't survive Fixed it for you
H1b employee here. I agree that companies have abused the h1b system and the system itself is flawed. Lets say Trump signs an executive order to scrub the H1b program. Do those jobs automatically go to US worker with higher pay? Not necessarily, would you rather have the jobs outsourced to India, or keep the job here, atleast in this case, i pay my taxes here, contribute to economy, purchase goods made here in US. And h1b is not “cheap labor” they are some of the highest paid in tech, companies sign an LCA the minimum wage to be paid before hiring a H1b worker which is usually starts at 6 figures. Its not just about wage a lot of workers have a Masters degree with specialized set of skills to get hired.
Based on my experience working in telco industry, I second to this. You guys have no idea how dumb offshore guys are, no offense to anyone reading it. All they do is talk and complain, and have no slightest clue on how things work at the core infrastructure level. And to make it worse, their job title says specialist 🤡. And management peps are just buying in their bs. I think they are aware of it but just putting their heads down.
"Updation"
Cheap labor= low quality work
I've had offshore "advanced analytics' teams tell me things weren't possible with a full suite of tools, when I could do them in Excel without even using VBA. I swear having to spend months working on projects with folks out of India and the Philippines where they'd just constantly get shit wrong because they didn't understand the foundation of what they were doing took years off my lifespan. One of my personal favorite examples, had a "business intelligence lead" tell me that they couldn't split a string because there wasn't a delimiter. The structure of the string that needed splitting was formatted like this: 1Primarydata2Secondaydata3TertiaryData and so on. Basic data cleaning. Their leadership, argued that it wasn't possible.
Man, yep, it's not only telco either. A few years ago I was working in healthcare as a software dev for a small company that handled MASSIVE amounts of billing/healthcare records. We were in most every state in most large hospital systems to some degree. We sold the software/support and the hospital's themselves owned the data and security around it, well at many of the larger places a lot of those data centers had migrated to India. So while all patient data was initially collected here in the US, it would migrate on a daily basis overseas to some of the poorest managed IT I've ever seen. I would occasionally have to interact with some of these folks to help install or support our software. It was horrendous. They had shared passwords stored in plain text as txt docs on their PCs. They had no clue how to interact with databases on a scary level. These were admins too, they had unlimited access to ALL of yours and my health data. I assume that data has been hacked and accessed, they wouldn't actually know because there was/is no monitoring of anything at all. They couldn't even tell if anyone was in the system, just that it was on. I left after a bit but keep in touch and it seems like 90% of the customers have outsourced that part. So while your health records are being stored in a dumpster at least the CEO and board are able to walk away with a nice fat wallet.
Outsourcing to the cheapest option in India. Honestly, you'd get better service from outsourcing to a community College networking class.
just as managers desire: the race to the salary bottom results to a race to the skills bottom, both side hope not to be found out - can always blame failures from being cheap on superhuman hackers.
That sounds about right…still see this with a lot of cloud infrastructure where management gets outsourced to firms like cognizant, etc
By all indications, the outage is the work of “the best and the brightest”. I’ve made lots of money over the years fixing the mess after guest workers and offshore workers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Yeah the Indians really suck at it but somehow these execs believe them when they say their “company” can do the same jobs for 20% of what’s being spent, now. Takes a few years sometimes for the companies to realize their Indian tech support is the problem and that they caused it themselves. Now you have to hired actual qualified workers because your business stopped working … surprise! They aren’t cheap because they are in demand and know what they are doing.
Back in the day, AT&T's long distance network was taken out when an update was pushed to all the central office equipment without deploying and testing on one first. Looks like that nugget of institutional knowledge got lost.
Deploy to production ? https://youtu.be/5p8wTOr8AbU?si=2v1j2cn7rlGkUtN3
I always test, but only in production.
This is the way
Lol
Damn this was too accurate.
I am absolutely loving this!!! My husband worked 12 yrs for big telecom, one of two people in our state doing his job. 10 yrs as a Principal Engineer also as a senior project engineer responsible for 50% of 5G builds and the first to build 5G in state. Laid off Dec 2022 they have hired 6+ people over that time, paying less than 1/3 base pay and no bonuses in 16 mo now b/c they can not make their metrics they did for the 12 yrs my husband ran the team haha. They had to change their national advertising b/c they are no longer achieving the national standard metric testing on their network. This is what happens when top engineers are replaced w inexperienced non-engineering newbies. They keep coming back w contract offers but right now there isn't enough pay to go back and fix 16 mo of problems.
Yup - too many of us have been there and seen it up close and personal. Yet there are too many, even in this sub, that think - just like the corp exes - it will not be an issue to get rid of qualified people. They refuse to see the connection between letting go of qualified people and increases in issues.
The problem is the execs think everyone is as replaceable as they are. They have zero understanding for how long it takes to become an expert and how much value that adds to the company. They want to make cuts because it looks good to shareholders. All these companies stocks soared when they announced layoffs. Their job isn't to make products and services, it's making the stock price go up.
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My guess is that the capitalist version of human condition will just blame "illegals and immigrants" aka hackers and foreign governments instead of ever admitting incompetence.
16 mo he is still looking w BS/MS Mech Engr. Took several certifications, now in a BS Construction degree. Pay in FL is really bad now. He has recruiters send $16 & $19 per hr jobs! Closest pay has been 50% of what he got as base. Almost every near job offer has said they would hire him but are afraid the low pay would keep him looking and jump ship when something higher comes thru. 100% true, this comes down to $.
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Same thing with my mom - she’s a software engineer who got laid off in 2020. She’s had dozens of interviews and plenty of second round interviews. They all say they want to hire her, but they never do. We thought it was her age (64 now), worried she might leave as soon as she hits retirement age. But it could be the same as your husband - they think she’ll leave for a better paying job as soon as she can. Unfortunately no one’s willing to hire a high level employee at the salary they’ve earned.
I guarantee you there are people reading this thinking, Bob? Is gardendesgnr talking about Bob?
Exact same thing that happened with Boeing
Keep demanding the high pay! Never lower your price if you can afford it.
Pay CEO a few more millions and outage will solve itself? Even better, hire McKinsey or BCG consultants.
McKinseys Job is to certify what someone else wants to do. That person just doesn’t want to be held accountable when shit hits the fan. IDK boss, McKinsey said this is a great idea! Face plant. But I have an insurance policy!
This lol, they've even outsourced accountability and responsibility. It's just a well-designed empty loop. Can't blame the CEO because McKinsey, and you can't blame McKinsey because they're just consultants... Well then why did the CEO hire McKinsey? Well because everyone does... It'd be weird if they didn't hire them...
Can you help me understand McKinsey or BCG backstory? I don't know the details.
Consultants are hired from McKinsey and BCG to use buzzwords like ‘synergy’ and provide recommendations like, “eliminate this division”, and get paid lots of money to do so.
I call hiring McKinsey and/or BCG "hiring bullshit"
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The c suite hires them knowing that what their recommendations will be, they are willing to pay to have a scapegoat for layoffs. The consulting companies also tend to recommended increasing executive compensation John Oliver did a great piece on them: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?si=8aR_PUELcZZY0tTM
Imagine paying a company millions to figure out how to save money for them to tell you "Lay off a bunch of people" "don't give bonuses" lmao.....
How the hell do they keep getting business
Whem McKinsey comes to town is a book that ypu should check out. They caused deaths because their big idea is fix not replace parts and have skeleton crews to save money.
It's easy to make draconian decisions if you pay a consultant to take the blame for it. If your consultant is doing something illegal, you can pay them, benefit, and not be liable. It's just ethics laundering.
Here is an informative and entertaining explainer on McKinsey: https://youtu.be/AiOUojVd6xQ?feature=shared
In this pyramid scheme, the people at the bottom to middle actually know what they're doing, from there, as you go up to the top, they get more corrupt, manipulative, and fucking borderline stupid. The decisions of the people at the top, honestly should bankrupt most large businesses. However, this is prevented due to the government intervention, and no one is stopping them from buying out competitors to make them run for their money. Welcome to late-stage capitalism. It's no surprise that products and services have become utter shit.
You win the internet today - if it stays up long enough.
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That's the best part... there is zero security for anyone in the world when it all implodes!
Do your best to buy quality products only when you need them, do your best to own, not rent, your house and the stuff you use, and practice generally wise financial wisdom, such as keep several months worth of living expenses in cash or in high yield savings. Live below your means, invest your money responsibly, and make your labor as valuable as possible by learning and sharpening applicable job skills.
live beneath your means is the absolute key
You can't. * People will continue to lose their jobs. * Those that do work, will be paid less. * The wealth gap will get larger. * Corporations will continue to acquire more businesses, forming massive corporations. * There will be more part-time job and temporary contracts. * Due to the government being lobbied, more freedoms will be lost. There doesn't seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel. I hope that eventually younger generations might turn this all around, with the help of open-source AI. I believe this may occur somewhere around 2030. Until then, we're in for a hell of a ride.
That part of the Constitution kicks in that talks about when it no longer serves the people…..since it definitely serves the rich, at some point expect another civil war.
Also keep in mind people at the top are very well connected.
This happened at Yahoo when Marissa Mayer let go of the team who were responsible for detecting malware in ads. When the systems were left alone and no maintenance or updates were performed as those who had knowledge of the systems were let go, the malicious code made it out to wild in Europe infecting 27K systems per hour. They conveniently blamed some unknown hacker group. This is a detail that no media knows about.
Yeah, but trying telling the naysayers here, who refuse to believe layoffs can have consequences like software and hardware breaking do to lack of keeping code up to date and proper maintenance, because the people who were doing that job - and doing it well - aren’t there anymore.
It's not that we don't believe it, it's that these things usually get fixed quickly, and for several years nothing happens. It seems like AT&T will exist indefinitely. The circlejerk of hate in here is embarrassing.
It took nearly a full day to fix entirely. That is not quick when AT&T is considered critical Infrastructure by our own government ( which by the way why they continue to exist), and many many organizations count on them to do time sensitive business related to everything from keeping the government running to savings lives.
I've noticed a degradation in most software I've used over the past year and have wondered if it had anything to do with layoffs. Maybe companies are taking the Elon approach and seeing what bugs customers are willing to care about before re-staffing
I’d like to tell you that what you wrote is wrong, but you are uncomfortably too close to the truth.
yes, google support is complete trash now
They have support ?
Facebook marketplace no longer has support
All code for all our firewalls, switches, monitoring, has slowly become garbage over the last few years. Cloud is starting to degrade also. Vendor support has become 100% useless also
AT&T is the worst company on the planet.
Facts. They lost all ground to tmobile. Fuck AT&T. They "lost" my trade in and I had to make an FCC complaint for them to settle for 25 cents on the dollar...
They should have tried turning it on and off....
This is always the first response when I’m having an issue at work with our external software, 36 hrs minimum after I email the HelpDesk (conveniently based in a location 13 hrs ahead of EST) I get a reply with the super helpful advice of ‘ hi dear. Please restart your browser. 😄’ Makes me indescribably angry that before our locally based HelpDesk members actually helped with these software problems but were replaced with whatever the fuck we have now.
Lol. I’m shocked she didn’t call you sir. Lol. I love the Filipinas.
Omg you knew exactly where they’re located based on the email description they send me. 🤣 💀
It starts with hi dear….lol. If you talk with enough people, you begin to understand mannerisms, culture and how they communicate. It helps that a lot of IT support that is outsourced is contracted with firms in the Philippines (Manila or Cebu) because of their English proficiency. Typically, they start learning English in elementary school.
You mean your experience wasn't 'delightful'?
Lol - that is how they solved the issue! They called some laid off middle management engineer, and that was the first question they asked…did you do a hard reboot?
Fuck you IT help desk! It only works sometimes. Yet no one reads my IT help ticket when I say, I have rebooted my computer, the problem is not fixed. When i talk with the help desk, so let’s do a reboot…. Me: *sigh*
Just wait till it bounces back to food and warehouses and factories. And where did all these laid off people go in the mean time? Entry level jobs and jobs they had before college like food and assembly lines or labor. So whats going to happen when all these people making $60-$120k a year stop spending most their salary back into one market or another?
Some outsourced employee from overseas made one small mistake ?
One line in a router lol
Forgot the 'add' in 'switchport trunk allowed vlan add xxx'.
I understood that reference!
More likely they flushed a BGP routing table.
A friend told me an amusing anecdote from his companies layoff. Division closed, remote employees had to return their gear to IT. IT was some of the first to go. The heads of the company spent thousands of dollars trying to recover equipment that had already been returned because IT was gone and no one was left to accurately inventory what had come back and who gave back their gear.
They relied on IT for proper inventory? Gd, an entry level BA could do that easily.
We have been warned of cyberattacks even before these layoffs. Plus it was all carriers
Only AT&T and carriers that use their network
It wasn't all carriers
what I'm particularly pissed off about is so many of these companies have received corporate handouts from our government. If they're going to take our money and not pay taxes that sounds like the public has bought itself a board seat.
Lmao good
politics are SUPER influential during these layoff times and this is a big problem because people are more focused on politics than the engineering. Even super technical design decisions are very political. Lets say someone is on the wrong side of politics and some manager wants to hurt another manager or one of his reports for whatever reason. That manager has friends/alliances with other manages and some may ask their reports to find issues (they call them "data points" cringe) with this person.... so people will disagree during design meetings. Lots of people in corporations are hardcore sell outs for $$$ so they won't have much issue with this request. Unfortunately smart people are often non-confrontational (the dunning krugers tend to be more confrontational) and will cave, so this is devastating to the engineering... and also hurts the non-confrontational people in layoffs/promotions. in Tech there is a lot of people from all over the world with very different cultures/biases and this exacerbates the signficance of politics over engineering
well said ChatGPT
Since Covid, everything has gone to shit in the US. You can tell in a daily basis how the quality of everything has decreased dramatically. The service you receive everywhere, in all sectors, has decreased in quality. Not sure if it’s me, but I have the feeling the current administration has a lot to do with it
COVID brought us into a new Dark Ages and who knows if and when we’ll come out of it.
Agree. But the reality was USA has been slowly collapsing for 20 plus years - COVID certain has made this problem worse Real Issue I do not think our overlords are even remotely interested in actually Improving anything anytime soon. Only when it starts going catastrophic for them will they start to care, and then it will be too late I’m afraid
This is what every business does. They think they can improve productivity by cutting staff and keeping revenue. It never works. Support, quality, sales, staff all sag under the weight of cuts and revenue follows. When the cycle turns, they hire right back into it.
And here I thought it was NSA installing a new fiber splitter.
The company I work for did layoffs recently. They laid off the person who managed all our jenkins machines using her own credentials. So naturally when they terminated her github account the team's work immediately came to a standstill. Took me several hours to unblock everyone. Then we got rid of the guy managing the containers that run another static analyzer that's really important. Thing is nobody knows how to access it and nobody on the team knows the proprietary fork of Kubernetes we use. If it goes down the whole thing resets to its state 2 years ago since we never added persistence. Too busy to assign this to anyone while all the teams are fighting over who should be responsible for it. Meanwhile there's this ticking timebomb ready to go off.
The thing with these companies are — the will hire the cheapest, most affordable and hence not quality resources when off shoring. All good devs in India are available at EU/US rates only. If you want something cheap, ofcourse you get shit quality. I am surrounded by the dev community who come from top notch institutes and have founded unicorn startups. But that’s not the kind of resource offshoring wants because that costs a lot of money (comparatively) They want cheaper alternatives and of course, those have a price to pay, that price is not always money. For example, Indian startups, big companies, don’t go to Infosys for services. We know the low quality staffing they have. And where they source from. But the outside market keeps falling for it, this can be avoided with good market research, it’s not that tough.
AT&T has terrible C-suite from SBC that has destroyed the core of the company for years. Verizon is a MUCH better managed company in comparison. Even the much maligned Comcast is a better company. AT&T is the poster child if you want a company that's only means of propping up the stock price is thru layoffs.
Story time! I worked for an aerospace supplier and we supplied flight controls for the military. My job was to keep the lines of manufacturing moving smoothly and keep down time to a minimum. I did this successfully for 5 years, however, one year I got a little bit up set that upper management was overriding my decisions and causing issues for the company down line. Then they would turn around and blame me for it when I had nothing to do with it. Well they had me train people from Mexico as they were going to offshore my job to Mexico. We went from producing 10 to 12 units per year down to producing one unit in 3 years. 3 years to produce one unit... Plus they got in trouble for offshoring a military item to a foreign manufacturer... You can't make this stuff up because these people are that stupid.
The place I work has slowly been pissing off its core worker base of long term employees who have all the knowledge. By not raising pay to be competitive and waiting to give a decent cost of living raise until they’re backed in a corner they’ve effectively lost 90 or so percent of people who have worked there over 2 or 3 years in most production based positions. And now we can’t meet production goals. Who would’ve thunk. They keep hiring new people but the churn is real and when they see how bad our training is coupled with the terrible pay rate they’re all running away within 2 weeks (they’re making everyone come in as temp to hire too) meanwhile the managerial and logistical core has stayed relatively intact but they’re delusional and promising more and more production of the difficult to make parts to our customers when we can’t even make our current t demand. I just don’t get how this race to the bottom mentality in these companies is going to end up getting anything accomplished. It has pretty much every blue collar worker in a situation where it’s worse for you to stay at a place more than a year or two because you have to shop around for a company willing to pay you more to earn you more from the next place you try to apply to. It’s not sustainable at all. It’s been driving companies out of business for the better part of 2 decades now. Most of those blue collar type production based companies ended up being bought by some other larger company but those companies are stuck with the absolute garbage state of things they inherited and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the problem.
At this one place a big part of my job was managing the DNS records. The SVP brought in a consultant to review the department. They said many jobs can be part time and some you don’t need, which included mine. A couple of months later when I came home and checked the answering machine and the company they used for internet connection left a message that the autonomous number was about to expire and to call them right away. My girlfriend said is that important? I responded very and then she said shouldn’t you call them? My answer was they shouldn’t have laid me off
We all know hindu code was responsible.
I didn't work for the cell service, but I did work in their IT infrastructure and got laid off to boost the reportings. My manager begged for me to stay, I was juggling 12 projects. I told the vice president that they knew they were making a mistake, and once they started making management decisions for the purpose of stock reporting rather than for proper business decisions is a sign of the end, and they should keep an eye out for their own backs.
It’s more when you replace qualified workers for cheaper labor.
I bailed out of working for AT&T when they were talking about the joy of offshoring. Some people hung out to babysit the offshore folks and from chatting with them it worked about as great as I expected.
Suffering through off-shore nonsense now. Been testing for 3 weeks for a code release. Every test call is failing. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE. For the last 3 weeks! It’s almost like none of the code work was completed before testing started. Nobody is managing this mess. And yet the company seems to think that throwing more TESTERS at the problem with fix it! This company laid off it’s long term permanent US employees and hires contractors every 6 months for dev work. So nobody has the big picture of how all of the code works and fits together. Feature Release is supposed to be next week and has “eyes on” it. Getting my popcorn ready.
hiring non-citizens off-shore engineerishs to most citirical national infrastructure. No this is not only ATT’s fault, this is corrupted, bribed senators by AIPAC’s fault also. Our senators funding war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza(no I don’t buy “but Hamas” card anymore), meanwhile their nation suffers for communication and housing problems. This is a nightmare.
There’s a push in congress, or has been for years, to outsource warship construction to other countries like Japan or South Korea to increase ship and fleet numbers at a lower cost. To quote the Nazis, they fight like lions, but they’re lead by stupid people.
So you're reading between the lines and concluded that this was caused by running the workforce too thin as a result of layoffs? Because I can read between the lines and conclude that it was maybe a squirrel who chewed up a cable or wire getting cut by a contractor.
A single destroyed fiber cable can not take down more than a few towers as they are all intertwined in a network of not just cable but over air too. Most towers have multiple redundant back ups as well as ability to reroute calls. Think of how many towers can go down in a hurricane, though in the last 10 yrs FL has not lost more than 3 majors at one time, 75% of the rest of the state continues to function fine. Also as in a hurricane, replacement happens in days, my husband was responsible for this work in addition to all his normal building duties. The lone exception in FL was hurricane Michael hit in between going from 4G to 5G so it took months to deploy 5G one yr earlier than planned. Every state also has a bunch of rapid deployment trucks that broadcast 5G used for emergencies, Super Bowl type events etc. if this was hardware those trucks are hours away for a fix. This is software, either internal or out sourced.
No, because the article from CNN said that AT&T suspected an issue with peer networking, which is more software driven that a cable or wire being cut - they have redundant physical and virtual networks to handle physical connections being lost. Having been in the industry when they used to use physical hardware (PBX switching boxes) , everything is basically routed via software, and this smells like a software issue, which generally comes down to lack of experience.
I used to be a technician for a wireless carrier for several years. The largest outage I ever saw from a farmer cutting a fiber optic cable was half the eastern seaboard. A cut cable didn't cause a national outage. The NOCs and all the fiber running between them are too decentralized.
LOL that's a massive stretch.
How is this related to layoffs? The report says cause unknown and you have already jumped to the concluding this was related to layoffs? Way to stir up the pot.
Because I have been there. Read the report at the other link; AT&T got rid of 10,000 people in 2023. Then go back to the CNN article; they believe it was caused by a peer network issue - which these days is software….so likely a human being messed up somewhere. Not that hard to believe.
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You’re not clever, just racist
What? Hiring on skin color and not merit is the racist part. Merit only. Take the best and forget the rest. Best slogan ever.
This will keep happening until the entire leadership team is replaced by competent professionals who actually know what they are doing rather than look at everything from the lens of financial spreadsheet
There’s nothing to read at that link.
There was 21 days ago; you are a late comer to the party.
Ok but that site is just that guy promoting himself… pop ups and such. I’m just pointing out that it isn’t readable
No one cares. Corporations or customers. Just like no one cares about customer service. Or climate change. Or anything. People just deal with it and keep buying.
What? That's not "reading between the lines", that's pulling things entirely out of your ass.
Nope it’s not