I am releived to have a new job.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My company, a rather large bank based out of the netherlands, decided some time ago to offshore a good deal of their IT. Those of us in IT panicked.

We were reassured, however, that if we did what we could to become technical leaders (ie a combo of a designer and a project manager), there would more than likely be able to continue working for the company.

Then they hired some dipshit who told them that they coudl offshore the technical leads, too. Of course, they didn’t tell anyone at the company who was busting their ass to try to assume the new role. No, they continued to assert that for those people who beleived in the company’s vision, there would be positions for a good many of them.

So, I assumed a tech lead position for a pretty high visibility project, and coupled with my extensive and exclusive knowledge of a few key systems, I figured I was probably OK.

Nope.

In February, I was told that my last day with the company was going to be July 31st. If I stayed and was a good little employee, I would get about 3 months worth of severance plus a good sized bonus (about 33% of my base salary).

So naturally I started looking for a job right away. In Michigan, the economy is sucking the big one right now, and finding a new job isn’t the easiest thing to do. I know, because I have been looking for a new job for over a year anyhow. But now I was fired up and started applying for all sorts of stuff, not just things in my specialty.

Today, I accepted an offer that I could not refuse. The pay is about 33% higher than my current salary, so I don’t feel bad about not getting my bonus. And it’s closer to my house. And I get to leave the company well in advance of the planned transition period, so I hope they choke on it a little bit.

It’s unfortunate that I’ve built up some very close relationships with people who will be remaining at the bank, because this means I’ll actually try pretty hard not to leave them screaming my name coupled with expletives.

But all in all, I’m happy. It’s been a very very stressful time for my family in the past few months due to some tragedies and other bad luck, but things might finally be looking my way.

2

Well, congratulations on the new job and raise! What will you be doing?

3

I’m a SQL Server DBA. I’ll be working for a large financial services comapny. Based, oddly enough, within 30 minutes drive of a pretty nice beach. Unfortunately, that’s their home office, not where I’ll be working.

4

Out of curiosity how do you “offshore” IT? Other than software development it seems to me it’d be like offshoring janitorial services. The PC and network hardware is in the building and needs hands on attending to. How is an IT person from India or elsewhere going to solve a hardware isse?

5

You are correct. They outsourced the hardware component of the IT to IBM. The offshoring was mainly application development, support, and maintenance. Which is not an insignificant portion of our staff.

6

Congratulations. Wishing you luck and joy in your new career. :slight_smile:

7

They aren’t, but they can do things like analyse logs, manage backups - leaving a local employee to actually change the tapes - administration (setting up accounts etc), and other stuff which means that you can employ many fewer local staff. Unfortunately IME operations outsourced to India and the Far East have one big disadvantage: not only do they not actually speak reasonable English but they think they do. One guy was so bad I simply told him to email me. That company (a major UK pub company) soon thereafter moved their IT support to a UK company.

8

Arrrgghhhh! You are so right. I despise having a 5-minute talk with someone whose English skills are so bad that it turn into an hour long marathon.

And, no, I am not being racist. Back in the mid-1990s, I had the privilege of working with many off-shore folk who were very sharp, and spoke/understood English better than most.

Such is not so today.

BTW, EDS has a very much-better PC term for this. They call it “Best Shore.” :smiley:

9

Congrats on the new job, crazyjoe! Best of luck to you.

10

Quite - the worst accent with which I’ve had to deal was a very broad Glaswegian.

11

Yup…it’s the only (technically) non-foreign language that I need to have subtitles for on the telly. Bloody Scots and their brilliant detective shows. Damn them.

:stuck_out_tongue:

12

Thanks to all the well-wishers, I really appreciate it.

The accents very vastly by region. Some regional dialects are so bad they might as well jsut speak german to you, while others are remarkably understandable, if a little off.

I have a very competent guy reporting to me right now, who I can converse with pretty well, but you certainly wouldn’t want him interacting with a customer regularly. The thing is, he’s technically very good, but like so many folks from outside the US (india, china) has a hard time thinking creatively and broadly. If the customer tells him he needs something and gives him a convoluted way of approaching it, he will likely stick to that instead of finding am ore efficient way. But he has also surprised me.

I certianly ber him no ill will. I hold that for the comapnies who are doing this stupid shit in the first place.