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Article on IT layoffs, employment

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At one major bank years ago, I observed what happened when a project ended – everyone was canned, not for cause, just because they were not needed for the project. These were very skilled people who also knew how things worked at the firm – something that takes months if not years.

Across the hall on the same floor, another project was ramping up, needing the same skills. And oddly, the HR people involved in staffing the new project, and dumping the people from the defunct project, were on the same floor. Not one of the workers from the old project were brought onto the new one, even though that would have saved months on the new one.

My guess is that this is a very common problem. A huge waste of good staff with huge impact on the new project.

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Such has been written about before.

In reply to Article on IT layoffs, employment

Companies tend to not want to pay the higher salaries those people may have commanded. So start over and get cheaper labor or just outsource the whole thing to countries with low pay and lax to non-existent labor laws.

There no mystery here. Let me sum it up for you: “It’s the money.”

Reply To: Article on IT layoffs, employment

In reply to Article on IT layoffs, employment

Absolutely about money, but in so many cases, the firm pays severance pay, then pays large fees to the headhunters who referred the new workers, most of whom will either be employees or even more expensive consultants. Of course, huge amounts of work for banks is now offshored to India and other Asian countries, and regardless of how well trained the people there are, it’s hard to have as cohesive a project where most of the work is done in country B for a project in country A, unless of course it is for a distributed system. I’ve managed a project which involved a firm’s trading floors in several countries, so of course it was managed centrally but work done in each affected country.

But in software development where the business is here in the US, odds of success are higher with the team being at the same location as the users.

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In reply to Reply To: Article on IT layoffs, employment

Forgot to mention, in the case I cited, they hired a new team on the same floor in the same building in New York. They wasted piles of time and money. What was behind this was that management had absolute contempt for its employees. Last I heard, this major bank still does.

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