turgid's Journal: TUPE'd

I still haven't managed to escape, so I got TUPE'd this month to the Indian outsourcing company.

They gave us a lovely welcome presentation where we were told that we'd have to adopt new, more efficient ways of working since we'd have to be doing more to be worth it to our new customer (our old employer).

Someone asked how Lean Six Sigma fits in. The reply was that we will only do the things that the customer wants (pays) us to do (the implication if the customer wants to pay for Lean Six Sigma, we'll be doing it).

Oh dear. This brave new world of more efficient, empowered working doesn't know what Lean Six Sigma is.

Let's keep an open mind, otherwise we will fail at the new company.

We will, in future (allegedly and if we're not booted out for being more expensive than the people in India) be working for multiple customers. Therefore we will have to make personal judgments as to which customer's project to work on and that might mean dropping one temporarily and making that customer wait a bit longer...

That's OK, this is business and we're empowered and responsible and doing things with the highest quality and attention to detail. These things go on and it's OK really.

We were introduced to the wonderful, cutting edge, hyper-efficient and empowering web-based administration, form filling and corporate brainwashing system.

This is a super-duper, modern, cutting edge system for filling in holiday requests and timesheets and raising service desk tickets etc. and finding out the latest pronouncements from the Great Leaders.

It only works in Internet Explorer (6.1 and above). OK, so it doesnj't even work in Internet Explorer. Many people have spent several hours wrestling with it to make sure that their work and home addresses are correct and that they can book their annual leave. Within 20 minutes, I had already filed two bug reports on it. I was blamed on user error.

This thing is bat-guano insane. It's slow. They UI is completely loony. It looks like it was put together by 13-year-olds. It's about as usable and reliable. There are drop-down boxes for mandatory fields on many forms which are empty! That's right, there is nothing to choose! You can't complete the form and submit it! And the only way out is to kill the browser.

Still keeping an open mind, several people from this company have already been contributing to existing projects. They are so fast, efficient and empowered that they don't need to do Test Driven Development. Heck, they don't even need to run the unit tests before delivering! Sometimes it's not even worth their while seeing if it compiles. And as for design, that just slows you down and gets in the way of delivering lines of code. After all, it's lines of code that the customer is paying for.

I'm still keeping an open mind, and trying to compare them with the opportunities in the market place.

Oh, and the timesheets are insane. There are prescriptive boxes to be filled in. You have to say how long you spent frobbing with PowerPoint (I use LibreOffice HA HA!), in meetings, reading email, updating the cutting-edge, futuristic web-based thngymabob and all kinds of rot.

And if you don't fill in you timesheet within 7 days, it defaults to leave without pay. Nice. But you can argue about it with managers the following month after you haven't been paid.

Gee, it's great to be empowered.

And I didn't opt out of the European Working Time Directive.

Sympathy

[PopeRatzo]

Man, reading this makes my heart hurt for you. It reminds me of my few years in the private (non-academic) sector, and that was before all the "innovations" of outsourcing and globalism. Back when it was enough to make a nice profit and have reasonably sane and happy workers. Back when there was still some fear that workers might unionize.

Now that corporations are unbound by any rules or regulations, by unions and "workers' rights", I keep hearing nightmare stories like yours. And to me it's just a bad

Re:

[turgid]

Thanks. I count myself very lucky to have survived the downturn so far.

It is quite clear that companies are not for any other purpose than giving money to "investors" and the Board.

Providing goods and services for customers is incidental. I get the impression that if those pesky things could be got rid of (because they incur costs of production etc.) they would.

They certainly don't exist for the material or spiritual well-being of the staff.

They also don't exist for the good of the economy as a whole or for

Welcome

[jawtheshark]

Reminds me a lot of my days in body-shops, I mean Consulting companies. Oh, and never mind, the future at my current non consulting employer looks like exactly going in that direction...

Good luck, it isn't pretty... If you find a place corporate or government where it's better, feel free to tell me. I've been looking for ages. *sigh*

Re:

[turgid]

It can't go on forever.

As the wealth is redistributed around the globe, the cheap places will no longer be any cheaper than anywhere else, and we'll be back to a level playing-field.

Secondly, old companies with no new ideas but only decaying corpses of anachronistic technologies to flog will go out of business. Cost-downs don't buy you progress: they only stave off your demise. You need new ideas. Not the silly Apple-Microsoft-RIM-etc. style patents.

Finally, as these old companies become increasingly misera

Re:

[jawtheshark]

I really admire your optimism. -- Signed, a realist... Alas, we usually are called pessimists by optimists.