Journal turgid's Journal: Training my Replacement 2
Our Indian has been with us now for nearly 3 weeks. He's a very friendly guy but he's very shy and nervous. He also looked very sheepish and embarrassed when I introduced him to other people not in the team as the guy who was learning our project to ramp up the off-shore team that would be taking over from us.
The outsourcing company that now owns us has completely under-estimated the time required to assimilate our knowledge and I know for a fact through the grape vine that our project is going offshore very soon i.e. at the end of the 3 months that our motivated, empowered and passionate colleague will be with us to learn.
He now knows how to compile our code, but he has no idea what all the builds are for (same questions asked every day despite it being explained and documented). He hasn't really cottoned on to the idea of using bookmarks or favourites in the web browser to remember useful web pages. Every time I tell him to go to such-and-such a page, he goes to his email an looks for the particular email with that link in it...
Progress is slow, tea-breaks are long and clandestine meetings with offshore managers on the phone are frequent and long. He doesn't feel like part of the team.
The poor soul is drowning in our (not very good) internal documentation.
Some of our PHBs told me that for this outsourcing deal to be financially successful, at least 50% of us have to be off our current customer's (i.e. former employer's) projects. So half of us have to be replaced by Indians in the next few months.
Never mind: there are Exciting New Possibilities of Interesting New Work(TM) for "other clients." That could involve travel and staying away from home for weeks or months at a time, and the new employer is notoriously stingy about travel and accommodation allowances.
But, hey, the staff do it because they are so enthusiastic about what they are getting to work on and the company is so great!
Our Indian has a son who is not quite 4 months old yet, and he will be here for 3 months, away from his family. The stingy slave-driving so-and-sos will not pay for him to go back to India to see his wife and child during that time.
What a lovely bunch.
This is why y'all need unions (Score:2)
This is why programmers (or software architects, or applications developers, or whatever - I prefer "technology professionals" except that some people think that means someone with an MBA who works at a technology company) need unions. Or needed unions, before silicon valley was more or less gutted under the Bush II administration.
Now, unions would only have provided a temporary respite from all this; the unions would be under constant assault, with promises from management that the union was just
Not your problem (Score:1)
That is not your problem. It's theirs. If it's not financially successful at worst you lose your job (you want to leave anyway, and being fired is always better than quitting), or you don't get a raise this year. I've been long enough in IT to know that you don't get raises in the first place.
So let them lose their sleep over it.