EDS to move jobs to India

[OhioChick]

Sunday, December 03, 2006

London, Dec 03: Texas-based Electronic Data Systems, the largest supplier of IT services to the UK government, is set to offshore thousands of jobs to India and four other countries next year.

The off-shoring proposal is part of an EDS global restructuring plan under which staff numbers in service centres in India, China, Argentina, Hungary and Poland will more than double to over 13,500 next year.

The bulk of the off-shored work is in IT applications and user support. The company insists the work will go to the most appropriate location and not just the cheapest, 'The Observer' weekly said today.

http://www.zeenews.com/znnew/articles.asp?aid=339683&ssid=54&sid=BUS

[pooja]

1. Whatever... if that were the case they would stay in shore... I say

all these US companies that want to profit here and disperse the work overseas... ought to move on themselves... They would no longer be US companies and no longer have tax write-offs. And if they sell components to any US... they would be charged importing fees (big one's)

[HughMoran]

15. Agreed

I am sick of these US companies playing both sides of the ocean for their own interest. There need to be incentives for these companies to do the right thing.

[SemperEadem]

24. I agree...

they should be hit with a crippling tariff when US companies outsource their jobs... make them think twice about their little culture of greed.

[MADem]

2. Well, a big ole Texas Yee Haw Howdy to that... isn't EDS H. Ross Perot's baby?

Gee, you'd think he'd go all out to reduce that offshoring...but then, it's offshoring BRITISH jobs...

Get a load of this completely NAUSEATING EDS history blurb--it praises the employees to the skies (We, who are about to fire you, salute you!!!!): http://www.eds.com/about/history/

Over 44 years, EDS evolved from a $1,000 investment into a $20+ billion technology services industry leader. The people of EDS deserve the credit.

President and Chief Operating Officer Jeff Heller said: “EDS has always been just ordinary people who came here and achieved more than they ever thought possible because of the opportunity and support they found.” .....Time and again, the people of EDS prove they never give up until the job is done for our clients.

[Taverner]

5. Giant...sucking....sound...

[notadmblnd]

7. Ross Perot has nothing to do with EDS

he sold the company to GM in the eighties and GM spun it off in the 90's. The last CEO I am aware of was the big Dick Brown. Off shoring was started in the mid-late 90's. My job went in 2003. At the time I worked for them, their aim was to cut 10% of the US workforce a year, that meant every three months all employees had to worry about whether or not they're going to have a job. I don't imagine anything has changed.

[Jack Rabbit]

9. See post number 8, below

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Yee-haa!!!! Go Git 'Em Big Dawg!!!!

I'd like to thank Mr. Clinton and his slavish emulators for blowing open the doors to outsourcing with their marvelous "free" trade agreements.

[OhioChick]

6. "Clinton-Era Free Trade May Be Over"

Published on 12/3/2006
Democrats reassess globalism and wages

When voters went to the polls this month, they registered not only a revulsion with the Republican regime but also a profound — almost un-American — anxiety about the nation's future. They ousted incumbents who wanted to stay the economic course, choosing instead Democratic challengers who questioned free-trade orthodoxy. In the exit polling, a plurality said they believed that life for the next generation of Americans would be worse than it is today.
All wings of the Democratic Party seem to understand the extent of America's economic problem. The architects of Bill Clinton's economic and trade policies, as well as their more liberal critics, all agree now, in the words of Clinton Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, that “the vast global middle is not sharing the benefits of the current period of economic growth — and that its share of the pie may even be shrinking.” The era of globalized free trade that Summers and his iconic predecessor at Treasury, Robert Rubin, sped on its way, Summers admits, has benefited many Asians and, here at home, has been “a golden age for those who already own valuable assets. ... Everyone else has not fared nearly as well.”

Concerned that the American dream is fading for the middle class, and fearful that said middle class may turn against the global free-trade order he helped erect, Rubin has created the Hamilton Project, which, in the spirit of its namesake, our first Treasury secretary, proposes a series of enlightened Tory solutions to address these conundrums. The project has called for greater public investment in education, health care, research and development, and infrastructure; balancing the budget; and wage insurance for workers compelled to take lower-paying jobs in our Wal-Mart-ized economy.

But are these solutions remotely adequate to the problem, which is ultimately that of wage convergence in the globalized economy? Even its proponents seem not to think so. “Let us be frank,” Summers wrote in a Financial Times column. “What the anxious global middle is told often feels like pretty thin gruel. ... (More) education (can't) be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month.”



http://www.theday.com/re.aspx?re=4ee755d4-a3f3-49c2-996c-2580c7e107c8

[MannyGoldstein]

11. This Drives Me Nuts

Perhaps I'm missing something, but I can't see how anybody could foresee anything else happening when the gates opened to "free" trade with countries where workers are paid $2 a day? They were only thinking of their patrons and buddies in the Predator Class, who stood to make even more money by these actions. They couldn't be bothered with the schmucks in the Middle Class - let 'em work at Burger King.

Now, worried that the voters will stop DLC-types from gaining back the White House, they're offering inane palliatives rather than addressing the actual problems.

[Megahurtz]

30. "Predator Class".

Perfect phrase for those Scumbags.

[rsmith6621]

4. So Perot Is Now A...

.....Hypocrite..

[Jack Rabbit]

8. As a poster pointed out above, Perot sold EDS years ago

I worked for EDS at the time that Perot sold it to General Motors and when GM forced him out.

Perot's EDS was a silly place as it was. Stress was put on image: no beards, must wear a business suit, etc. The mission -- writing computer code -- came second. It couldn't run a week without crashing in the middle of the night, usually several times. In my opinion, code that behaves like that simply doesn't work. If it took that much intervention from programmers (I'm sorry, it was systems engineer -- pretentious titles were part of the image) to just to get the thing to terminate normally, the next question is what kind of data is it reporting? How accurate is the output?

GM took over with the usual steer manure about how we were doing a fine job and GM would not change EDS' corporate culture. Not only did GM change it, but changed it for the worse. More pretentious and empty PR, new tedious paperwork to keep track of time for the sole benefit of bean counters (I admitted mine were a pack of lies -- I have never been a clock watcher and I wasn't going to start being one} and still the programs crashed in the middle of the night and needed to be fixed right away.

The last straw for me came in 1991 when EDS promoting the idea of quality. "Quality," I told my supervisor, "is when the data is accurate, reports are on time and the cycle duty monitor gets a good night's sleep." "Yes," my supervisor told me, "but it's more than that." I snorted back, "It may be more than that, but it is that at a minimum and we aren't doing it."

I didn't last long after that. In the ensuing years, I read often of EDS losing contracts or getting sued because of poor performance. Quality my ass.

[cap]

10. EDS: Every Day Sucks

Well known for being the one of the most anti-worker joint in the industry. Death March was a way programmers used to describe months of overtime in order to get out a product. Perhaps now it seems quaint to describe 12 hour work days as inhumane; but back in the 80's workers did have a life outside of work. When programmers had more options, a lot of good people refused to work for them.

Well now, the misery is internationalized. I dont imagine the Indians will have it any better.

EDS is known to be the low cost, cheap s--- government contractor. Want to know why your Medicare/Medicaid, Blue Cross/Blue Shield gets messed up? Give you one guess! EDS was the prime contractor for these systems.

[notadmblnd]

14. they created a huge nightmare of breauacracy with their F'ing

quality programs.. Demmings.. there were a couple more before they finally settled on this ISO shit. I think in reality their quality program was nothing more than a way to get employees to put their knowledge and expertise down on paper so thst their real goal (outsourcing jobs) could be accomplished with little or no rebellion from the peons.

[cap]

17. quality programs were mandated by the government

because it was tired of getting screwed so badly by cheap s--- crap produced by companies like EDS.

So EDS complied with the letter but not the spirit of the law. Ergo the bureaucracy. You can implement SEI/CMM or ISO9000 efficiently, if you choose. But if you create a bureaucracy that slows everything down while you are billing by the hour, well, so much the better for your profits.

[MADem]

18. Hell, they made the NAVY do that total quality horseshit!

What a complete waste of time, money and energy....packaged bullshit, with decision planning matrices (full of squares, rectangles, triangles and so forth) everywhere!!! People used to have tons of fun making up stupid ones that went along the lines of:

Did you break it? No? End.
Yes? -----> Can you fix it?
Yes?-----> End.
No? -----> You're screwed!

[cap]

26. yeah... but you're burning billable hours.

and the shareholders made even more money...

No one cared about the product built. One fortunate thing about EDS defense contracting is that they dont build weapons systems. On the weapons systems side, people are a lot more serious. If EDS built weapons, they would explode.

EDS is a turkey farm for the defense turkeys.

[MADem]

27. Oh, they made the Navy do that with everything--from processing a leave request to

loading a weapon on an aircraft. It was total quality bullshit....

[liberal N proud]

12. I attended a conference last week and several presentations slammed India outsourcing

I was in several different meetings and presentations were the outsourcing to India was slammed.
We are talking software industry people who are just a little pissed off about the outsourcing thing.

[Hardrada]

13. I wish they could just move Bangalore to Iowa.

We need more people in this state even if they aren't Lutherans or Catholics. We might be losing a congressional district. Put the Indians in western Iowa to bring up the general wages there and also to help vote out Rep. Steve King!

[Gin]

16. EDS calls it "best shoring".......it's all about the money

g

[rainbow4321]

19. Their headquarters is here in the reddest repuke part of TX

Plano, TX.

They've been doing this for years. A friend of mine works for them and a couple years ago all of their departments were threatened to outsource 40% or face department closure if that 40% goal was not reached.
The company would fly people in to be trained by the local workers..then those trainees as well as the JOB would go back to India.

Yet the local repukes keep voting like the sheeple that they are. Outsourcing thru the roof, massive increase in layoffs (EDS, Nortel, other local high tech companies), house foreclosures increased every year.

[EnviroBat]

20. I was asked to train my replacement via telephone.

When I worked for a prominent Telecommunications company in Ohio. I never engaged in said training despite many desperate phone calls from my little replacement worker bee over in Mumbai India. I told my boss to kiss my ass, and the little replacement worker bee learned some new English phrases as well. Don't give me that, "It's not their fault..." crap. US Corporations can go suck it for what they've been doing to us, as well as those who feel they are entitled to our jobs. Yeah, it pisses me off a little...

[fujiyama]

22. "those who feel they are entitled to our jobs"

Funny, I guess it's not "our" jobs anymore.

Attacking some Indian for taking your previous job may feel good, but frankly it's pretty immature to attack him or her.

On the other hand, I don't blame you for not doing the training and telling your boss off. That does sound degrading.

[SKKY]

21. They're rolling out, as we speak, the largest single network on earth...

...just for the Navy and Marine Corps to the tune of about 19-20 billion (With a B) dollars called NMCI- Navy/Marine Corps Internet. I wonder if any NMCI work is getting outsourced. That would be very, very "complicated".

[cap]

25. yes, it is getting outsourced.

at least to non-US citizens. H1bs are working in the Pentagon. Don't know if any of that work is being performed overseas.

[Ilsa]

23. Fuck. One of our oldest friends in the industry has managed

to ride it out through now. Oh well, if he gets canned, they'll probably land on their collective feet. His wife just graduated with her MSN Clinical Nurse Specialist degree.

[dmallind]

28. Irony eh?

Why wasn't it bad for the US company to have UK workers? Why isn't THAT offfshoring? Were those British jobs "our jobs" too? Does it matter if the shore is Bognor Regis or Bangalore? Does it matter if EDS is the name on the worker check or not?

And with the lamentable ignorance of Quality programs demonstrated here it's no wonder they failed where the posters worked. When you do it right on the other hand, total costs go down, so offshoring and outsourcing becomes less likely. Doing shitty work for high costs and obstructing progress is a sure fire way to see your jobs go offshore.

[gemdem]

31. It's not about quality...

Spare me your talk of quality programs. I deal with quality issues every day as the SOX-compliance manager for my department. We have a combination of offshore and domestic staff. My metrics show me that the domestic staff is far more productive, writes better code, and is more willing to dig for solutions to problems rather than treating symptoms. I show these numbers to my manager. He agrees with me, but shrugs and says that his management doesn't give a damn about the numbers.

The offshore workers and those who have been brought onshore, while intelligent and capable, have not borne the fruit that management has promised. Despite close management, in general they have failed to deliver even half the level of productivity as the domestic counterparts. Turnover is extremely high -- fraud is not uncommon. Those who are brought onshore tend to be better than those who remain offhsore -- the thinking is that the consulting companies will only bring their best onshore and will leave the less than best offshore to collect some billable hours before the client calls them on the issue.

Companies put up with the fraud because they're convinced it's worth the costs. In fact, for companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and others who make heavy use of offshore workers, the poorly written code is a money maker. Pieces of code are written all over the world and assembled into software that goes to market -- bugs are rampant as things are rushed to production. This is not US-written code -- it's mostly from offshore. I've dealt with it long enough to know the facts of the matter.

Companies invest so much money in this software that unless they have capable in-house staffs to work the code and develop fixes, that they're trapped into bringing in Microsoft or Oracle consultants at an exorbitant rate to fix the code (cha-ching!). The other option is to apply a software patch or bundle supplied by the software company -- problem is, these patches frequently break as much as they fix, and you may have to wait months for such a fix.

The drive in the US now is to follow the European model where many of the staff are consultants. Why? In Europe, the laws make it difficult to fire/layoff employees -- plus, beyond salaries there are the costs of employee benefits, etc. to consider. Companies want to be able to flex the work force to be better able to manipulate the bottom line. It has NOTHING to do with who does the best job -- it's who costs least. This is why hiring and salaries are frozen, staffs are cut, quality employees are forced into other means of employment, benefits are reduced, pensions are eliminated, etc.

From where I sit, from the metrics I produce, from the work that I do -- it's not about quality, it's not about productivity, it's about the bottom line. 20 offshore workers cost less than half as many domestic workers -- and they can be cut on a whim. Note, they often cost more than employees if brough onshore, but you can stiff cut them on a whim. It matters not a whit about who can do a better job -- it's about how much it costs. So much for domestic workers and quality in-house staffs -- people who have skin in the game and an interest in the success or failure of a company.

I've had this discussion with my co-workers, and the concensus is that before we reach retirement (presuming we're able to retire) that we'll either be working in another field or that we'll be traveling consultants/contractors working for much reduced wages with little or no benefits. Consider this, the same will be true in other lines of work -- not just software engineering.

How long before this squeeze on the middle class knocks the legs out from under our economy and the whole model falls down upon itself?

[gemdem]

34. Exercising quality control...

Writing so early in the morning has its disadvantages. Correcting my last three paragraphs for clarity (caught some typos that confused things a bit).

From where I sit, from the metrics I produce, from the work that I do -- it's not about quality, it's not about productivity, it's about the bottom line. 20 offshore workers cost less than half as many domestic workers -- and they can be cut on a whim. Note, they often cost more than employees if brought onshore, but you can still cut them on a whim. It matters not a whit about who can do a better job -- it's about how much it costs. So much for domestic workers and quality in-house staffs -- people who have skin in the game and an interest in the success or failure of a company.

I've had this discussion with my co-workers, and the concensus is that before we reach retirement (presuming we're able to retire) that we'll either be working in another field or that we'll be traveling consultants/contractors working for much reduced wages with little or no benefits. Consider this, the same will be true in other lines of work -- not just software engineering.

How long before this squeeze on the middle class knocks the legs out from under our economy and the whole model falls down upon itself?

[cap]

32. it's not the lamentable ignorance of Quality programs

it's the perversion of Quality techniques ... talking the talk but not walking the walk.
Creating huge amounts of meaningless documents.

[Gin]

33. It's not about quality or productivity. It's all about the bottom line.

The kool aid forced down our throats is that we cannot compete, and must be retrained.


BULLSHIT!!!!!!

[OhioChick]

29. EDS Taps Offshoring Advocate As New President

Ron Rittenmeyer, a strong proponent of hiring tech workers in low-cost countries like India and China, was promoted to president; he retains his current role as chief operating officer.

By Paul McDougall
InformationWeek

Dec 6, 2006 11:00 AM

Outsourcer Electronic Data Systems has promoted Ron Rittenmeyer, a strong proponent of hiring tech workers in low-cost countries like India and China, to the position of company president.

Rittenmeyer retains his current role as chief operating officer. Jeff Heller, who had been serving as president since returning to EDS in 2003, has been named vice chairman, EDS said on Tuesday. Both appointments are effective immediately.

Heller will continue to serve on the EDS board of directors, while chairman and CEO Mike Jordan's position remains unchanged by the shake up, according to EDS.

Analysts have credited Rittenmeyer with helping to author a turnaround that has seen EDS reduce debt while boosting sales and operating margins. In its most recent quarter, EDS said net income was up 83% year-over-year to $128 million, while sales increased 9% to $5.3 billion.
http://www.informationweek.com/outsourcing/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601955