On the trail of a job opening

It seemed today I had found an instance of a rare and endangered species: a technical opening in our office for a California associate.

I discovered it in a chat with a colleague. He was leaving the company, and wonder of wonders, it seemed his position was not going away. He would actually be replaced. This meant (gasp) a job opening.

It was a testing engineer position, not the most fascinating thing in the world. But it had some positives. The work closely involved the major database I have long worked with until last year. There was a local team leader, so management was on-site, and I knew a couple of other people on the team. Finally, the work would allow me to gain much deeper knowledge of our data structures for marketing. All in all, it seemed preferable to the position I've been slotted into.

Before getting too excited, I went over to learn more about it from the team leader. And a good thing I did. Unfortunately, it seems my colleague did not quite have it right.

The team currently is "in a state of flux" (like who isn't these days). The position would be on hold while things sort themselves out. It was unlikely the opening would be filled by an associate.

Instead, the position will be outsourced. In fact, outsourcing is the eventual direction for the whole testing function.

What's the title of that Beatles song again? Oh yeah.

I Should Have Known Better.

Our Outsourcing Continues

Three more senior-level programmers have been laid off from our West Coast offices. With this one move our organization let walk out the door 90+ years of specialized, highly valuable experience. Left behind in their place: two young, freshfaced Indians - and a number of their offshore compatriots - filled with several weeks of "knowledge transfer".

Our department a few years ago numbered 83. We ran the technical side of the organization's database marketing operation with great success. But now only 23 workers remain - a reduction of more than 70%.

Our workplace - so tightly packed at the peak that visitors needed to use cubicles of those out sick or on vacation - is now rather sparsely populated. Many aisles are deserted save for the window cubicle. Of the 36 available cubicles near me, all but two sit empty. I half expect to look up one day soon and see a tumbleweed blowing past.

Meanwhile the survivors soldier on. Why don't we just leave? Well, of course the younger and most marketable of us have moved on to greener pastures. Many of the remaining are over 50 and would prefer to put off the day when they put our open, diversity-loving society to the All Ages Are Equal test.

Unfortunately, that day has been coming all too soon for many of us lately.

Famous economist: 40 million jobs at risk

Princeton economist and former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder says the current one million jobs lost from offshoring is the "tip of the iceberg". In a page 1 Wall Street Journal article this week, Blinder says as many as 40 million American jobs could be shipped overseas in the next decade or two.

"A New Industrial Revolution" is the scale of change this nation faces, analogous to when workers left farms en masse and migrated to cities. This change set off massive shifts in "how and where people lived, how they educated their children, the organization of businesses, the form and practices of governments."

The changes we face in the coming generation are of this scale. We must recognize the dimensions of the problem and begin to prepare ourselves for it.

He says the most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don't. It's not simply that skilled jobs stay in the US and lesser-skilled jobs go to India or China. The important distinction is between services that must be done in the U.S. and those that can -- or will someday -- be delivered electronically with little degradation in quality. The more personal work of divorce lawyers isn't likely to go overseas, for instance, while some of the work of tax lawyers could be. Civil engineers, who have to be on site, could be in great demand in the U.S.; computer engineers might not be.

Our educational system must adapt. A college degree will not offer a worker protection if they have worked hard only to master a skill that is easily outsourced offshore.

Bottom line: jobs with person-to-person contact will survive; many others will not. The janitor's job is safe. But all you computer programmers...oh, well.

Still standing

It's been a long week. Just waiting for the East Coast head honcho to arrive, probably to lay people off. After all, she had said all "affected Associates" would be notified by end of February, and she was to be here the 27th and 28th. And with our unit being potentially redundant after the last internal organization, things weren't looking good.

But she has come and gone and I am still standing. I was sick yesterday and working from home, and spent the whole day checking voicemail every half hour. With each call I waited anxiously to see if a "summons" was on my voicemail; fortunately I always heard "no new messages" awaited me.

They have taken a new quiet policy and are not announcing layoffs, but I know something was supposed to happen yesterday. Of course word always gets around when people are let go, so our minds will not be eased just because a formal announcement is withheld.

Or maybe it's just not a big deal any longer. What a great topic for our internal corporate web site: "Click here for the latest layoff news!" "Check back often to see if your name is on the list."

Sometime ahead they will be analyzing in detail redundant positions after this reorganization is complete. That may be a hard exercise to survive. But for now I'm still here.

But each layoff round leaves one battered and bruised. How much can someone take without becoming perennially demotivated?

Think I'll skip the welcome mat

I received an ominous e-mail this morning.

My manager’s boss is coming to town, for an in-person “all hands” meeting. We were told to reserve Tuesday, February 27th for a short meeting. Our manager said we shouldn’t worry, it’s likely just a “meet and greet” session.

Yeah, right. Managing 200+ employees, she’s going to drop everything, fly across the country from the East Coast, to have a “short meeting” with her 12 West Coast associates.

There can be only one reason for this trip: she will be laying off people. Per company protocol the news has to be delivered in person.

This is the same script from last year. The unexplained higher level East Coast manager visit. The advance note to make sure everyone is “available”. The promised “all hands” meeting as a cover.

The original performance was bad enough – was a sequel really necessary?