Job Matters

In-Depth Offshoring Series over at News.com

Beau Monday — Thu, 06 May 2004 12:31:00 GMT

C|Net's News.com is doing a week-long series on the subject of Offshoring. Very informative, and highly recommended.

Google and the Screening Process

Beau Monday — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 01:24:00 GMT

I've been reading a lot about recruiters using Google to screen job applicants lately. I have to admit to being a little troubled by the process, in all honesty.

Google is entirely unregulated, understand. Through Google, one can discover my political leanings, my marital status, and the fact that I drink copious amounts of Fat Tire. None of those things would be legal to bring up in an actual job interview, and for good reason. Yet through Google, recruiters can decide without reprecussion, which candidates fit their moral standard and which do not.

I find this practice deeply disturbing.

The job I currently hold, a security position, had to pass the Google filter. The person who did the first phone interview admitted to reading up on me via Google. While I'm not ashamed of anything I've said on the net, I'm not sure I'd say it all over again to a potential employer. It certainly makes me stop and think about who might read this in 5 years when I sit down at the computer to publish a blog entry.

How much of this is my fault? I recognize that the Internet is a public forum, and things I say can be used against me. But the unfortunate reality is that I feel much more constrained now, knowing that my entries here today may influence a potential employer some years henceforth.

And that reality saddens me, as a creative, open and imaginative writer.

Who is really doing your taxes?

Beau Monday — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 20:58:00 GMT

As tax time approaches, one of the issues that has come up recently is the effect offshoring is having on financial sectors, like the tax preparation business.

According to a recent report on 60 Minutes, roughly 200,000 U.S. tax returns will will be prepared by Indian tax preparers, nearly a 10-fold increase over last year. In many cases, without the client even realizing it.

In fact, entire businesses are springing up to handle the offshore tax return preparation business.

Take, for instance, SurePrep, a company based in Bombay and soliciting US accounting firms to send them their tax return business. “What if you could prepare a thousand more tax returns without adding even one more staff member?” crows the website. According to their own figures, 20 of the top 100 tax preparation firms in the United States outsource work to SurePrep.

Does it give you the willies to have your tax information sitting around on the Internet? It should. Let's think about what information is in your tax return:

Your legal name
Your social security number
Your address
The names of your children and other dependents
Your bank account numbers
Your stock brokerage account numbers
Where you work

A single tax return has all the information someone would need to steal your identity, a crime that has grown 300% in the last year alone. Identity theft now ranks as the #1 threat to people who do business on the Internet, and it's no wonder when companies are treating their client's most personal information like yesterday's newspaper.

“We're as safe as online banking”, says one of the popular offshoring tax preparation facilitators. Yeah? Well banks get hacked too. But a hacker won't find my brokerage account numbers or the names of my children if they hack into my bank account. Nothing is such a nice little “Identity Theft Starter Kit” like a tax return is.

If you take your taxes to someone to have them done, make sure they do them. By law, they have to notify you if they could possibly outsource the work. If you see some ambiguous language in their privacy policy about sharing your tax information with third parties, well the sirens should start going off in your head.

Because just like your medical records, it's not a matter of if somebody's tax privacy will be violated, but when. Oh, you didn't know nearly 20% of the country's medical records are sent to offshore medical transcription services? Surprise!

New Offshoring article in the morning

Beau Monday — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 23:01:00 GMT

I'm heading to bed because the new offshoring article I have in mind will take me an hour to write, and I promised my wife I'd be in bed an hour ago. But it will blow your socks off, I promise!

Here's a teaser quote for you:

"The type of security you see in this facility is generally much more so than you would see in any U.S. accounting firm. Everything is paperless. You'll notice in the facility there's no pens or papers on the desk. There's no printers in the work room. Everything's done on screen."

That's a quote from a guy who works in an office in India doing particularly sensitive financial work for unsuspecting Americans. He's explaining how Americans needn't worry about security since “everything's done on screen“.

I'm gonna have so much fun with this one.

Offshoring Legislation

Beau Monday — Fri, 30 Jan 2004 12:22:00 GMT

To track ongoing legislative efforts to curb the booming offshoring trend, check this website out.

There are no fewer than 9 pieces of legislation at the federal level, and at least 7 at the state level.

One bill making its way through my state's legislature is HR-2351, which requires, among other things, that call center employees identify their location to callers, and transfer the caller to a US-based call center if requested to do so by the calling party.

Jobless Recovery a myth?

Beau Monday — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:44:00 GMT

I promised some good news on the job front, and I have searched long and hard to dredge some up. This one is a doozy.

Bear Sterns today released a report indicating that the Jobless Recovery we've all been talking about is a factor of poorly designed metrics, and the job situation in America is actually much better off than most economic types and rant-prone bloggers would have you believe.

On HobbsOnline, Bill Hobbs goes into a number of reasons why this economic recovery is not, in fact, jobless.

Turns out there are in fact 2 ways to measure unemployment: One way involves asking Employers how many people they hired recently. The other involves asking households how many people are currently employed.

I give you the following chart, shamelessly stolen from Mr. Hobbs' site:

As you can see, by using the traditional Payroll Survey method, the job market looks grim. But if you look at the Household Survey, things are coming up roses. In fact, if you trust the Household numbers, we actually have an all-time record number of people employed right now.

Personally, I go by an entirely different measure: How many of my friends are either out of work or in sucky jobs because they can't find anything better. I can tell you that by that measure things are certainly not rosy.

Read the report. It's interesting.

Wait a minute... Mexicans can write software?!?!

Beau Monday — Tue, 20 Jan 2004 19:57:00 GMT

So it's slowly dawning on people that Mexicans can do more than pick oranges, cook, and clean houses. This is something I've known all along, naturally, and this fact has been the root of my discomfort over the President's recent immigration proposal.

The proposal may be intended for farm jobs, or other non-technical sectors, but unless the legislation is specifically restricted in such a way, the folks who run the nation's technology companies are going to be chomping at the bit to import Mexican tech workers (they do exist, I've met some, and they don't suck). What would a mexican immigrant accept in pay for the opportunity to live and work in the US? I'd bet a Krispy Kreme it's less that what the average American would.

The whole idea is bad. Would I feel better if they restricted it to the crappy jobs that are beneath our high-brow society? No. I don't want to tell a Mexican techie: “You are welcome to come to America, but you can only take jobs cleaning up after lazy-ass Americans, picking fruit for lazy-ass Americans, or cooking for lazy-ass Americans. The good jobs are reserved for the lazy-ass Americans.”

How is that not exploitation?

Offshoring Eats Away at IT Pay, Study Shows

Beau Monday — Tue, 13 Jan 2004 19:11:00 GMT

eWeek is running an interesting story about the decline of IT pay scales as a result of the recent boom in offshoring. Some professions have declined nearly 30% in pay in just the last 12 months.

We're witnessing the beginnings of the reset I anticipated, as job seekers in the US adjust pay expectations downward in order to compete with foreign workers for IT jobs.

Unemployed Americans can still vote come November, GW

Beau Monday — Wed, 07 Jan 2004 20:43:00 GMT

I was reading the text of President Bush's speech today announcing the new immigration policies, and frankly I feel like I just got sucker-punched. This is the last thing I expected out of a President who has been cracking down on foreigners at every possible opportunity. In fact, I was hoping he was going to announce some much-needed reform of our woefully mismanaged immigration policies.

Instead, his new proposal is going to:

Introduce a new 3-year visa program for illegals who are already in the country
Allow foreign workers into the US to fill American jobs under the same program, provided the jobs are secured prior to applying for the new visa
Allow an unspecified number of renewals after the original 3-year term is up
Increase, by an unspecified amount, the number of green cards issued to immigrants who wish to become US citizens

Un-freaking-believable.

Apparently having learned nothing from the L1 and H1-B visa debacles, they are asking companies to show that American workers were offered the jobs (unenforceable, as the other visa programs have demonstrated), the workers must pay a one-time unspecified fee if they are already in the country illegally (but not if they wish to immigrate here legally), and the immigrant worker must return to his/her home country at the end of the term... I mean, unless it's renewed.

I just have to ask... WTF? You mean Big Business isn't already pumping enough foreign workers into the system via L1 and H1-B, now you have to go and enable a whole new way to screw us?

I have an idea, Mr President. Instead of pandering to the immigrant voters, why don't you do some pandering to the millions of Americans that are unemployed thanks largely in part to the loophole-ridden and unenforced visa programs already on the books.

I'll leave it at that. It's late and I don't have the energy to give this issue the full-on rant it so very much deserves. I'm so tempted though. Maybe tomorrow.

More Offshoring News

Beau Monday — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 11:26:00 GMT

Some offshoring tidbits that I have come across recently:

IDC is predicting that by 2007 nearly 1 out of every 4 (23%) IT jobs in America will have been moved offshore and performed by non-US personnel. For 2003 the figure is 5%.
EDS, one of the largest technical services organizations in the world, is planning on cutting 5200 jobs in America and Europe next year while at the same time hiring 5800 new personnel in offshore locations like India, Brazil and Ireland.
AOL recently admitted to opening an office in India to begin offshoring some of its development activities. In the same breath, they announce the layoff of 450 personnel in their California offices.
Cognizant, another large US-based technology services provider with 9000 employees, announced recently that it plans to add roughly 4000 new employees in 2004. Good news, right? Except 2/3 of those new jobs will be in India.
Google: Opening first office in India in 2004, and sending 100 jobs there. That's 10% of their current workforce. Google says the move was not motivated by the need to save money, but by the need for India's engineering talent. 3 years ago we'd buy that, but not now when a good chunk of the United States' high tech work force is out of work.
Hewlett Packard: Laid off 4800 people in 2003, yet increased headcount in foreign offices in India, China, Poland, and the Phillipines. HP has eliminated 16,000 positions in the last 18 months.
Oracle plans to double the number of engineers they currently employ in India, taking the number to 6000.

I could go on and on (and on!) about recent offshoring activities by major US companies, but I think I've depressed my readers (and myself) enough for one day.

I'll try to track down some good news for my next “Job Matters” posting, but that seems to be much more difficult to find these days.