Shifted to new employees. They will hire some over 50 but they won’t have the vacation time or retirement advantages of the present over 50s. FINANCIAL MUSICAL CHAIRS. THOSE new hires in the U,S. Will be for the jobs that they want to keep in the U.S. that they do not want a foreign country to do. Like customer service, collections or any phone related work and some wholesale jobs.
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The biggest problem US will have, is losing interest in STEM.
Wehn parents will tell their kids not to do engineering remember who really sold the country. I think the MBAs did.
This is so true! Over 50. SIRP'd in Aug. I was almost to 10 years which would have been another week of vacation. Also, I was a multiple year TA so my salary had advanced very rapidly.
Cutting me, hiring another FCG saved the company two weeks vacation, and probably $80k/salary. I'm healthy so I was not a drain on the healthcare side so no savings there. But I was taking full advantage of 401k matching. Hiring a young person to "fill" my position probably saved the company well over $100k. Now multiple that dozens of times.
@2iuc You are lucky then. Some NA IT groups are stacked to the gills with abusive obnoxious engineers. One guy was regularly reported to HR and the LL5,LL4,LL3 all protected him denying allegations to HR and then telling the team J is an a—h-le but he’s our a—h-le. This went on for his entire lengthy career. And because of that only other a—h-les would work in the group for any length of time. That group is still 90% jerks even after the guy retired including the present LL3 who enjoyed and sanctioned the actions.
@1zxa In all my years with the company I never ever saw any of what you describe. My interactions with US engineers was mostly positive (there's always the outlying oddball in every group that should be working at Mcdonalds) . I always thought they were very helpful and knowledgeable. I cannot say the same thing about my interactions with the AP engineers and application people.
1lie the mainframe China infrastructure engineers are far superior to the US mainframe engineers. The current US infrastructure engineers are totally incompetent. Lost track of the number of times the US teams’ actions caused problems and they blamed it on China team. They claim they have to create processes for China when in reality they are covering up their own incompetence.
Maybe a few US infrastructure are better than China counterparts but the Chinese tend to be highly educated and knowledgeable, and don’t have fake credentials like some other low cost countries are known for. I have never observed the Chinese teams being anything but polite and deferential. Now the NA team I have regularly observed being abusive, dismissive and obnoxious. Cursing and belittling other team members being the norm.
@1jza+1lnPB1ez You are missing a very important point in your list. Please allow me to add it for you:
- Different culture, education and values, aggravated by living in a developing world.
Before the DEI police starts shooting at me, please note that I am not against any race or ethnic. I have worked with all kind of people, and I realized the living conditions in other countries have nothing to do with ours.
One example: Indian guy left a very important meeting, where he was the key person to access the down system, because his "transport" (not sure if it was a bus or just a van provided by the company) was leaving. No NA guy would have left until the issue was resolved, and the people in the meeting were shocked when it happened. Am I criticizing the Indian guy? Not at all. He lived in a remote village, with no available transportation, and missing this "bus" or "van" would mean not coming home to his family for another 24 hours. We (NA) would be doing the same thing if we're in his shoes.
The problem is that the company changes the "operators", by replacing the expensive NA force with low cost countries workforce, but the expectations do NOT change (and they should since you get what you pay for). That's where some of the clashes happen.
@1dwn+1lnPB1ez. IT infrastructure engineer here. It is possible what you say, but that's not my experience. I dealt with China and it was a PITA: we had issues with simple tasks. I had to create an specific documentation and a bunch of processes just for them, since we couldn't do the work in China ourselves.
There are deadwoods in NA, but sooner or later you can find the "guy/gal" that truly knows how things work. Low levels of IT knowledge in China, as in our Indian counterparts, tend to generate a lot of frustration when dealing with them. Some India workers are nice, clueless, but nice. Chinese workers tend to be rude and combative, even when they are still clueless.
Usually, the most knowledgeable Indian, Chinese or Latin-American workers are already in NA, or having a comfortable position in their home countries, not working for low wages at Ford. If companies would pick truly good professionals in those countries for outsourcing, the wages' disparity would not be that great. Ford is replacing older engineers with FCGs and low wage outsourcing, and the only difference between them is that FCGs tend to speak better English.
There are several problems with this outsourcing trend.
- Overseas team members are constantly job hopping, no continuity.
- No sales or manufacturing in country, steep learning curve.
- Language barrier, poor communication.
- Time zone differences, especially if production plant dependent.
- Leakage of intellectual property.
My experience has been that the offshore teams have become emboldened, going off on their own creating software/processes that do not comply to industry or corporate standards.
Cuts both ways
Observed Ford IT infrastructure teams purposely sabotaging China IT infrastructure teams. They would purposely omit critical information from turnover meetings/documentation and also purposely insert code bits to cause failures and then play hero when they fixed failures.
Now these Ford IT teams were barely competent and were practicing the time honored Ford silo and job protection. They even got boondoggle trips to China under the guise of knowledge transfer.
BTW the sabotage continues to this day, as does the incompetence of the Dearborn team.
Odd that when the ring leaders “retired”, others stepped up to take over the tradition. Well maybe not odd at all as Ford does have a type that they hire and promote.
Good point on the outsourced regions leaning hard on US. I had to support China in my last assignment. They couldn't po-p without asking us how to do it. I can't tell you the number of meetings I attended where the China product manager was upset that more hadn't been accomplished. I thought he was chastising his own team publicly then later realized he was talking to us US based employees. I finally told him, we've guided you over and over again and that's our role. Why things aren't done are on you!
Suddenly the early morning and late evening meetings decreased in frequency. Last I heard they still haven't delivered after 3 years something that should have taken 6 months.
I'm retiring in a few years so watching this place crumble will be fun as they try to get things done with these cheaper outsourced resources. They'll either come to their senses or they'll end up paying suppliers and partners big bucks to actually get things done. Ford+!!
It will be entertaining to see who takes the fall for this outsourcing strategy. Those in India/China/Mexico/etc are leaning hard on their US counterparts and still failing massively. Removing the bumpers provided by the Dearborn personnel will be a disaster.
Also eventually those jobs that they keep in the U.S will be outsourced in the U.S. to other cos