[rescue] [geeks] Looking for a sysadmin gig in Houston/remote

[microcode at zoho.com]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 07:53:57PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:51:43PM -0500, Nick B wrote:
> >Easy.  "Cut 10m off our operating budget and you get a 1m bonus in 3
> >months."
> >6 months later
> >"Onshore everything successfully and you get a 1m bonus in 3 months."
> >(Ok, the cycle isn't usually quite *that* short)
> 
> When Halliburton closed the Austin office (offshoring most of the positions),
> after 2-3 years the person who had made that decision had moved on to another
> company, the promised savings weren't up to par, and a lot of the people who
> had been laid off were brought back as consultants.  It always made me smile
> to see them in the hallways of the Houston HQ.

Which used to be the BMC HQ? I mentioned to Bill a few years ago but I saw
BMC go from rented office space all around town (and Houston is a BIG town,
covering more than 500 square miles) to building their own campus with an
office tower, parking deck etc. That was when they were still a little
engineering driven and still had the ego and the people to be the best at
what they did.

They started cutting developer incentives and downright shafting people and
little by little the top tier of product authors went onto greener
pastures. The tech writers and marketing staff got promoted to development
management positions (I shit you not) and to middle and then finally senior
management positions and the writing was on the wall.

They turned into a market driven company and got out of the prime software
business and started treating everything from people to products like a
commodity and then the layoffs started. Waves and waves of layoffs. They
started selling office space in their building and leasing off their
equipment. Everybody worked from home so they didn't have to pay overhead
for the staff. Then they started hiring H1Bs by the thousands if not tens of
thousands over the last ten years. Then they subletted to contracting
companies. It just got worse and worse until the company today is
unrecognizable from how good it was in the late 1980s early 1990s.

I know people who used to be part of one product who are now responsible for
5 large products and are alone, no help. Because everybody else quit or got
fired.

> Turnover at the offshoring companies was something like 300% from what I
> heard, so they had to keep constantly retraining new people.

They have plenty of curry chefs waiting in the wings.