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back to article 'You don't have to take Prozac to work at Capita - but it helps'

Capita IT Services' morale-zapping redundancy programme is not running to schedule nor playing out smoothly, say company insiders. Although 1,000 workers were put at risk of losing their jobs at the end of March, layoffs have yet to be comfirmed: programmers were given 90 days of notice but other employees were given 30 days …

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  1. Bernard M. Orwell
    Stop

    What has changed?

    I don't get it. What has changed in the IT market? Are there suddenly less computers in the country? Have networks & servers suddenly become so reliable that they no longer need support? Are racks now self-installing? Are call centres experiencing a massive drop in call volumes?

    No. I don't think they are, yet corporate IT is slashing low-end jobs left, right and centre; one corporation after another. Even in ones where jobs aren't "formally" under threat, the level of intimidation, bullying and "strech objectives" is ever-increasing as demands on staff are pushed to the breaking point.

    There is NO excuse for companies treating employees this way. It's fire-sale cost cutting in order to keep share values high in a kneejerk response to the "current financial climate" (which was created by the machinations of yet more corporate fucktards).

    Well, corps, keep pushing us techies all you like because sooner or later you're going to be left with a company full of managers and the inability to even replace a toner cartridge. Your costs will spiral out of all control as you buy in expensive contractors to cover simple jobs. You will lose contracts due to the lack of continuity of skills and customer knowledge as people like me, and many other engineers, decide to say screw you and head off to start their own agile and responsive small businesses.

    I'm heading that way myself soon.

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    1. Ogi
      Reply Icon

      Re: What has changed?

      Well, I presume outsourcing is the biggest thing really. Both the "old kind" of outsourcing your DC, etc... e.g. just leasing managed dedicated servers (possibly in another country) and cloud computing.

      A few years ago I worked for SME's, and in each and every case I was eventually laid off when they shifted off the servers to the cloud (mostly Amazon's EC2). Most companies that are not core IT companies don't want the hassle of DC/server management. SME's first made the jump, and likewise once they contracted out that side of the business, had little use for the low-end IT jobs.

      I presume now that as the cloud has begun to be seen as more legitimate, you have bigger and bigger firms considering it, with corresponding loss of the need for low-level IT staff.

      Not that these jobs have vanished, the cloud/managed-DC guys still need people to work on the servers/racks/etc... however:

      a) you get economies of scale, they need fewer IT jobs per machine managed

      b) the jobs may well no longer be in the country, the DC may well be somewhere else, so the jobs essentially moved overseas.

      I don't know about Capita in particular (I have no access to their internals), but I've seen it happen.

      I did my job and wrote the tools to transition to EC2 for my company, then they laid me off. Same at the next company. At that point I saw the writing on the wall, and just contracted myself out (for far higher an hourly rate than I got before) to transition firms to the cloud, with the tools I've written and the experience I had doing it so far ( I didn't agree with the idea, I felt that losing their IT people and just being managers with developers in India would be a failure, but its their funeral, they were pushing for it).

      Then I moved on, now I work for a large company, essentially as a sysadmin for their private cloud. IT is a constantly changing area, much faster than most others, so you just have to keep on your toes. That is the only way I can think of to keep up and keep your job from being outsourced...

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    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      EVery industry

      is suffering and I'll not shed a tear over this.

      Crikey there are worse places to be in the world to be, and I've seen a few.

      0 1
    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What has changed?

      Where I work we're on a massive recruitment drive. Sounds good doesn't it?

      What's actually happening is that engineers on the ground who were already very heavily overstretched (25% of required staff in some cases) are being told in performance reviews that we need to keep raising the bar, while legions of people are hired in the periphery functions and middle management. Naturally all the new (and in many cases needless) staff are getting excellent salaries while existing ones are left to languish. At some point I imagine a bean counter will look at the overall IT staff cost, and they'll cut some engineers.

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    4. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What has changed?

      Nothing has changed per say, companies are just finding ways to exploit tax loopholes with outsourcing and looking at the small picture for headcounts without seeing the larger logistical problems...

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If

    By on track you mean hopelessly behind schedule then you are right

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    1. sabba
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Oh, the irony...

      ...Capita can't even deliver redundancies under budget or on schedule!!

      And these morons are running most of our government IT projects, which will be outsourced to India.

      Morons!!

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  3. Fred Mbogo
    Devil

    Frozen Salaries and Bonuses

    You can bet your ass that the frozen salaries and bonuses are only at the non-executive level.

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    1. Yet Another Commentard
      Reply Icon

      Re: Frozen Salaries and Bonuses

      Much as it pains me to say it, but the 2011 accounts confirm directors not getting a cash bonus or payrise this year:

      "The Executive Directors asked to keep their 2012 remuneration unchanged from 2011 levels and therefore the salaries at Executive and Divisional Director level have been frozen for 2012."

      Mind you, it's pretty easy not to take a payrise when you are on £380k basic, plus £165k in shares plus pension contributions of £19k (p74 2011 accounts) isn't it, Paul Pindar (highest paid director)?

      I must confess that surprised me, as they earn less each year than Bob Diamond does each month (roughly £1M a month there), even impoverished Wayne Rooney et al do better than that. That's not a defence of ridiculous pay. I think the xkcd on money sums it up quite well; the differentials between directors and those that actually make the company do stuff.

      It's tough at the top (but you have to be hard as bloody nails at the bottom).

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a surprise

    Prozac would help - so would a lobotomy.

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  5. Snowy Silver badge

    Costs are being cut not because they need to be but because they can. Times are hard so lets take the opportunity to cut costs while can do anything about it.

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  6. xperroni
    Devil

    "Redundancies have still not been confirmed"

    Redundancies.

    Such a nice way to refer to dismissals! It almost sounds as if it's something good in itself.

    Really, HR people are the poets of the channel.

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    1. h4rm0ny
      Reply Icon

      Re: "Redundancies have still not been confirmed"

      "Really, HR people are the poets of the channel."

      Channel? What the Hell does Channel mean and why am I seeing a section of the Reg called this?

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'll never forget...

    Coming up the escalators from the restaurant at AXA Centre seconds after one of the (ex AXA) Capita guys jumped off the third floor into the atrium area. Fuck Capita.

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  8. Andus McCoatover
    Windows

    South Park School of Outsourcing...

    1) Fire our own staff, and get it done from India.

    2) ???????

    3) Profit!!

    2 0
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Maybe...

    Maybe they should stop presenting their clients users with such a shitty GUI?

    0 0
  10. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Lousy personnel management

    If you have to cut costs, then cut costs, but do it responsibly. Giving 1000 people a "we reserve the right to lay you off" note and then drag the process on for months just stresses people out (lowering productivity) gets them working on their job searches instead of work (lowering productivity more) and encourages the best people in the 1000 to leave because they don't know if they are getting the axe or not (lowering productivity into the toilet).

    Times aren't great, but managers should take charge of events, instead of casting things to the wind....

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    1. Cpt Blue Bear
      Reply Icon
      Facepalm

      Re: Lousy personnel management

      There are HR managers out there who think that is a valid method of creating "voluntary redundancies" (read: fuck this shit - I'm outa here). I've met them and sat through meetings with the fuckers. They genuinely think it's clever social manipulation. The idea is to make the job floor so unpleasant that people "make their own redeployments" (actual phrase used by one). I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but here sacking someone making someone redundant is a potentially expensive exercise what with paying out leave, etc. If you quit, they are off the hook for a large slice of it.

      Just in case anyone thinks this is a clever way to shut down and outsource their IT dept while avoiding redundancy costs, my boss' comment at the post-meeting debrief (read: I'll have a pint while you're there) was "that arsehole is worth millions to us". He wasn't wrong - he hired most of the redundant staff and pimped them back to their old employer for three times their original wages bill.

      In a final act of irony, Mr HR Manager got made redundant when they outsourced their HR dept to a labour hire company. Oh how we laughed.

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  11. Gordon 17
    Big Brother

    Crapita!

    never liked Crapita, still don't they run TV Licensing, never met such a bunch of sh*** heads in my life they are all underhanded, i could go on but would lose it.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    They're doing something right at least

    "...It is pretty depressing. Staff who don't want to go look likely to go and vice versa." This is exactly what you want when you downsize. The people who want to go are those who know they can get another job easily ... ie your best performers.

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  13. TheWeddingPhotographer
    WTF?

    Morally Crapita

    While they may have the law on their side (how?) I fail to see how this is in the slightest bit moral

    The government give (for us) contracts to Crapita, absolutely huge contracts, on the basis Crapita will save us money as the job was outsourced to a "smarter organisation". An organisation who can do more for less

    However, In true Crapita style, they treat their staff like a resource and not as humans. They dump 1000 hard-working employees back on the scrapheap, for whom income support and the like will need to be paid to, and take (our) money to pay staff in India To provide us the services that our government (who represent us) procured from Crapita in the first place

    First up. How on earth can it be OK to make a redundancy, solely on profit grounds, when the same job is outsourced to someone else in a different country... It might be Legally ok, but it feels wrong

    Secondly, why do we continue to award huge contracts to companies that exhibit no moral backbone.

    We have robbed Peter to pay Paul and screwed the lives of 1000 families in the process

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nothing new here for Crapita

    You need Prozac to survive working for Crapita at the best of times, not just when they're doing a round of redundancies. I know of a number of people who have been pushed out using a "compromise agreement" which is much cheaper than redundancy - this is where they think up some mis-demeanour on the staff members part and say either take the compromise agreement or take us to a tribunal. As it would come down to your word against your line managers word, a couple of months salary payoff and a guaranteed not-bad reference is a lot better than the possibility of being sacked & having that told to prospective future employers.

    Working conditions aren't always the best either to put it mildly; having to work 12 hour days when living away from home, when your boss swans off for days "working from home" when they never answer the phone can be a little depressing too!

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  15. Ascylto
    Big Brother

    23456

    So ... the've actually GOT morale at Crapita?

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  16. SamPersona
    Mushroom

    Despicable and Incompetent Organisation

    I used to work under crapita when they took over Abbey National. We hung under threat of redundancy for about 5 years. The date kept getting put back. Since the initial takeover I decided to enrol at university, I was still there briefly until I finished my degree. Hung on part time to get my redundancy cheque then began another career in marketing. I was lucky, but feel bad for all the folks left over.

    Morale was awful. What was funny (tragic) were the pitiful attempts to keep moral up by having inter team world cup, comic relief, eurovision initiatives to try and gloss over the fact they expected more from workers while giving out less. Most of my dept got outsourced to India c.2009, however craptia managed the whole operation so f*cking badly they had to pull back many call centres to the UK as the banking divisions lost customers in droves.

    The worse they perform the more they cut costs, and the more they cut costs the more the performance suffers. It seems a fairly obvious cycle, but who am I to say, Paul Pindar surely knows what he's doing.

    I do have one fond memory, the Christmas do when Paul Pindar turned up to thank us all and hand out raffle prizes - the place erupted in boos.

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  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    SNAFU at Capita.........

    I used to work for Capita IT in a fairly senior position but left due to way people are treated there.

    The teams I worked with are hardworking and talented, however the approach of management to slice solutions to the bear minimum to win a deal and then blame architects and engineers in patently wrong!

    The management in Capita need to stop addressing their workforce as commodity items and work with them rather than worrying about their fat bonuses, and transferring roles to other countries which are out of touch with the client base and their onward clients just to make a quick buck.

    The culture of bullying in the Capita group of companies (including ITS) is repulsive, demeaning and driven from the top on the Stalinist approach of "If a man represents a problem, remove the man"

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