CSC grabs pistol, plays employment paintball with P45s Wimbledon is around the corner, the hippies are getting ready for Glasto and sickly integrator CSC is cutting jobs again - the summer season is upon us. Almost like clockwork, the US-headquartered company has again kicked off yet another redundancy programme - it ran one in June last year and one in May 2014. In a memo to the …
I see your relief, but when it comes down to it, your pension will still need to be funded by someone! I've come to the conclusion that despite a set (a patchwork of different employers plus see employment), I really need to keep on hedging my bets on pensions longevity. On the basis I do hope to live another 30 years or so.
I've never come across such a backward thinking company.
Their processes are still stuck in 90s.
Their answer to everything is throw it off shore to hand crank deployments (sorry you are not allowed to run that great script that will ensure you have 500 identical Linux installs, we'll make sure you have 500 slightly different VMs)
And when it comes consulting in new technology fields there is no training or even willingness to bid for work.
An expenses policy that means you have to hunt around for the nearest McDonalds to be able to afford a decent meal without being out of pocket.
I remember when HP (pre HPE) brought in a rather wonderful can't claim your lunch and dinner is going to be very severely constrained policy. At this point, the number of people willing to travel and work in Scandinavia (large differential at the time) suddenly dried up.
> There's always the Dilbert approach to travel food...
> http://dilbert.com/strip/1995-08-24
Or this one http://dilbert.com/strip/2009-02-16
As someone still in CSC, training in the last year has been on overload! (For the first time ever).
Primarily I think because the company hit the point where skills were so far behind, that we had basically no one who could use either new 'stuff', or of the existing offerings, we were several versions behind the times.
This started to impact, where we either couldn't deliver work, or couldn't even bid for it, as we just had no one (or very few people) around that knew the product/offering/tech etc.
Plus historically, CSC never encouraged certification, I think they were afraid of people leaving once they had a certificate or two! Now we are being actively encouraged to get certification, even in our own time, with pay reviews for people who get certification in things like AWS etc.
CSC is a different beast from 12 months ago, still a beast, just different !!
Moral is still rock bottom though, it was perhaps just starting to pick itself up, but this announcement has just crashed that back down again :-/
What won't help, is we are already short-handed in many places, this is just cost cutting, without taking into account utilisation, or the need to retain at least some experienced people!
I agree, I was there for a few years, too. And with backward I would also recommend: abusive, unethical and criminal, in some cases. If someone asked me I would discourage anybody from ever working for or doing business with CSC, because they will screw anybody and everybody to make a quick buck.
Everyone company is at it (CSC, HP, Intel, IBM, MS).
But as for the contact bemoaning the 2 redundancy programs so far, come join us in the shitehole at IBM. We've had at least 8 since 2010:
Feb 2010 - Lighthouse
March 2011 - Tyne
July 2012 - Conifer
May 2013 - Jura
Nov 2014 - Chrome
May 2015 - Digby
July 2015 - Yukon
Feb 2016 - Saturn
With rumours of more to come, you can guess how the morale is here. Great place to work (not). Still, Ginni has presided over 16 quarters of straight decline and still picks up her $1.8m salary and $4.5m share bonus. I wish I could be paid that kind of money to be a complete failure. If I missed my targets like she misses hers, I would have been fired a long time ago.
But it's the same in all the big companies - the management get the money and we all get the shit. We're just numbers to them.
If they need to ensure they have the right skill balance they could always train the people they have. It is actually cheaper and less risky than hiring new people.
Still why should CSC be any different to the rest of the market, anyone over the age of 30 is incapable of learning any new technology. Who needs business knowledge, we need to rise up and meet the digital challenge.
Because they are getting rid of the expensive (and experienced) 35+ year old people, and replacing them with cheap interns, albeit with new job titles, so they are different roles and so not the same ones we are making redundant, honest!
AC as I'm in CSC, am 35+ (and then some), and have two of the new interns sat in the same bay as me!
I used to work for Comprehensively Shafting Customers - a similar outfit, cannot possibly be the same mob - until they realised that they could replace me with someone new on less than half my salary and who did not think the idea of Support was to stick at a problem until it was actually fixed rather than merely getting it to look like it worked once, closing the call and then waiting until the poor User had to log another call as it had "gone wrong again"...
Did I mention that this was shortly after they had switched the customer from a 'fixed price per machine' contract to a 'small price per machine but whopping overcharging for every call to the HellDesk' contract?
Seems to be what every US headquartered company does. Even if they're profitable, their growth might be below the street's expectations and the solution if of course to cut costs. What better way to cut costs than sack some people to save on the wage bill.
Are there any companies left that don't do at least two rounds of redundancies a year?
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