Grauniad faces offshoring strike Guardian Media Group*Guardian News & Media is facing strike action from techies and possibly journalists if it pushes ahead with plans to start outsourcing technical staff. Although the paper has been an occasional critic of offshoring, the media group (GNM) desperately needs to save money after running up serious losses in …
Their editorial of the weekend before the election said "Citizens have votes. Newspapers do not. However, if the Guardian had a vote in the 2010 general election it would be cast enthusiastically for the Liberal Democrats."
You reap what you sow boys. You are all complicit in the sell out and now face the full consequences of assisting the election of the ConDemNation government and the full forces of capitalism.
I cancelled my subscription to your papers as a result of that editorial and I've stopped using your website. Enjoy marching enthusiastically to the dole office to sign on.
This is one of the things I hate about modern life.
Company after company goes down the outsourcing trail in the search of savings - but whatever you are paying must include a profit element for the outsourcer.
We then all end up working in organisations where most of the people we come into contact with don't actually work for the company at all and consequently don't give a crap. They are performance measured to within an inch of their lives so nobody does anyone a favour.
I don't believe that the workplace should be some kind of ersatz family with one-sided employee 'loyalty' but I don't think it hurts for everyone to be striving for success for the same entity and to see colleagues as co-workers in that effort.
As one of the previous posters says failure becomes redefined as success and we all get used to it and live with it.
/endrant
A curious assertion. Do they mean like unicorns, which have some sort of existence albeit not a material one? Or perhaps like utopias, which are similar to unicorns and come with in-built goodness for everyone, as opposed to unicorns which have in-built goodness only for girlies? Or is it merely symptomatic of the complete intellectual bankruptcy of the Left?
If they didn't give The Guardian away, who would actually pay for its left wing climate change propaganda? I much prefer US Fox News with an unashamed, nationalist, right wing agenda (unfortunately, unequalled in the UK.)! I see the new UK government has cut off The Guardian advertising subsidy at last, maybe now we'll get some independently minded civil servants. Private Eye, IMO, aren't happy to go to the internet whilst their double dealing informants are trying to escape detection in Westminster, so they also have a hidden agenda. Although, I might be persuaded to buy the occasional copy.
Hahahahaha....
My (personal) experience of HCL occurred when they wanted to outsource my last role - they sent two codemonkeys over for a "trial" (basically to try and glean information from the existing developers). Sixteen man-weeks of work later, and not a single piece of viable code between them, it all had to be rewritten by our in-house staff.
The deal didn't go ahead, though the moronic management consultant still made us redundant out of spite (then ran off for "another contract" before actually seeing it through).
Hoping this doesn't contravene Ms Bee's libel rule, as it's a personal experience, and may not be indicative of HCL on the whole....
I would like to hear more of the reasoning of the Anonymous Coward and his support for Fox News.
Why is it such a superior service (apart from being in line with your own opinions)? Is it informative or not important what anyone else has to say?
What should be the strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan? Social Welfare? What next for the world economy? Are bankers criminals or did they just mess up? BP? Supporters of terrorism or just good friends of Dick Cheney?
It's just too easy to deride the broadsheets for writing long articles, many of them supposedly "liberal".
I accept that long articles don't make them worthy or intellectual. After all the Daily Mail has a great history of wordy articles of bile and hate.
There should be a healthy competition between broadcasters right and left to express a broad range of opinions - and I believe the Guardian provides good articles.
What I hate about the Guardian is its overtly middle class authorship, its champagne socialism and London-centrism. It also panders to youth, and the quiz on Saturday isn't what it used to be.
I support any readers of broadsheets of any persuasion. Any independent thought is better than nodding along to "broadcasts".
That the Guardian is indeed bust accords with "Supply and Demand". I am very sad that the arseholes have frittered away revenue on the web site, have been dismissive of the Times's similar efforts, and are destined to crash and burn...
My last experience of indian support was to ask the support staff to run a command to determine the packages installed on a high-end sun server.
They had to ask us what command to run to access this information which we found scary. So we sent them the command and assumed they were complete morons - dont include a full stop at the end - dont quote the command etc.
Well after a long wait we got the result back .
The gist of the response was "Segmentation violation: core dump."
Yes these fwits^Wsysadmins assumed this was what we expected as a package listing for a business critical, state of the art sun cluster and sent it as a valid response.
I was part of the failed Wapping HCL experiment and if that is anything to go by, those at the Grauniad have my every sympathy. Striking was effectively ruled out for us because of the lure of redundancy payments - some people had worked in the IT department for around 20 years and quite rightly they didn't want to lose what was due.
It began by the replacement of the outgoing CTO with the aforementioned Mr Turtle Neck who promptly dispatched virtually the entire IT management team, (save one or two useless arse lickers desperate to save themselves - you know who you are) as well as anyone that knew what they were doing. These were replaced with vacuous yes-men and non-technical managers (I'd be surprised if any of them could change a plug) who were all in on the act, many of them having worked with Clucky before.
Cue much management bullshit when the problems started that no-one could fix because anyone that could had since left. Problems were either blamed on the 'transition period' or successfully defended with that great 21st century invention, ITIL. It's fucking great for problem identification and recording, problem classification, problem investigation and diagnosis etc.. Thing was we didn't have any fucking problems before turtle neck arrived.
Consequently, morale dropped like a stone, productivity ceased, indeed production ceased ito in house development ceased completely. Turtle Neck believes you can buy any type of software off the shelf you see and get a grad' to 'configure it'. Hey presto - new Editorial system!!
Fortunately, he has now had a dose of his own medicine and will soon be off (a consultant for Bernard Matthews I believe). Not nice to be surplus to requirements is it Andy? Still, 3 years to completely fuck up an IT department isn't a bad epitaph for ones CV.
I wish the Grauniad strikers all the best. I wish we'd had the balls to do it when we had the chance.
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