HSBC swinging axe on UK IT department, 840 heads to roll HSBC is to wipe out more than 800 of its UK-based techies in a move Unite the union has condemned as a ‘reckless’ drive to offshore jobs. The redundancies are part a wider cost cutting drive that will see the bank slash 8,000 positions in Blighty and a total of 50,000 worldwide by the end of next year, with the aim of saving $ …
Been there done that got the T-Shirt (Literally, It's bright orange as a hint and a cookie for anyone who could guess who it is).
Though mine was "buy more shares, you're crazy not to" when it was peak. I was crazy not to buy them at rock bottom though. But I'd prefer not to even get involved that way with them.
"Count yourself lucky. I have a Nortel share certificate."
Count yourself lucky.
Forty thousand people in the UK are entitled to Nortel UK pensions and, eight years since the collapse, still don't know whether they'll ever see them.
Maybe El Reg could look into that one day, as well as reporting the (sad but relatively insignifcant) monthly bankruptcies of yet another piddling little IT industry distie hardly anyone heard of.
Nortel UK pensioners say they're owed around $3B. Legal fees to date have eaten up $2B. Fancy that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Nortel#Liquidation (several years out of date)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2016/04/05/nortel-bankruptcy-fees-approach-2-billion-as-court-hears-arguments-over-assets/#939d6b41e055 (almost current)
Oh colour me surprised, thought not
Or should that be "colour you brown" mate? It's good to see the verminous management of HSBC decide that (after their vitriolic little paddy about domicile) they want the advantages of a London headquarters, all the protection of the English courts, all the joys of London banking bonuses, the implicit taxpayer backing should they ever screw the pooch on any of their casino banking bets. But when it comes to low end and even mid range white collar jobs in the UK, HSBC's scumbag board just can't wait to issue the P45s.
Those on the receiving end can perhaps pause and think gratefully that their noble (if involuntary) sacrifice means that a few more bankers can go and quaff a six or seven figure bonus at whatever champagne and oyster bar the idle, value destroying f***ers infest these days.
How many head-up-ass iterations does it take to figure that one out?
Perhaps we could ask some of those affected.
Chinese bank with HQ in Hong Kong reduces staff in small island off Europe !
Except that it isn't a Chinese bank AFAIK. It's a remnant from the colonial days, which is also easy to detect from how they treat anyone below C level. They're a vile bunch of crooks in my opinion, so I booted this bank *years* ago.
I wonder how good the training will be anyway. If I had to train my replacement in such a scheme, I would certainly give as few information as somehow possible.
As long as there's no tie to good results at the end, and I think that would be impossible anyway as that would make your payment dependent on the quality of the replacement they source.
To be honest, I'd have fun with that one. "Now, after you saved today's ledger, you copy it onto this USB stick and drop that at Leicester Square. It's mandatory for compliance."
When my role was off-shored by Tesco I spent between six and eight weeks handing as much knowledge as possible across to my successors. Didn't begrudge them this in the slightest. Nice people who were uncomfortable that they were being trained by the people they were pushing out.
The thing is, I wasn't in the first wave of off-shoring so I could clearly see the impact of how it worked (or didn't) in a way that the upper management surely knew but refused to admit.
I knew I couldn't give them all the tiny nuances of how my role fit into the business, though I did my best. I also wasn't allowed to explain some of the "value added" activities I did that helped other teams out but wasn't officially part of my role so that all got lost too.
I also knew that no matter how well I transferred knowledge, the natural churn over in India meant that one or more of the replacement team would move on very soon and others would after a while. Sure enough some months later while lunching with a friend who still worked there he said how the "new" workers didn't have a clue as to how stuff fitted together. All the people I had done knowledge transfer with had moved on. He also had a couple of critical questions about how some of the systems were supposed to work but I didn't begrudge him, it was a nice lunch.
And that's kinda the point. Yes, you can get programmers ten a penny nowadays but to get someone who knows the business and a wide angle of technology and has the foresight to 'do the right; thing' is a lot harder. Consistently I've seen off-shoring becoming near-shoring becoming on-shoring.The UK still have some of the worlds best quality IT folk and that's just fine. You have to accept that the clue is in the name - Hong Kong... This is not a British company being disloyal - this is a multi-national company doing the right thing for its share holders. They are already a highly distributed workforce with numerous local regulations that they abide by so to them this is nothing more than another restructure to save money. I find it strange that India is mentioned so many times in these diatribes, In my experience China is where the skilled people are.
Don't buy from multi-nationals if you don't like 'em !
IT shop in Banking....no wait for it, in the world....you couldn't make this stuff up.
Management have been drinking the Kool-Aid and want to do lots of stuff in the Digital arena including Robotics (eh?). This being one of the few areas to remain in the UK. The coding for it though will be out of China/India.
People being taken into meetings all day, being given their marching orders. Teams Decimated. Whilst the CIO's are going around saying how Awesome they are.
Only a matter of time before they do a RBS.
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Same way the symbian team at Nokia fucked over that company, by resisting anything that would have threatened their comfortable existence. HSBC were in the process of trying to re-engineer to comply with regulatory requirements under (admittedly vague) threads of a state-imposed breakup, but that all got lost in a turf war between the internal team and external contractors. Writing was on the wall when the entire contract team was abruptly dismissed shortly after christmas.
"Time to vote OUT... "
Yes, and in time to come all the employee friendly legislation imposed on Blighty will be a no more than distant memory, and lo, UK staff will become the world's cheap option, and lo, the caverns of Sheffield will once more ring to sound of weary HSBC workers. Rejoice.
"Yes, and in time to come all the employee friendly legislation imposed on Blighty will be a no more than distant memory..."
Utter rot.
There's this misconception that the EU is some wonderful, fluffy organisation out there to protect the little man. Well no, most of those in charge of the economics side are ex-Goldman Sachs banksters and once TTIP has been forced down our throats you'll really get a feel for how "employee friendly" they can be.
Just look to how the EU has treated Greece and Cyprus for further examples of the bureaucrats' kind and caring nature.
A number of our clients outsourced their IT to random places round the world and guess what, even a few years down the line we still get vastly more support calls for our software from these new teams than he British team that used to support it. The worst bit is the outsourcer keeps blaming us for providing poor support when the problems are things out of our control like running out of disk space. All ends in tears in then end.
"If high skilled jobs could be outsourced so swiftly, perhaps the shareholders should consider outsourcing the management too?"
There seems to be an implicit assumption in there that 'management' (ie spreadsheet jockeying) is a highly skilled job. You've perhaps been distracted by the fact that management is a highly rewarded job. Highly rewarded does not imply highly skilled. It does imply moving in the right circles, being 'one of us', etc.
Cheers! Trebles all round.
If HSBC expect the replacements to be able to take over the roles in a short time frame, working in different time zones, then these can't be high skilled jobs.
I assumed exactly the opposite. My assumption is that these are high skilled, highly paid jobs that will be sent off shore and done really, really badly. (But cheaply).
Offshoring is not only stupid but undermines the very future of our countries economy because once these skills are lost, they will NEVER come back! I have worked for more than ten banks and several big consultancy firms such as IBM and HP, and all seem to be following the same path, and that is driving down staff wages whilst paying themselves bigger bonuses. The result is that lead times are longer, staff turnover is higher as management seek to exploit the "off-shored" workers, believing they will accept lower wages (even by their local standards), and quality falls as more and more mistakes are made due to lack of experience.
I fully understand the need to cut costs and improve efficiency, however this can only be done by using a devops type mentality that breaks down departmental barriers and simplifies processes, and this is the complete opposite to what this kind of offshoring achieves.
Anyone know where FirstDirect comes into this picture? Long-standing happy customer here, starting to think much more seriously about looking for an alternative, or to maybe hope that FirstDirect gets floated off as not being a sufficiently core global-money-laundering business.
"fd = HSBC
screwed - same systems"
You think so? Same parent company, certainly.
The telephone banking was different and may still be. The online banking is certainly different. The way they do business is generally different.
So, try again: anybody got any definitive info re First Direct? I'll be asking them later.
I don't know HSBCs average for years employed, but I do know the industry average is a little over 10 years.
So HSBC is getting rid of ~8,000 man years of site knowledge.
You can train new people about what's in the book (documentation), but you can't teach that "ah, we saw this fault a couple of years ago, dig out that email". But to an accountant, a techie is just a techie. I wonder when the board is going to notice that the same is true of accountants...
I'd take a cold hard look at the complete fuck up of their IT department, that RBS did when they swung the axe on UK IT around a decade ago. As reported on the register 4 years back.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_offshoring_software_glitch/
It will happen again. The Banking Authorities need to intervene I think.
"During this time many will be expected to pass on their knowledge to their successors based in 'low cost' countries in a 'cynical race to the bottom'," said Hook.
Yeah right!, but every time I did this it lasted as long as the next guy stayed in post, and the quality of knowledge transfer degrades on each subsequent transfer, tending to zero very very quickly.
More importantly isn't Banking IT under the spotlight a tad at the moment; with a litany of recent TitsUp events. I wonder how much money HSBC will be 'investing' in overhauling their creaking back office systems.
We're going through the same sort of thin where I work, loads of jobs been off-shored to India and Poland, UK jobs cut last year and I can see the cycle happening again this year. Of course, nothing offical has been communicated by management but you'd have to be blind to not see it. Taking as many courses and exams as I can get away with for CV update purposes and then I'm out of here. Looks like the job market might be 600 people busier though so better get a shifty on...
they are offshoring so that the big shareholders make more money. If people (including the staff who are being sacked) stop buying piddly amount of shares in these companies, then this may put a halt to offshoring ?? Just a thought. We are all guilty of forcing these companies to make more profits by going for the cheapest options and the cheapest options are abroad ..
I vote for don't teach them anything during KT. Approx 80% of the staff will bugger off once they have spent 6 months at HSBC anyway and then the bank really will be stumped of course this depends which parts of IT are being offshored/outsourced/tax avoiding ...
Here we go again. This has happened before, do they never learn? Let's hope the rest don't follow. I complained to what was then Abbey National when they closed their call centres & sent the calls to I believe India. My worry then was security so whenever I had a query I waited until I could call in the branch except for one time when I had a general enquiry & then I didn't get an answer because I refused to give my bank account number. When I explained that it was a general enquiry & nothing to do with my account she cut me off, probably because she didn't know what to do unless she could follow the script. So when we hear that HSBC's online banking in the UK insn't working we will know why; the Poles will be blaming the Indians, the Indians will be blaming the Chinese, the Chinese will be blaming everyone else & the customers will be piggy in the middle wondering how safe their data is.
Glad I baled over a decade ago before HSBC degraded redundancy and pension arrangements.
Glad because what had been a great place to work (Midland Bank IT) had become the plaything of management and accountants without the first clue about IT or, now I come to think of it, running a bank - a few issues like money laundering, over-paying for failing USA banks then not only remaining hands-off but giving credence to their "IT experts" (please insert your own virtual sarcasm emoticon here), PPI.
Glad I sold most of my shares a very long time ago.
Glad I hung onto a few hundred because I'm sure this new initiative will result in their value rocketing (sarcasm emoticon). They were once worth over £10 currently under £5 - Glad they fared better than some other UK banks...
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