Driving Xtreme Cuts: DXC Technology waves bye bye to 45% of Americas Security divison DXC Technology is sending hundreds of security personnel from the America's division down the redundancy chute and offshoring some of those roles to low-cost centres, insiders are telling us. As revealed by The Register at the back end of March, the outsourcing badass cum cloud-wannabe confirmed the security practice within …
"The security landscape is changing, and our global clients need different types of services as they progress through their digital transformation. At the same time, security skills are becoming both more specialized and more scarce. We therefore need to look worldwide to fulfill these changing requirements."
The guy's not very good at logic or press BS, isn't he? If those skills are scarce they would not be putting people on the street who were already screened and operating in this sphere and who could thus be trained to add those new skills. No, this is shifting more work to lower wage countries, yet keep charging customers the same.
Yes, but it is also a way to guarantee quality, which does not seem to be part of DXC's goal any more.
Also, letting an engineer go to hit financial targets ? Of all the dumb reasons to fire someone, that one has to take the cake. It indicates without a shadow of doubt what really matters at DXC.
Another rotten place to work at.
In 20 years of experiencing offshoring, Ive yet to come across a 'cheap offshore' location. At least, not for long.
Closest Ive ever seen this promise being met was some stuff going to Estonia. They were good but they were not cheap for long. And theyve all gone now
Cheap workforces do not exist. Any company that thinks there is is kidding themselves. yes I know this is a load of ratweasel MBA types pissing around with Excel.
Offshore companies such as MPhasis (DXC's usual go-to in situations like this) are never cheaper past the first billing cycle. And they're never better.
Butts in seats is all they care about. I've interviewed some guys who couldn't find their ass with both hands and a flashlight only to have them hired because they're cheap and fill out the headcount.
If DXC's customers were smart, they'd just go directly to the outsourcer. They'll get the same service but without the 30% margin DXC is likely adding to the ticket in their desperate desire to remain relevant.
About the Irishman (other ethnic butts of jokes are available) who had just finished training his donkey to work without eating when the ungrateful beast died on him.
I have no doubt that cutting staffing levels each year can make the current year's financial numbers look good and maintain the C suite bonus levels but each cut ditches some current customers and reduces the range of future prospects.
Await a write down in the accounts of "customer good will".
I could, perhaps, understand them "rebalancing" the staffing to support the current product range and customers but to reduce the staffing and product range to cut short term costs seems to be yet more of the "death by 1,000 cuts".
That's all you ever used to get with HPE before it was DXC.
People saw that big blue HP logo (or the daft green letterbox) and assumed they were getting a premium service or solution. In reality it was best-brand price, best-shore resources.
DXC don't even have the history or recognisable brand to pull that kind of con off.
I've been asked to train a replacement in the past - I tend to take the 'PhD' approach. i.e. explaining everything in excruciating detail, no summarisation. If they recorded it they could use it to train themselves to a pretty high standard, but not recording it would make it next to impossible to absorb all the information if you didn't know most of it already.
They couldn't complain I wasn't providing them the knowledge, they just didn't provide quality students.
Also, training is an actual skill-set. Knowing your job and training someone else to do it are totally different (albeit related) skills.
Seems like anyone who wants to get the job done should just go directly to MPhasis, or whatever third party they're shunting work through.
The idea that DXC would shift security functions to a country KNOWN for security breaches is laughable.
What they're doing is offloading liability. When something goes wrong, they can (and will) just blame the subcontractor.
"Knowledge transfer" before you go....
Bwahahahahahahahahaha... "knowledge transfer"... I gave two weeks notice. They tried to squeeze the knowledge transfer into about three hours on the final day to a guy who quit three weeks later.
D☠️C doesn't care enough about customers to ensure a proper knowledge transfer. All D☠️C cares about is having people seeming to have the knowledge so that customers don't immediately leave.
I've only been made redundant once but it was to my mega advantage since I was already looking for another job. I knew I could earn more than I was on, by a significant margin and so after my 3rd interview in a particular week I got a phone call from the Team Leader announcing the redundancies were coming.
Well I eventually did find another job and had the luxury to be paid a considerable sum to leave at the same time! I did however have the indignity to have to travel to train up some of the replacements, who I felt sorry for since I knew they were being tossed in the deep end of a swimming pool packed to brim with liquid manure since the company management and directors had no idea how operations worked in that company.
"and our global clients need different types of services as they progress through their digital transformation."
Pretty sure they don't want a *shit* service (which is what they will undoubtedly end up with).
Where the fscking hell do we find these C-suite people, and if anyone knows can they please nuke it.
"The security landscape is changing, and our global clients need different types of services as they progress through their digital transformation. At the same time, security skills are becoming both more specialized and more scarce. We therefore need to look worldwide to fulfill these changing requirements."
Hmm...and these "more specialised and more scarce" security skills are available in Low Cost Countries, are they?
...these "more specialised and more scarce" security skills are available in Low Cost Countries, are they?
Why yes; yes they are.
There is a seeming inexhaustible supply of security engineers, support staff with deep rapport with clients, highly skilled developers and more in low-cost countries. Oh wait - that rapidly becomes high cost. Oops; my bad.
I like the line :
"Given five-and-a-half weeks' advance notice to help the accounts they manage migrate the design, implementation and support work to a DXC team in India "
When i was there (and on the pre sales side so hopefully a little more expeditious), five and half weeks would be about enough time to eventually find the team, (after finding the manager and getting a decision made that their team would be supporting this new workload in addition to their already stretched team..)..
Oh were now out of time ... never mind... Bionix and Platform DXC will save us.... Oh...
Customers should start looking at their commercial agreements very carefully!
DXC are totally left without any real customers, business offering or meaningful revenue?
I honestly think they should just shut-up shop now and hand back what cash they have to shareholders. They seem to have very little (if any?) strategy for making money or exploiting new markets - I'll add them to the list of Zombie Corporations. IBM's been similar for decades. Cost cutting is what bloated companies need to do; otherwise its just a sign that management have given up any prospect of growth.
Microsoft could have gone that way but Nadella seems to have done a fantastic job of actually adapting his company to the changing world.
"How long until DXC are totally left without any real customers, business offering or meaningful revenue?"
The DXC story is destined not to end well but it remains a large, profitable company; it's not going to disappear overnight. It will probably be another couple of 'difficult' years before we see the DXC denouement.
DXC are totally left without any real customers, business offering or meaningful revenue?
It could be a few years, actually.
Talking with a soon-to-be-ex-DXC buddy, in my old section hiring is frantic to replace the people leaving - but experience isn't entering the building. It's people wanting to get started in their careers that are being hired.
Remaining customers are satisfied for now as they are seeing new names replacing old names, but even that is drawing attention. Sheer inertia is keeping some of them; contracts with DXC hosting of services is keeping others. But the tide will turn, and DXC will be yet another giant shell.
The entire staff should just walk out now. Let the idiots pay for training their own offshore staff. I've some experience with Health Care organizations near shoring the medical staff with friends and relatives from India. They were not well trained, did not have social skills for the enterprise, and I refused to provide them any services once my contract was up.
In my experience, you can get very good people in India, but they cost - they demand higher salaries - knowing their worth.
At the end, whether you hire a top expert in the US or india, the price can be the same and the quality the same.
But DXC hires the worst in India and pays low salaries, so low quality.
I'm going to actually defend some of my India colleagues here - they are not universally bad in the same way as not all Western staff are brilliant.
What I see though is that certain cultures have pros and cons and that companies such as DXC fail to exploit the positives.
If you have a highly process driven function, the Indians will work that like demons. They will cope with that far better than a US employee, who will slack off and can't be arsed after a short while.
Where they fail is when it comes to initiative, what you rarely find is an Indian offering you a suggesting about process improvement or thinking outside of the box. In some security functions, the inability to think on your feet is a major failure, but what maybe some people don't understand is that "DXC security" is/was a whole raft of different things, most of which are not trying to outwit advanced nation state hackers (sorry all of you who thought it was all James Bond) but actually just grinding admin work.
However, to say that all Indians contribute nothing positive is nasty slur that I must oppose!
My last place offshored once and we lost about a third of the UK based department. Training was a nightmare and it took about two years to get the guys over there to a position where we were confident enough to unleash them on the customer as there was large staff turnover with the Indian company we partnered with. Things just settled down when a major customer announced they were leaving us after our botched renewal bid so the Indian operation got scrapped. Fast forward five years and they are doing it all again under new owners. Guess they'll never learn. :(
DXC is like every other outsourcing company out there. They all sell snake oil. They are all full of BS on one level or another. It all depends on how much $$$ you want to pay for your snake oil. Do you want to get screwed for big $$$ or small $$$. There isn't one company out there, "Even MS, Dell, or whoever" that is using some super superior technological staff. They cannot afford it. You can't make money when you are paying six figures for all your employees all the way down to the desktop staff. Everyone is trying to make money. They may start off on the high end, but it won't be long before they are riffing people just like DXC is doing. They've been doing it for a long time. Getting rid of the 125K employee for the 70K employee that can and will do the exact same job. Then eventually they lay that one off for one in India, PR, or where ever the next cheapest place is. DXC Execs are just fleecing the company with their huge bonuses, cutting staff to make the company appear profitable all the while their contracts are running out on certain accounts that may not get renewed so they want to sell it to some other dummy.
Its simply the post-growth 2008 wall street economy... its not just ITO.
Look around you, see if any major company is paying well, focusing on quality and not cheapness.
See how they all are laying off those dratted staff who have had the cheek to have had a "career" pre-2008 and accrued salaries commensurate with their experience and worth.
No, with zero real growth, the only way those C-Levels are getting their bonuses are by grinding those people out of existence and running on empty.
Its got to end, but when...
There is no news story here other than how long it has taken a Legal Firm to swing into action and try to make some money off the corpse of DXC.
Of course it has been mis-managed and blatant lies were presented as facts (see all the previous El Reg articles), its the flim flam Barnum and Bailey style of business that we expect from Corporate America. If you look good then golly gee, you must be good. Is Mike off to make his run on the Presidency? Could happen.
I blame the Investment community for absolutely zero due diligence - they gave oxygen to this parade of fools. Now they're crying for their money. Money that's needed by Pension funds etc. This really has to stop. If a company cannot prove good Governance then it should be excluded from the world markets before the phrase "too big to fail" starts to be bandied around and Govt's are expected to bail them out.
How about a Mandatory Code of Ethics for Directors? So they don't bring their profession into disrepute - or have I just overstepped the mark?
Anybody left at DXC have my sympathy - apart from the Rat Bastard middle management who will cling to the wreckage in the hope of rescue by another multi-national megalith.
The sharks are circling and the Titanic is sinking below the waves.
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