Maersk prepares to lay off the Maidenhead staffers who rescued it from NotPetya super-pwnage Maersk is preparing to make 150 job cuts at its UK command-and-control centre (CCC) in Maidenhead – the one that rebuilt the global shipping giant's IT infrastructure after the infamous 2017 NotPetya ransomware outbreak. The redundancies will see some jobs outsourced to India, according to employees who have been caught up in …
I hope they kept a few binaries of the ransomware on archive media in case of this situation arising. Set it to activate one month after redundancy and wait.
When senior management decide that skilled IT people are 'replaceable units' it's probably best for these people to have to find a new employer. Let the management tell their shareholders two years later why their productivity has nosedived.
... leaving it on a USB stick is careless.
...and more BOFH-like.
(though he'd likely leave that to the PFY)
Also, for those staffers being told their services are no longer required: make sure that someone in charge has your telephone number, just in case something very bad happens in the future and it turns out the low-wage folks replacing you are unable to handle it. And, of course, have a consulting contract ready to go, with rates set accordingly.
"The BOFH would more likely leave it in a drawer of the boss's desk.
So much extra satisfaction from getting the boss to cut his own throat."
This is assuming that the PHB knows what it is. So few can find the power switch on a computer. Leave it in a receptionist's or secretary's desk. Somebody that may have lots of down time during the day and may go through their desk and play with random things. Put some popular music or a video on so it stays plugged in for enough time.
Yes, there's a particular level in management where failure is rewarded- and rewarded well. The trick is to make the failure profitable to shareholders. You can drive a long existing well regarded company into the ground as long as it makes a profit for the shareholders. This trait also makes the perpetrators highly desirable as shareholders of other companies look for you to do the same.
Multiple Tory MPs have already floated tearing up the working time directives already, under the context of reducing immigration, arguing that people might want to work longer than 48 hours a week to cover
the shortage of workers. They are even trying to sell this a benefit to employees ?! If I want to opt out and work more than 48 hours I can do already, without a change in legislation. This is a defacto plan to reduce employment rights. They want to rip it up so you can be forced to work more than 48 hours.
Indeed, here's Scott Mann doing it recently, https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/scott-mann-on-the-working-time-directive-and-brexit-1-6543027
I've come to think of this as the "Brexit ratchet". It goes like this:
"We want control over X."
"You want control over X because you want to do Y."
"No, we want control over X so we can choose."
Gets control of X.
Does Y.
Claims Y is what everybody wanted all along.
Rinse and repeat.
Nope, wrong, more Project Fear nonsense, Workers covered by the Working Time Regulations must not be required to work more than 13 hours per day. Also individuals must not be required, against their wishes, to work an average of more than 48 hours a week. Workers may agree in writing to work more than the 48 hours per week on average, and can withdraw their agreement at any time.
I've been encouraging a lot of my European co-workers to volunteer at old folks homes, hospitals and the like. They looked a little baffled, but once I explained how Corvid 19 will decimate Tory voters and Brexit gammons alike they warmed to my suggestion.
We're all looking forward to rejoining the EU once the knuckleheaded generation gets put in its place - six foot under.
Well, see my comment immediately above of yet another example of a tory MP suggesting removing this protection while acknowledging that people can already exceed the limit voluntarily. And as for your "project fear", we've heard it before, you're at the, "No, we want control over X so we can choose." stage.
Like the boy who cried wolf this strategy becomes less effective over time. We've seen the pattern, it keeps repeating, the number of people you can fool all the time eventually declines.
We can't use 'multiple mps' as evidence , and why should we care about them at all? We didn't bring back control from Brussels just to give it to a fundamentally undemocratic house of parliament. We brought it back so Dominic could make clever decisions. He believes "We should explore ways of drastically reducing the regulatory burden, such as making small businesses exempt from most regulations so they are free to grow, innovate, and employ.". What bit of 'exempt' do you think translates as "won't make standards worse for employees" - or do you believe that the EU was a dead hand forcing employers to not pay sick leave to their zero hour contract workers because if they did it might make bend bananas?
"What evidence do you have the Bojo wants to reduce our employment rights?"
Have a gander at https://norightsemployee.uk, especially the Heroes page which, surprise-surprise, lists just about the whole on the PCP (Parliamentary Conservative Party, not the drugs I think they have been snorting)...together with a light dusting of others.
Also look at IR35 legislation
Back in October or November the FT published an article saying that the Cabinet had been given a paper drafted by DexEU which, with input from No.10, said that the government was open to significant divergence on employment rights; this clashes with the level playing field statement made in the withdrawal agreement. (I'd get the URL of the paywalled article for you, but my trial period is over.)
Given that Johnson is already walking back the Irish border agreement, over customs and paperwork requirements, he's either planning a massive bluff by trying to convince the EU that he's in agreement with the Britannia Unchained lot (some of whom he's put in government) and is going for a No-Deal Brexit unless he can have his cake and eat it (something the EU won't let him do because they'd be undermining their own markets), or these are his actual plans whatever sort of deal is reached.
Given the Tory history of preferring business over people, not to mention Johnson's own record of mendacity, I'd say the future for workers in this country is not going to be bright either way.
The bias towards capital against labout is written int o the Treaty of Rome, and the next 6 treaties that followed. The myth that th EU protects workers is a joke. The truth is that social Europe never delivered all that much, even in the days when the European economy was in much better shape than it is currently. That’s because a succession of EU treaties has enshrined in law four basic freedoms for business: the right to provide services; the right to establish an enterprise; the right to move capital; and the right to move labour. These freedoms trump all other considerations, including the right of workers to withdraw their labour. This was best illustrated in the European court of justice’s ruling in the Viking case in 2007. At issue was the concept of “posted workers”, employees hired in one country but employed in another. Viking, a Finnish ferry company, posted workers from Estonia as a way of getting round collective bargaining agreements made in Finland. The action by the company – a classic example of a race to the bottom – was challenged by the International Transport Workers Federation and ended up in the ECJ. The judges sided with the company, with the ECJ advocate general Poiares Maduro saying “the possibility for a company to relocate to a member state where its operating costs will be lower is pivotal to the pursuit of effective intra-Community trade”. Thus dies the delusion that "the Eu protects the workers"
And which country was the most gung ho for it all to get made more concrete once it finally joined the EEC? Without the UK's malign Uber NeoLiberal hawks in the room Social Europe has more of a chance. The battle lines on that one are being drawn already in response to Brexit.
Expect it not to extend to asylum seekers or immigrants for a while after arriving and be billed as 'looking after our own' (translated into all the local languages). This will get the New Right on board as well as the likes of the Gillet Jaunes.
Thus dies the delusion that "the Eu protects the workers"
One court ruling does not a decades-long policy make.
Alternative examples (from implemented policy, not the courts) would be the Working Time Directive and the creation of basic minimums of parental leave.
Regardless, you miss the main point that even if the EU isn't an exemplar of worker protection, it has still implemented more improvements in this area than has the UK. There's nothing to stop the UK doing more, yet it hasn't. And now there's the threat that the current UK government will reduce our rights.
"Having control of employment rights in the UK parliament is not the same as running them down..." Technically you are correct but you would have to be pretty deaf to Priti Patel and co and their clear and oft stated intentions. That you added "completely" to your comment as in "completely biased against..." lends weight to the idea that you are so heavily biased in favour of brexit that any inconvenient fact is just false news to you.
Because they had the opportunity to write existing EU standards into law to give their stated intentions legal force and refused to do so.
People like Jacob Rees-Mogg have already talked about how Indian standards will be good enough.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-safety-standards-workers-rights-jacob-rees-mogg-a7459336.html
Ah one of the myths of the looney left. We had workers rights long before the europeans, and ours were better in some cases - we had the first Factories Act, for example, and the first Health and Safety legislation.. Britain’s labour market has been reshaped over the past 40 years by deregulation, privatisation and anti-trade union laws, not by the limited protections delivered by the EU, which are weaker in practice than they sound in principle. There was, for example, nothing in the draconian Trade Union Act 2016 that would have run counter to EU law, not even the clause – eventually dropped as the legislation passed through parliament – that picket supervisors would have to give their name to the police. The notion that only Brussels stands in the way of a barrage of deregulation betrays not just a misunderstanding of the way the EU operates but also a deep and irrational pessimism on the left, a belief that the Conservatives will be in power for ever no matter what they do. The left doesn’t need the EU to fight its battles. What it needs is to make the case for better working conditions and win over a public sick of a labour market loaded in favour of employers via the flood of cheap labour, courtesy of the Eu.
The notion that only Brussels stands in the way of a barrage of deregulation betrays not just a misunderstanding of the way the EU operates but also a deep and irrational pessimism on the left, a belief that the Conservatives will be in power for ever no matter what they do.
How did Lexit work out for Corbyn, or is he still playing the long game?
They tried something similar in 2004, selling Maersk Data (I was sold with it) to IBM, and then shifting the work to India. Within 2 years, a lot of people who had spent half their lives working for Maersk were finding new jobs because they were unimpressed by IBM - no need to fire.
I hung in there as I planned to quit IT in 2007.
To use a good German word: jein. I have been running a holiday rental business since, apart from providing WiFi to the guests it also includes website, maintaining and backing up our computers etc. But then I also get to unblock sewers!
I have enjoyed it, I like the social side (most of our guests are nice or at least ok) and I rarely have back problems as I sit much less. But it is more work.
"Danish company stops offshoring IT to country outside the Eu and switches to another country outside the Eu ?"
I believe the path for UK IT in Maersk was in-house -> outsource to IBM -> in-house -> outsource to UCS.
I believe IT is run from Denmark so they are just re-positioning services. Even though the last time they did this, it ended very badly...
Hearsay based on the movements of ex-coworkers. Corrections welcome...
Well, that's an absolute bag of shit. My sympathies to everyone potentially at risk. (Currently resting between engagements myself after being made redundant in favour of cheaper offshore replacements.) One nasty surprise I got was discovering that the already small minimum payouts have been cut even further; after 3.5 very intense years I got two weeks pay. The timing is terrible! What sods.
I’m guessing that you didn’t get the full 3 weeks pay because your weekly pay is higher than the minimum £700 or £750 ish depending on age?
This is not new, this is the way it has been for many years.
Now is a good time for people with long service to be made redundant if the Conservatives are planning on cutting or doing away with redundancy pay.
I know someone who works for Maersk and considers them and exceptional employer with strong loyalty to their staff and a genuinely caring attitude.
She's not in IT though - clearly that approach does not extend to all parts of the business, but I wonder if these employees also thought it did?
I've heard people say exactly the same thing about Maersk too.
But I'm sure every company has a period during which they were considered to be a good employer with a caring sharing culture.... but those left with that these days are no doubt continually looking at their competitors and arguing that nasty and vicious produces more profits.
The nasty vicious world of business today is copied behaviour from witnessing others profit it from it and everyone is just a board member retirement away from the wolves moving in to their employer.
IT is almost always an exception. Unless a company is a tech company, they consider it an outsourceable service. The best way to survive in a non-tech company is to end up "in IT" but attached to a business unit....or doing what I do, which is infrastructure engineering in a software product shop.
IT people who have business experience and aren't just closing pure tech tickets are still doing OK...but we're not immune to offshoring either.
I knew of a tech company that outsourced the hardware engineers to ICL. They though they had the contract fully dotted and T's crossed until they got the first bill. Were as they thought a single callout was $35, it was in fact for a single device...
Were as in the inhouse system a call for 12 printers was just one "callout"; the new system was a little bit more. The bigger sites would save dead equipment until a real important device failed or they ran out of printers.
After the shock of the first month the following months were worst....
This is what someone very important in Maersk said less than two years ago:
Snabe plans to ensure Maersk learns from the "very significant wake-up call" that was the attack and turn its experience into a security stance that represents competitive advantage.
He also called for all businesses to stop being naïve about security, saying organisations of any size - even the mightiest - will experience disruptions if they don't take security seriously.
So much for that, then.
Staff have proven their worth, saved the company from going under and the response is to dump them and outsource.
This will come back to bite Maersk, we all know that but some execs will get bonuses for this - shareholders should be up in arms if they had any sense. Any repeat of the issues and that company is gone.
Staff have proven their worth, saved the company from going under and the response is ...
To royally screw them over.
My sincere sympathies to these guys as I know how they feel.
I've also been at the end of that stick.
This will come back to bite Maersk, we all know that ...
They don't give a flying fuck.
The top brass' and shareholders' only interests are about bonuses/profits and nothing else.
And if when the company starts to tank, ones have their golden parachute and the others quickly sell.
Any repeat of the issues and that company is gone.
It will happen again.
Be sure of it.
O.
Sorry, hate to be a pessimist, but it will NOT come back to bite Maersk in an way obvious to non-technologists.
The reason for the layoffs in the FIRST place is due to a lack of understanding of IT and what it does for the company by non-technologists.
If they cannot connect the dots between IT and their business operations now, why would they be able to do it in the future?
They will not.
In their world, each outage is, and will be, viewed as a separate, inevitable event that some group of "geeky wizard" people in some office somewhere will have to fix.
Therefore, in their minds, why not go out and get cheaper "geeky wizard" people to react to the next "inevitable" event?
So, sorry, but I highly doubt that anything that comes back to "bite" them will ever be linked to the layoffs in their most remote thoughts. It will be viewed as just another inevitable event....
I am not sure how it is now, for many years their it was lightyears ahead of their competitors. To give an idea, the subsidiary Maersk Data was started 1970 and Mr. Møller was on IBM's board for a number of years, as the first non-american.
They had a custom built messaging system on mainframe ffs
From memory, most of the a-shares (with voting rights) are held by funds controlled by the founding family: I think they are on their third or fourth chair of the board since foundation in 1904. They used to have no interest in day to day share price but thinking very long term.
A conservative and somewhat paternalistic company for good and for worse.
This may have changed the last ten years, I think it made a difference when the founder's son died (and thereby retired) in 2011.
At the other hand, it is a very international company and they have had IT in India for almost 20 years, they could keep it in house.
Disclaimer: I have not followed Maersk in detail The last ten years
shareholders should be up in arms if they had any sense
Two problems with this: First, shareholders don't have any sense. Shareholders are by the very definition, leeches that are playing (or are being played in) a legal fleecing scheme orchestrated by those at the very top of the pyramid. Second, shareholders are sloths, and even if they did have sense, wouldn't do anything because, Hey, I'm alright, Jack.
Shareholders are by the very definition, leeches
That's a very distorted version of reality you inhabit there.
Have you ever in your life borrowed money to do/buy something ? Haven't got £1/3million in cash handy to buy a house - borrow a load from a bank/building society and pay it back over (say)25 years while enjoying the benefits of having your own house. Haven't got a spare £10+k in cash when the old car dies - borrow some of what you need and pay it back over time. Down to the "daaaad, can I borrow £20 to buy <whatever>" and pay it back when you get paid for the next paper round.
Well guess what, businesses usually don't have loads of cash lying around when it's needed - so they borrow it. Selling shares is just a variation of that - give me some money, I'll pay you interest on it when we make a profit. Few businesses would ever get off the ground without such funding.
Of course, a lot of the shareholders (investors, people who have money invested in the company) are pension companies. Hand up, how many readers here do NOT have a pension of some sort ? Not many, well I guess that means a lot of us here are, by proxy, shareholders in a lot of companies.
And yes, shareholders would like a return on their investment. Hands up again, who chooses an investment (whether it's a savings account or pension or ...) on the basis of it offering a LOWER return than alternatives ?
According to the job spec screen grab, they are not advertising the location as elsewhere. The outsourced provider based in Pune, India is recruiting for the roles in Maidenhead (the text says "within the new 24 7 command and control based in maidenhead" . Though maybe they just copy/pasta's the original job spec, and if so they shot themselves in the foot as they are clearly showing they are recruiting the same rols they are making 'redundant'..
speaking of fails, rumour has it recently at a big pharma company that a director sent round an email along the lines of "you may have been this management role available on the company careers site. We advise you don't apply, because we have someone in mind and the position is already taken. We have to go through the motions to be seen as fair to potential internal and external candidates"
Spectacular own goal there.
Happens more often than you imagine. I applied for a role at Northamptonshire Police, turned up on interview day, ther were 5 others, During the long perods of hanging about we discovered one of the applicants in the room in fact already worked for the Police and was actually doing the role advertised. A clear case of going through the motions so they couldnt b accused of corruption when they gave the job to the bloke already doing it. At the point we discovered this little gem on info, two of us decided it was a waste of time and effort and left without engaging any further in the farce.
Yes, this is normal behaviour, they appoint someone informally but go through the motions of a recruitment process.
They also already have a candidate profile in mind but will still waste the time of other interviewees so they appear to be correct process.
Those rules are pointless.
Perfectly normal behavior for a few places, because they either can't do promotion from within, or they have rules and a process to follow. I got my last two 'promotions' that way; the former, because I really was the best candidate for the job, and the latter because I was somehow the only one that applied for the position....
anon to protect my paycheck.
On site contractor at a NHS hospital.
IT Manager decided that they could save money by TUPE'ing us two engineers across. Some beancounter decided that it wasn't a TUPE situation and so we had to apply for the positions. Being NHS meant that it had to be publicly advertised, had to go through HR and their scoring system so we could have a chance to have an "interview". At the time very stressful, even though we had help from the IT manager with the CV's and telling us what questions will be asked at the interview.
Then our HR department found out, and demanded what they were playing at - this is a TUPE situation. To be fair to the NHS HR, they did agree and it was resolved very quickly.
Sadly, if the "new post" is outside the EU (don't know what happens after Brexit) there's nothing you can do about it - it's perfectly legal.
I should know; I was made redundant and my old job is now being done for a quarter of the price and a quarter of the quality by somebody in Mumbai.
yep, precisely this happened to me about 15 years ago. I went off sick with stage 1 bowel cancer, when i was off for 6 months they advertised my job but split into two jobs, and gave them to two spotty youth at half the salary i was getting. When i turned up at work i was told there was no role for me, but they didnt actually tell me i was redundant, they just left me sat in an office with nothing to do, and no line manager, hoping id get bored and bugger off. I sued them for Illegal Dismissal, Constructive Dismissal, Disability Discimination and several other things we chucked in for good luck, I relived them of £15,000, and the barrister and solicitor were paid for because of a useful little clause I hadnt previously noted in the House Insurance, which covered exactly that situation. MORAL: Check your house insurance if made redundant.
Maersk is losing its maidenhead [office] and no-one is commenting?
I'll leave the empathy to others this time. Offshoring is not nice and it is not unknown for it to be a lose-lose for all parties.
Having worked remotely with Indians in Chennai, I can say firsthand how much effort working with offshore groups are. I don't mean to be racist. They were (and surely still are) good programmers and friendly, helpful people. It was, however, primarily the cultural differences and the insistence that once a file was checked in, it couldn't be checked out for another week. It meant that the level of detail I had to put into specifications was very high and I learned a lot about the definition of 'common sense'. Added to that, the Indian company burned its way through programmers. We had new people on the team replacing others every couple of weeks and then we had to start again with getting to know to know people.
I'm getting heartily sick of it, designs are outsourced to HCL but they're badgering you on Teams all day asking you to confirm everything that's in the damn document that's in front of their eyes and asking questions about things which aren't even in your domain so you can't get any work done yourself until after about 4pm.
This, apparently, is such a success in spite of the terrible code and is deemed to save so much money in spite of wasting everybody's time over here that the plans for expansion are to outsource even more.
If it costs a third, and takes twice as longer, it's a benefit for the company. This kind of thing kills me.
I work with remote Indian staff regularly. Most of the time they are brilliant and very very hard working but as soon as you get the good guy trained up, working 100%, he buggers off to a new job because they know they won't get a raise and only way to earn more is to change working places. Then I restart with either a new person, or someone that is still around but less competent.
As it had been said, the working culture is very different. Endless "checks", if it's not written down, it doesn't get done, or it gets done exactly the way it's written down but not common sense dictates. And so on. It's not their job to question a design, they only execute until the next job opportunity.
Culture is what's different, personally pretty much all of them are nice.
The problem I have with this is when the role specifically requires someone to be able to think -- and I don't mean the marketing blurb about 'think outside the box' or other crap, I just mean things like actual troubleshooting vs. running down a checklist.
Last time my job went to India, I was a DBA. They brought in two guys in India to cover the other shifts so we'd have full 24/7 coverage, flew them over for me to train them up, the whole nine yards. I could see the writing on the wall and made exit arrangements, but for six months or so I was working with these guys. Except none of them would ever do anything that wasn't on the checklist, and when you're babysitting a random mix of hardware spanning literal decades of age (and I include the OS in that) because management is too cheap to upgrade, not everything you run into will appear on a checklist. And even when it does, you need to figure out which checklist to use.
By the time I left, the India team was up to 8 people to cover the role I'd had, were still not hitting any of the same goals I'd been hitting (audits, DR tests, etc), and were at something like 400% turnover.
But each of them only cost the company a third of my salary! So it was all good! Right?
(For another six months my phone kept ringing because the India team had it as their contact number for when things went south and none of them seemed to understand the phrase "I don't work there any more.")
Ah yes. About Four years ago I was made redundant from an Indian company in the old "My job wet to India and I didn't even get the t-shirt" move.
Which was a pain, as I'd been assiduously dodging the redundancy hammer for several decades, so when it finally got me it had to be when I was in a job I'd only held for just over a year, so the payout was a pittance.
Anyhow, about Six months after I'd left my phone rings with a "+91" No., and I answered it out of curiosity. The guy at the other end of the line launched into a long a complex question about the internals of some product or other, and when I could finally get a word in edge ways I explained that I no longer worked there, at which point the guy at the other end said something along the lines of "Damn. You were one of the few people who talked sense".
Ironically, I ended up re-joining that mob on a short term contract a couple of years later, ostensibly doing a completely different job, which slowly morphed back into my old role, only on less money, naturally. I got a better offer after a couple of months and quit. That was a very good day...
For another six months my phone kept ringing because the India team had it as their contact number for when things went south
So the first time you tell them you don't work there any more.
The second time, you tell you don't work there, but if they insist on having your help them, then your rates are <insert suitable rates - including a reasonable minimum charge>. Follow up in writing, and copy in your ex employer and make it clear that you are holding them responsible if one of their contractors insists on trying to use your services.
If they still don't get the message, start sending the bills. The letter above has put a contract in place - call me, you owe me; if you don't want to owe me, don't call me. Bill the UK company because they are responsible for what their contractor does - and they are easy to claim against without having to mess about with Indian legal systems.
Of course they'll curse and whatnot - so let them off the first invoice, and make it clear that any future calls and they owe you. You'll either get your consulting fees, or the calls will stop.
I outsourced my own analyst role to India a good few years ago. I was only contracting myself anyway so not unexpected. The cultural difference I found was criticism. I was told never to criticise when something was done wrong or instructions weren't followed. You can imagine how much harder that made the job especially when trying to explain how something is done and they go off on a tangent choosing to do it their own way.
21st century and for employers it's "nothing personal". However, employers appear not to realize that this cuts both ways, and this attitude of treating employees as "disposable assets" costs them, possibly, a significant drop in productivity (and money) when disenfranchised "colleagues" no longer give a fuck about their employers and apply this attitude to work, at work, every day of their work.
Shame to hear that about Maersk, from what I had hear they were a good company to work for.
I've been curious about shipping as an economic indicator, partly due to having watched some of the huge ships like Maersk's E and EEE-class sailing across the desert. The Suez canal can provide a strange perspective on shipping.. But-
https://worldmaritimenews.com/archives/291719/105-sailings-from-asia-to-north-america-and-europe-blanked-in-february/
Non-Chinese ports have not reported falling throughput volumes, however, the impact is expected to become visible in the next few weeks, when ships from Asia fail to arrive with containers from China, Drewry said.
As explained, a 30% fall in container volumes in China, which accounts for 30% of global throughout, means a 30% x 30% = 9% reduction in global container volume, unless the shortfall is caught up later.
And there seems to be a few factors coming into a wicked conjunction. So competition between shipping companies increasing supply & reducing freight rates, declining manufacturing, trade wars and now any impact from Covid. Freight EU-Asia already seems rather asymmetric, ie China-EU coming with full containers, EU-Asia going back empty.. Especially since China & other Asian countries stopped importing EU's rubbish. Not good news for shipping companies, or ports, or ship yards like S.Korea who've been building lots of larger cargo ships.
Then there's the IT angle, so any disruption from problems with virtual containers leading to challenges figuring out where 18,000+ physical containers per ship are. Or should be. I'm kind of curious how much of that data is local, ie digital manifests onboard ship vs in the cloud, and thus vulnerable to IT disruption.
In the case of Maersk, Manifests/Bills of Lading used to be on mainframes (390s when I was there) in a suburb of Copenhagen. For Y2K, we had a copy with 3 months data to play with in Viby, Jutland, on an identical environment.
The imbalance is decades old, 20 year ago you could get stuff shipped EU-Far East if you paid for the container moves in port - the ship was for free, as the companies had to reposition the boxes. A dry 40' was about $1000.
Maersk is probably prepared. They have their own ship broker and tend to sell when rates are high and order new when rates are low. And (used to) have so much cash there was no need to ask the bank
How about my employer telling hundreds of people that "You have to apply FOR THE JOB YOU ARE ALREADY DOING"???
*
This scam allowed the employer to effectively sack everybody after the sham interviews were over.........and at the same time claim "Our firm has never had any layoffs in our fifty years in business".
*
At least this Maersk screw up has the merit(?) of incompetent honesty!!!!
My lot didn't do it as a sham, just when merging some teams that were clearly doing the same stuff you want someway to try and work out who the best ones are to keep.
Thing is they did it three times in 18 months to the same set of Change Management types (BAs, PMs, etc).
*That* made sure that the "best" were the ones who fled at speed to our competitors, and many of the survivors were the ones who had no hopes for success interviewing elsewhere. Five years later, our change management function is still a rolling shitshow.
"*That* made sure that the "best" were the ones who fled at speed to our competitors, and many of the survivors were the ones who had no hopes for success interviewing elsewhere. "
Yup, seen that all too many times.
When merging companies one needs to be utterly ruthless about culling management, but one has to cull the no hopers and keep the good ones or you have "serious problems" on a British Leyland scale.
Its a common ploy these days. Instead of just sacking the peopel they dont want (like i the old days) they now have to engage in a facical sham pretending to interview everyone and give every one 'equal' treatment when in fact they know perfectly well they "want Fred to do the job and they can use the opportunity to get rid of that fat bastard Phillips". I quote from reality.
I went through this back in 2011 with my previous shower. They were looking to outsource most of the operations team to India. The best part was when they brought the guys over from Bangalore to be trained by the people who's very jobs were being offshored.
The new guys did such a poor job that customers started kicking off and around two thirds of the jobs stayed onshore. Of course, anyone that was any good took the whole saga as a wake-up call and left anyway.
My thoughts go out to those at risk.
Yep. Happened to me. I was tasked to train my replacement. I told the boss that 30+ years of experience is worth more than spending a week handing over to a still wet behind the ears software code monkey from Chennai.
He disagreed so I refused to stay on a week extra. I'd already been issued with the formal papers saying that I was redundant. He offered me an extra grand to do the training.
I left that Friday and the Indian didn't get trained. Six months later the whole cost saving exercise fell apart and it ended up costing them more to get support and development from India. Staff moved on every 2-3 months so any learning was lost. The company lost several million in 18 months and went bust.
I ran into the former MD at a trade show a couple of years later. He was heading up another Software company. He calmly said that he'd do it again.
That company went belly up within a year. Rinse and repeat?
I don't have to worry about my job being offshored any more. I'm out of the jobs market for good.
IMHO, there really is no future in IT in Post-Brexit Blighty. With jobs going to India in droves and HMRC attacking it from both ends... you really do have to be mad to work in IT now.
I doubt there will be any problem getting work visas from the Home Office. Our Government wants lots of cheap skilled and semi-skilled labour. It keeps the pay rates for all employees down which is good for dividends. What it doesn't want to do is grant residency rights to the visa holders or their dependants to stay in the UK. Once the contract is over its back to India on the next flight. That is true capitalism.
I have had several interviews for various positions at Maersk. Didn't get any of the jobs, but I don't hold it against them.
Great employers, free food, amazing pension.
But, at one interview I was told quite bluntly that Maersk's priorities are shipping containers and anything that touches a container.
IT is seen as just a cost, and is not seen as a business enabler, although their NotPetya outage shows otherwise.
Although IT did get some more attention (patching anyone?) after NotPetya it does sound like the powers that be still haven't got it.
Best of luck to everyone adversely affected by decision.
"IT is seen as just a cost, and is not seen as a business enabler"
And THAT, is where logistics and transport companies fall over on their faces.
Anyone can run an airline or a fleet of container ships. You NEED computer systems - well designed and run by people who know what they're doing - to keep all the balls in the air as margins are so narrow you can't afford downtime or ships idling in port because of late customs paperwork
It sounds like the old Maersk owners knew that (seat on IBM board) and the lesson hasn't sunk into the newer generation, which isn't that surprising really (the three generation rule of business empires seems to apply - #1 starts it, #2 expands it, #3 destroys it)
I remember having this conversation with a HR person as there more or less in the same boat.
A good IT function (Or HR function), that gets stuff done, runs smoothly and tends not to get noticed.
It only when things to to sh*t that people start noticing you.
But by then its too late as its usually been caused by management wondring what we need all these expensive nerds around for anyway, and the best ones have already been pushed out.
Perhaps we in IT expect a bit too much, like being treated like heroes fighting an act of God.
From the point of those outside of IT the NotPetya was an IT problem the IT department should have been able to prevent (like a fire in an engine room in a ship). The fact that the IT department then managed to correct the problem using lots of time and money, including probably pay for overtime is what you expect them to do. Feeling like heroes they can share together best they please.
In the 1970s there was this claim that companies tried their best to move IT department out of sight because we come and go with total disrespect of working hours, dress funny, speak funny and look funny.
And quite frankly, I am not that surprised about that.
Having studied IT in England I remember a teacher who tried to tell us howto behave looking for a job, two thing I can still remember he mentioned was, never smoke a pipe, do not use sandals.
I have a feeling we will have to share our heroism here among ourselves in the future too.
I hope the big brass at Maersk realise that when / if something like that happens again the indian outsourcers won't raise a finger to help, not in the contract sir, sorry sir, their on site staff will do exactly what the contract states, no more, no less, 5:30pm a wave of the head and home, unless you have documented everything so a 2 yr old could follow it you'll be SOL.
And once you have trained their staff for them they'll move to another pre-sales project or just leave the company, they couldn't give a toss about you or your company.
Been there, done that, didn't stipulate a t-shirt in the contract.
Conversely, you can anonymise yourself out of a job.....I worked in a large IT dept in local government 20 years ago, the top cheese was a guy we shall call Fred. Fred delegated EVERYTHING to anyone below him he could. Even turning up at meeings got delegated. We saw less and less of him, which was a good thing ,because to be fair, he was pretty useless anyway. Eventually, one day someone said, "Anyone know where fred is, i need a signature". Thre was a general shaking of heads and lookign round, and much pondering. It turned out he had been made redundant 6 months before and not replaced. he managed to shed so much of his workload onto subordinates, he became surplus to requirements, and quietly got the heave ho, and no one had noticed!. And the fact he wasnt replaced and he absense wasnt noticed shows how good he was at delegating. Unfortunately theres no employment equivalent of a Darwin Award, or he'd have won it.
And at that point the whole team should just up and WALK. In an ideal world, that's what the response would be. You want to get rid of us after what we did to save the entire company ? Fine, we're gone. Now you can go and fill in the slots, the offices will be empty and nobody will be around for the oh-so-vaunted "knowledge transfer".
But obviously, that won't happen. These people need those jobs, and they need time to find another one. I'm willing to bet that they won't be busting their ass off any more though. Printer won't print ? We'll deal with that next month.
But obviously, that won't happen. These people need those jobs, and they need time to find another one. I'm willing to bet that they won't be busting their ass off any more though. Printer won't print ? We'll deal with that next month.
That's part of the hand-over training. In the new world, it'll be logging a TT, getting it assigned as P5 with an SLA of 4hrs. Which then becomes <=4hrs to have someone try turning it off & on again, then clock can be reset on the TT because someone attended within SLA. Your staff still can't print, but contractual terms between outsourcers and the finance team have been met.
IT might be a cost, but too often the C-types seem blissfully unaware of the costs to their business when IT stops working. I've seen waaay too many examples of this where JIT-manufacturing and logistics end up dead in the water because they've saved money.. And then there's the cascading effect of backlogged production queues or stuff being out of place that add cost/extend outages even when the IT problem has been fixed.
Kind of curious if any of Maersk's risk-management types have done any 'what if?' analysis for the impact of a Petya repeat with in-house IT vs out-house.. or if that's just been fudged because outsourcing saves money, right?
"If they jump before they are pushed, they would not be entitled to redundancy or unfair dismissal payments."
Yes, but a nasty cough should lead to self-isolation for two weeks, and then there are the contacts at work who should also look out for a nasty cough and then self-isolate. A couple of weeks getting very little exercise is going to see a huge increase of back injuries needing four weeks off. Oddly, that's a month-and-a-half gone!
Isn't this exactly the kind of thing that our revered Home Secretary has been aiming for ?
Hence the plan to switch to an easily-gamed points system and use it to justify removing all limits on the actual immigration numbers ( afaik the salary requirement is gross & doesn't take into account any compulsory deductions an overseas agency may consider appropriate ).
I note that world trade is significantly suffering due to fear/precaution over nCOV/novel coronavirus - both in terms of supply chains breaking from China production interruptus and from fear of contagion affecting freighter (from China) docking. As evidence - there appears to be a container shortage in the US.
As a shipping company, Maersk is certainly going to be affected.
Is this Maidenhead move a cost cutting just in that group, or part of an overall change?
Prolly too soon for a CoronaVirus response. Prolly too soon to be a reaction to a January downturn either. Some of the data I have seen suggests there was some slowdown going on before CV went global. Anon because our data is a good proxy for Corporate performance.
If the jobs are being/have been advertised in India and the company is retaining a presence in the UK, then it would appear that the roles are not actually redundant and TUPE should apply. If Maersk has not offered alternative employment or relocation, this could be seen as unfair dismissal. But IANAL.
AIUI you are right, but also AIUI and IANAL it's also easily worked around. One work around is simply to announce that you're relocating the office to India - offer relocation or alternative jobs to those affected. Can't find another (suitable) job in our UK operations, don't want to move to India, guess that's tough luck for you then.
But yes, declaring jobs redundant, while advertising for people to do the same job (especially if it's in the same place), it really taking the urine.
Why are you describing one of the world's single biggest cyberwar attack's with almost certainly the biggest collateral impact as Ransomware?
Paying the ransom didn't help. It is called "NotPetya" because it was not Petya, but looked like it.
It wasn't ransomware, it was a state sponsored weapon of mass disruption.
Still amazes me how many companies see IT and the associated services as a secondary concern, in this day and age you should spend more money on IT and the people that support it because without it the productivity and ability of the rest of your company to actually do business is severely limited.
Still IT ends up stuck in the basement with no budget, no support, no management buy in and outsourced to the cheapest people possible.
The phrase, "If you think its expensive to hire a professional just wait till you hire an amateur" comes to mind, as others have said, what goes around comes around, Indian IT teams lack the ability to think around a problem and take creative leaps to solve an issue so good luck with that.
What the PHBs and above don't get is that we in IT are an insurance policy. We are there to resolve issues quickly when the shit hits the fan. Our experience affords us much quicker response times to the majority of events that hit, and allows us to get a head start when the shit really hits the fan.
The fact, that for the most part, techies go unnoticed, unappreciated, and are just seen as a cost, is we are very bad at making sure PHBs understand just how shit things would be if we were NOT there to fix the multitude of daily problems and issues that plague most, if not all, extremely complex environments.
To my brothers and sisters in arms, I raise a pint to you for working tirelessly and largely without recognition for the amazing jobs you all do.
To the PHBs, you should hang your heads in shame.
UST Global is a private high growth organization headquartered in Orange County California and is a leading provider of Advanced Computing and Digital Services for Global 1000 companies worldwide.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/infrastructure-analyst-at-ust-global-1648443029/?originalSubdomain=in
Take it as an opportunity - for all UK Maersk employees to quit and start their own employee owned business. To replace the one that is about to fail.
Unfortunately I have to work with support from another company that has been outsourced recently. Although the people are nice and willing to help, the language difference is very difficult to work with. What should be a 20 min phone call takes days to weeks to resolve now. We are replacing that vendor and their product. They have Force ed us to Point another direction.
I cant believe after all they did! From picking up a single HDD in an airport from an African nation saving a global multinational, to that.
I hope Maersk have not learnt a dammed thing and get hit again. Lest see how outsourcing works then for them when thats going down.
If any of the team read the reg (lets face it ofc they do!) Engineers around the globe salute you for what you did to save them, its dammed folklore esque!
Im sure you put that on your CV for an infosec role, you will be snapped up!
The wired article is forced required reading to my team!
I've said it before - as BOFHs of various sorts, we're our own worst enemy.
When our departments (including ones consisting of just 'me') do our jobs right, nobody notices what we're up to so it can't be hard, therefore it's a job that can be farmed out somewhere cheaper, amiright?
Major calamities happen so rarely that it must be cheaper to offshore the work /s
I feel for my Maersk colleagues.
It's always about the money not the people.
I need one of those and would share willingly ---->
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