Index

Outsourcing Misery

I am still,  after all these years,  capable of bring amazed at how callous and just plain mean corporate management can be.  They really are not human.

I work for a company that is considered “high tech.”  They stay in business by selling the products of their employees ingenuity.   You might think that intelligent self interest would require that they take reasonable care of the people that do the creating,  You would be wrong - the “Intelligent” part is missing.

A few years ago the all powerful beancounters decided that they could save money by outsourcing “non-core” business functions, one of which was the personnel department.  In the typical least-cost way, the functions of personnel quickly diffused into a constantly changing web of unnamed outfits, all doing business in my company’s name.

When I was rehired after a layoff (another beancounter induced disaster) I almost didn’t come back because the hiring function was being handled by outsourced morons that had no clue that communication was required - they treated it like a paperwork task, without a thought towards the fact that the people involved were making important life decisions.  If they had been hiring minimum wage kids at a fast food restaurant, it might have been sufficient, if barely.  For hiring engineers, it would have been humorous if I hadn’t been the one they were screwing around.  I knew who I was going to be working for and everything - I had been there over five years - and I still almost didn’t come back because of the idiocy.

Now that I have been working for a bit, I need to use a medical benefit and get a prescription filled.  It was rejected by the insurance company, and after almost two hours on the phone, it turns out that the insurance company has my address and phone number wrong, and the name and address they had for me was for a guy who hadn’t worked for the company for two years.

Of course there is no one to blame, since no one involved in the process of setting up the account was involved any more.  Since everything is outsourced, no one is accountable.  The few personnel representatives left can do nothing more than shrug, completely powerless.

The bean counting types smile at the cut costs, and the employees suffer.  It really is sad that these corporate morons are allowed into the company offices, let alone make decisions that can screw up lives.