Lowe's To Lay Off About 125 Workers, Move Jobs To India (go.com) 222
An anonymous reader shares a report: Home improvement retailer Lowe's says it's laying off approximately 125 information technology workers, the third round of job cuts this year. Chief Information Officer Paul Ramsay said in a memo that the affected workers were notified Wednesday. He said the Mooresville, North Carolina-based company has spent the last several years planning a strategic IT workforce team to respond better in what he called "this highly competitive 24/7 retail environment." Some of the jobs will be relocated to Bangalore, India.
Making American Great Again (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Funny)
"All laid off IT workers will be given lifetime employment in my coal mines." - King Donald
Fortunately, it'll be a short lifetime - a win-win.
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Unfortunately the last years of the short life are considerably more expensive.
The Government had set up funding to help coal miners, however they found out that black lung was seriously underreported.
That increased demand comes as the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund is stressed. The fund is nearly $6 billion in debt. It has taken on 1,000 claims that were covered by self-insured mining companies until they went bankrupt. And the coal excise tax that supports the fund is set for a 50 percent cut in two years.
However if we double down on rolling back all regulations they could hope for a quick (and cheap) death in a mine collapse.
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Can someone translate this from "Retard" to "English"?
I tried Google but it doesn't seem to recognize the source language.
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Who's with me?
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The world the 1% wish to see is orderly, religious and poor
There are no whorehouses as in Capra's classic, much less bawdy entertainments.
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure he'll be all over this. He cares about American jobs after all.
If he does, he'll instruct USCIS to pay better attention to H1-B petitions that are being adjudicated right now, and make sure that none of the petitions apply to beneficiaries with a comparable skillset to those that are being laid off. In other words: until these 125 people have a new job, USCIS should scrutinize pending H1-B petitions.
Let's be honest, that would only make sense, and if these guys are any good they'll have a new job tomorrow.
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Interesting)
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And what could he do? (Score:2)
There's nothing Trump can do about it. He may tweet about it, but there's nothing in his powers he can do.
I feel bad for the workers. They are all gonna be flooding the job market at once and the longer you are unemployed the harder it gets to get a job. Employers do not like hiring unemployed people.
And the IT profession is especially brutal in that regard. The attitude of "if you're any good, you'd be employed" is still a thing out there even though the whole shortage idea has been proven to be a myth.
Taking it al back (Score:5, Interesting)
$550 worth of lumber is going back to Lowe's today.
Fuck them.
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And then you'll go to Home Depot. Same shit, different label. It's everyone, including me, who goes to these big box stores that validates their business model to squeeze every last cent out of the system for what it costs to deliver the goods to the customer.
If more people were willing to pay a little bit extra and go to companies that treated their employees fairly and bought their goods from firms that did the same the world would be a better place. Not that there are many of these stores around.
As an a
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No. Working in a coffee shop was never meant to be a job that a person could live off.
Oi, cayenne8! GTFO of my account you asshat!
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Sounds like you are in favor of Government Subsidized Workers!!
Re:Taking it al back (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Working in a coffee shop was never meant to be a job that a person could live off.
Says who?
Exactly what authority says that a person working a 40 hour/week job in a coffee shop shouldn't make enough to live on?
Re: Taking it al back (Score:2)
Don't forget that many corporations have moved their data to cloud based services, which means that when the shit hits the fan for real only the diehard businesses that still run their own servers with bookkeeping have a chance of survival when the IRS do an audit and the employees want their salaries.
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Now don't be so hard on the coffee places. Where else would PhD's in Women's Studies work?
Re:Taking it al back (Score:5, Interesting)
If more people were willing to pay a little bit extra and go to companies that treated their employees fairly and bought their goods from firms that did the same the world would be a better place.
They mostly don't exist.
I started driving 1.5 hrs to a HD after the local hardware store* would not sell me a replacement entry door for less than $459 and I found one at HD for $129, based on a co-worker's recommendation (HD did not have any websites then).
* the one of three that actually had doors
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Boy, is that the truth. Last year, when I was interviewing after a merger and a mass layoff, I actually had people say that "if someone else doesn't think highly enough of you to hire you, then why should we?"
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Trump hasn't "made his move" yet, obviously. I'm sure he'll be all over this.
Oh yeah, he'll spring into action with his dog-like reflexes!
-
He cares about American jobs after all.
Which is why he makes all his stuff in China and Vietnam and India.
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Making American Great Again (Score:2)
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Re:Making American Great Again (Score:4, Informative)
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I don't think people elected him to give his best shot. What did he accomplish in 8 years?
No, don't compare him to other Presidents that suck. We're talking about Obama. What did he do beyond doubling the national debt?
Obama seems like a swell guy. I wouldn't mind drinking a beer with him. But as far as accomplishing things, making tough decisions...nope. He had an open checkbook and gave everyone what they wanted, kicking that can to the next President.
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He implemented Romneycare nationwide.
Not the best healthcare plan, but at least insurance companies had a lot less ability to weasel out of paying your healthcare, even if you were too expensive or had been ill before.
Re: Making American Great Again (Score:2)
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:5, Insightful)
The President can't write checks, only Congress can do that. Obama started his term during the worst recession since the 1920s, and left the job with a stock market at record highs, unemployment numbers at near record low, and 20 million Americans on health insurance who couldn't previously get it. On top of that, he vastly improved relations with all our allies around the world, who were delighted to get to deal with a mature, respectful, and thoughtful President after #43's reign. Of course Americans then deiced that "No, our President should be an uninformed, loudmouthed, bragging buffoon!". So our allies are once again having to deal with an American government that can't be unpredictable, untrustworthy, and undiplomatic...
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Americans cannot understand and do not trust a president who is, or seems to be, smarter than they are.
Americans want somebody like them. Somebody they can understand. Somebody they can relate to.
Even if that person is really like con man uncle Joe who always spins BS stories at family gatherings and doesn't appear to have a real job, yet always has a new car and women 1/3rd his age with giant boobs hanging around. Nobody knows what Joe does but he sure seems to be good at it, so why not elect him?
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Hope that things can be changed for the batter...
Well, he struck out on that one!
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:4, Interesting)
Other than just saying it was worse. How is was america worse during the Obama Administration?
The Economy improved after a bad recession.
Gas prices became low
Improved rights for discriminated groups
A larger portion of the population now has health insurance.
Yes they are trade-offs for these decisions, but for the most part from 2008-2016 increasingly got better.
Re:Making American Great Again (Score:4, Funny)
Other than just saying it was worse. How is was america worse during the Obama Administration?
A long-lasting and historic low in conservative good feels.
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How many unemployed in Bush's TWO recessions?
Hmm?
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Why didn't you blame Obama when this happened? Because he did shit for the American Worker
Wow, lie through your teeth much?
The unemployment rate was 7.8% when Obama became president, and it was 4.7% when he left office.
Overall, Obama took over a jobs market in crisis and ended up growing the labor market better than most of the modern US presidents.
These are facts backed by hard numbers. You may not like them and they might make your tummy hurt, but these are facts.
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He did shit for the American worker? He saved the American auto industry for starters. Let's follow that up by taking a highly depressed economy and bringing it to a much better point. I realize the unemployment rate isnt a perfect metric but taking the country from 8 or 9% to what are considered to be the very healthy levels of 4 or 5% is certainly doing something for the American worker. After that we have lower income workers who weren't lucky enough to get health care through their employer that now hav
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Actually it's different, he hated the American Worker with every fiber of his being.
I'd like whatever medication you're taking, but in a smaller dose.
Midnight shed shopping. (Score:3)
Not sure where this 24/7 notion comes from. Lowe's has pretty mundane business hours and a pretty limited reach. They aren't exactly IBM. A 3rd shift IT workforce seems like it would be nothing but a total bother instead of some sort of benefit.
125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback.
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125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback.
Those probably aren't the only cuts, just the ones making the press because 'some' of them will be offshored. But its still over $1M per year in salary saved just on that part. The only blowback will be from slashdotters and the like, I can't see many people would stop shopping at Lowes because of this. It is a very small cut for a company their size, but its smart to make moves before you need to have huge cuts.
Re: Midnight shed shopping. (Score:2)
In a year or two it may be that it wasn't any saved money at all due to the cost of downtime and lack of competence.
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125 jobs also doesn't seem like enough of a potential gain in terms of salary cuts to offset the potential PR blowback
People economize. If you can somehow cut costs, you can get lower prices. People will always attempt to maximize the ends achievable by their means, and so will reach for the lowest-price thing that they expect to do the job.
Ever notice that people who cook a lot buy high-end kitchen appliances? $400 food processor, $100 knife, $450 KitchenAid mixer, and so forth. They expect these things to perform better. They'll last longer than the $20 things they buy, produce better results, and do so more-quick
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Off-hours is the best time to implement new technologies.
Also there is the online store, processing inventory...
With increase risk of computer security problems, off sourcing is increasingly a dangerous idea.
Hiring an IT worker in India who is half as good but time times cheaper, back in the old days would seem like a good decision. However today, half as good, means you could be leaving yourself vulnerable
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Just because the physical stores are closed it doesn't mean the IT shop closes down. Financial reports are generated from the stores, orders to move stock are generated automatically, sales are analyzed, HR, payroll, orders to suppliers are created, etc. Oh yeah, the web site is running and taking orders 24/7.
Re: Midnight shed shopping. (Score:2)
IRIS By Lowe's (Score:3)
If IRIS by Lowe's is any indication, Lowe's either offshored the coding to the lowest bidder, on the notion that with enough heads banging on keyboards, they'll be able to beat much more capable competition... or the US team was already headbanging on keyboards, producing rotten code, and Lowe's figured they had nothing else to lose.
Either way, it's hard to see the future looking bright for IRIS.
It should not even be a blip on the radar (Score:4, Insightful)
Where was the outrage when blue collar jobs by 100,000s were disappearing all through 80s and 90s? Textile jobs, furniture making... before that auto jobs, before that railroad jobs ... White collar and the educated never cared, never bothered and were telling the 50 year old furniture makers to learn new trades. Well, it is all coming back to them, now they cry a river for the loss of 125 jobs.
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As a person in technology I don't care about 100,000 jobs if they are all Walmart jobs likely to be taken away by automation anyway. Do you even know how many of those jobs are quality jobs with a +$50K salary, benefits, and a certain amount of job security?
Wow, what a whiner you are. A job is a job is a job. You shouldn't be worried about how much it pays or any benefits it has, you should just be happy to have a job and be willing to bust your ass for your employer. Just ask a politician; there's a rea
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So your hot take on this is that shitty things happened to other people, shitty things are now happening to these people, everyone deserves shit because that's the way the world works, shut up and like it?
Fantastic. When you wonder why the world sucks, go look in a mirror.
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Well, it is all coming back to them, now they cry a river for the loss of 125 jobs.
wow, lots of AC's took offense, but you're absolutely right. Sure, 125 IT workers losing there jobs sucks, but when did 125 jobs become that big a deal? Even if they were all really great jobs, how many CS majors are getting pushed through the system every year? If there aren't way more than 125 more openings out there, then things are really really bleak.
That said, if this were my department at my company, and that department happens to be much smaller than 125 seats, I'd be quite pissed if it was all move
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Interesting fact about Lowes and Home Depot (Score:5, Interesting)
Founder of Lowes is a Hillary supporter and contributed money to her campaign.
Founder of Home Depot is a Trump supporter and contributed money to his campaign.
These two companies form a duopoly in the home improvement stores in the US, and the Republican/Democrat parties are a duopoly in government.
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Founder of Lowes is a Hillary supporter and contributed money to her campaign.
Founder of Home Depot is a Trump supporter and contributed money to his campaign.
These two companies form a duopoly in the home improvement stores in the US, and the Republican/Democrat parties are a duopoly in government.
Duopoly?
What About 84 Lumber?
They will bring Jobs to America
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These two companies form a duopoly in overpriced home hardware boutiques for yuppies in the US, and the Republican/Democrat parties are a duopoly in government.
FTFY
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We have a local hardware/home improvement chain in the Puget Sound region - McLendon's Hardware. I go there, rather than to Lowes or Home Depot, because their employees actually seem to know what they're talking about when I need advice (which is often, since I am not "handy" by any stretch of the imagination). You do pay a little bit more (not much) at McLendons than at the big chain stores, but I see that as the price for having a place which can afford to hire knowledgable people.
Home Depot is a fallback
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Orange is the new Red. Blue, that's covered.
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I love Menards and miss having them since moving to the South.
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Menard's is heavily republican, and includes anti-union training in their manager courses.
Menard's is weirder than that even (Score:3)
Someone I know worked for a home improvement product company and was running a marketing project that involved a market research component.
My friend had an ad taken out recruiting customers of Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's who had bought a similar product in the last year. Pretty standard stuff in marketing.
My friend got a call from a woman who identified herself as "Chief Counsel" for Menard's and demanded to know what the market research project was about, who was behind it. My friend said it was conf
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Phone them? That would require talking to a person, and wasting a lot of my time doing so, and having extremely poor communications reliability in the process. Why would I want to do that when I can go to the other store's website and search for what I want, and see actual photos and descriptions? Can the small hardware store employee show me a photo on the phone?
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True Value has a web site with a search engine.
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I've done a lot of work with a local Ace/True-Value hardware store and it was so much easier to deal with for random/weird things than the big boys. I was involved in a project to renew/rebuild part of a camp/retreat centre, and so we were buying a lot of different items to make things happen. To get our stuff on-site involved sending it up a lake on a boat.
Anyhow, for big ticket electrical items (spools of wire, conduit, 15 new electrical panels and associated breakers, etc... we dealt with the local elect
Re: Interesting fact about Lowes and Home Depot (Score:2)
Home depot people don't have any idea of what the difference between amps and volts is.
Just another company that won't get my business (Score:5, Informative)
Toys-R-Us
Disney
Carnival Cruise Lines
And now Lowe's
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Of course, the converse is also true -- we need to show support for companies that keep their IT in-house, or have insourced recently. (Because even companies are allowed a chance at redemption.)
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Can you list any corporation that hasn't fsck'ed their IT department at some point?
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--Netflix (AFAIK)...
Inevitable Call... (Score:2, Funny)
"Hello. This is Punjab from Lowe's. Your hammer is sending signals to the internet and we need access to your bank account to fix this problem..."
note to self.... (Score:2)
Note to self: Don't call Lowe's and expect a useful or coherent answer.
That's a new... (Score:3)
Self-interested hyprocisy (Score:2)
Race to the bottom (Score:5, Interesting)
Long term, I think that most IT jobs at non-IT companies will be outsourced, and those outsourcers will do anything to raise the margin on their deals. This includes offshoring anything that they possibly can and/or replacing native workers with H-1Bs. The offshoring firms have a well-known loophole in the law that sets the minimum salary for an H-1B at $60K per year, not adjusted for inflation. I actually think that closing this loophole while keeping the program for its intended purpose is the way to go. If you're a body shop, and average onshore salary is $40K more than the $60K you can get away with paying a visa holder, it's obvious how much of a gift that is for the company and no wonder their sales pitches to companies are so effective.
IT companies that outsource are engaging in a race to the bottom - once you outsource, nothing new or interesting will ever be attempted in that environment again because the provider will want to charge an arm and a leg for change orders. Also, the wall between the company and the outsourcer is going to limit how much can be changed and how the company engages with IT.
Other than the distortion of the market this causes, I also don't like the fact that new entrants into the IT world aren't able to find as many entry-level positions at reasonable salaries anymore. Speaking as someone who's been doing this for 20+ years, and got where I am today by going through a progression of these entry-level and mid-level jobs, that pipeline needs to be in place to ensure people have the foundational knowledge they need when tackling bigger, more complex problems. No one comes straight out of college with the entire skill set required to do IT in anything but the simplest environments. In my case, I did a series of support and admin jobs to get the expertise and skills to "learn how to learn" about new stuff and how it fits into the realities imposed by the surroundings.
Fundamentially, I worry about so much cloud abstraction in IT that people who haven't been around forever lose the ability to understand what's actually being provided under the hood by hosted SaaS stuff. Companies who treat their IT like a janitorial service are going to fall into this trap too. Being at the higher end of things these days, I deal with a lot of "systems architects" who are very good at drawing hand-wavey diagrams but can't work out where the bottlenecks and dependencies are because they don't see the end to end view. Anything complex seems to be hand-waved away in a cloud symbol on their diagrams, and an "oh, the provider takes care of that." I'm not saying we should go back to the no-abstraction era of physical servers, etc. but that we should take the time to understand the realities of what's going on.
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lose the ability to understand what's actually being provided under the hood
As far as I can see, we're already there. Unfortunately, the decision makers, who got to be decision makers by being ridiculously, unrealistically optimistic, are also assuming that reality doesn't matter. I would have thought that all of the security breaches that have happened, and continue to happen, would have brought the world to its senses, but it looks like they've decided to double-down on the "details and facts don't matter".
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So could somebody tell me... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well that explains it (Score:4, Funny)
When I can't find any help in Lowe's, I usually figure they're out back smoking. So now it turns out they're in India?
Please define... (Score:2)
Can the CIO, Paul Ramsay, define for us just how many "some" is in the 'Some of the jobs will be relocated to Bangalore, India.'? Is that half a dozen? A dozen? Two dozen? Or more like 75 or 100...or, you know, 125 jobs?
I'd like to think, likely naively so, that some day shareholders will wake up and realize that not all things that are good for the bottom line, are good for the company, either in the short term with morale, or long term for the longevity of and sustainability of the company.
they make there in store people smocks with spanis (Score:2)
they make there in store people smocks with Spanish on them this is the USA not north Mexico!
New fridge not from Lowe's (Score:2)
Hmm. I need a new refrigerator, and was thinking of getting it at Lowe's. I guess I'll get the refrigerator somewhere else.
Does anyone know of any appliance companies that haven't outsourced their IT workers?
Fix This (Score:2)
Want to fix this? Its the US Federal Income taxes that are making US workers uncompetitive. Abolish the income taxes, every last one of them.
Pass the Fair Tax. The Fair Tax runs the country on a consumptiion tax that, after a personal exemption keyed to your living situation - single, married, married with X dependents - taxes everyone at the same rate. The exemption is just enough to ensure that people in poverty pay no Fair Tax.
Our economy would roar if the Fair Tax was passed. Not only would all th
Oh noes (Score:2)
I guess it's time to call in.....Super Donald!
Yes, Super Donald- the Defender of American Jobs and the downtrodden Working Man! Preventing corporations fro- wait, what? You say that this is okay by him because it allows Lowes to make an extra 0.00001% profit? Well ain't that somethin! Haw haw, the joke's on me!
There's nobody more responsive than (Score:2)
Competition? (Score:2)
Not sure if this is a contributing factor, but Home Depot is their only real competition. The Home Depot website and app are some of the worst I have ever seen for a large commercial enterprise. Half the time neither do not work at all, and if they do, they are full of problems with almost every aspect of the experience. On top of that Home Depot has started a policy awhile ago not to honor any giftcards or store credit online. Dealing with their technical support in an attempt to buying something online wa
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What passwords? I don't remember anything since I got a pink slip.
If laid off Lowes staff hold any "secret" passwords needed to run the company, whoever let that happen should be laid off too.
Every secret password here is shared in a team password vault.
Re: Passwords? (Score:2)
And I accidentally shredded the master encryption key media too for the backups.
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its not, and you obviously don't
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Their registers are monochrome screens so I'm leaning towards AS/400.
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They'll be next.
Get used to it America. The Corporate Beancounters think that India is the answer to Life, The Universe and Everything.
India is not the answer to anything except a life of pain.
I know from bitter experience that the quality of code coming out of India is generally very poor and will often require extensive re-working to make it useful.
No more though. My Job went to India at the back end of last year.
The company wants me to come back and sort out the mess. Not going back even at twice the sal
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They'll find someone else to sort out the mess; you might as well profit from it. Just make sure to set your prices very high, like 3x your old salary plus a guaranteed generous severance if they lay you off again. If they're that desperate, they may very well agree.
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Re: I hate Lowe's anyway (Score:2)
How about Harbor freight?
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You can always "shop" for the better cardboard boxes out behind Home Depot.
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So very true. You would think the number of horror stories of companies pulling this shit would serve as a deterrent, but it seems there is always another sucker thinking that India is a good investment.
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Yeah. "Oh. With a bit of management.."
Yeah. Right.
Then you tell them something they don't want to hear and the Adjustable English Comprehension Knob gets turned down to "I'm ignoring you." and they truck on doing whatever they want.