Barclays Plans to Cut Up to 5,600 IT Jobs

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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Barclays financial institution, a worldwide banking concern, has announced its plans to eliminate up to 19K positions, almost 6K in the IT sector alone.

The job cuts will be achieved through automating IT platforms across the group, infrastructure consolidation and moving to digital channels on the retail side.
 
Automation my ass. Basically they tell the remaining folks "do more with less".
 
Automation my ass. Basically they tell the remaining folks "do more with less".
Because they always do.
Can't wsait for all the "lazy Americans need to learn what real work posts" from the mindless trolls coming next...
 
Automation my ass. Basically they tell the remaining folks "do more with less".

Hey, you must work in IT ;-)

IT seems like its always the most understaffed and overworked group, and the first ones to be cut. From my experience, its because upper management has absolutely no clue how IT works, or how much/what they do, until something breaks. So, when everything is running fine, they just keep piling on the work or start cutting staff. This is true for just about any sector of the workforce, but IT seems to be especially susceptible since most of the time they don't have anything to show or generate revenue. We just keep all your shit working, we're not important or anything.
 
Its because IT is overhead, and reducing overhead costs is always the first thing that upper management tries to trim.

The problem is that they don't realize that IT affects the bottom line in industries where virtually everything is done electronically on various software systems and hardware platforms.
 
I don't know the size their IT department used to be, but anyone who has ever actually worked in large companies IT department knows almost 60% of the folks there are nearly useless.

It sucks that these people are losing their jobs, but sometimes there is a lot more going on than you know. IT isn't an easy industry, you're either "talented"/excellent worker or one day the axe will come. There are too many people/companies out there who can do the job better.
 
There are too many people/companies out there who can do the job better.
Cheaper is more like it. My company recently outsourced:
1) 3/4 of HR (I'm not kidding)
2) 1/4 of Finance department (again no joke, even though the overseas counterparts supposedly doing the busy work are insanely slow and barely speak English and are afraid to ask questions)
3) 1/2 of IT (got a helpdesk... fine, but also outsourced most of the network team, the sharepoint team, and 1/2 the server guys)

Their counterparts in my experience so far are borderline RETARDED... but when they'll work for $10K a year and consider themselves wealthy, hard to compete with that even if it takes three of them to do the job.
 
Hey, you must work in IT ;-)

IT seems like its always the most understaffed and overworked group, and the first ones to be cut. From my experience, its because upper management has absolutely no clue how IT works, or how much/what they do, until something breaks. So, when everything is running fine, they just keep piling on the work or start cutting staff. This is true for just about any sector of the workforce, but IT seems to be especially susceptible since most of the time they don't have anything to show or generate revenue. We just keep all your shit working, we're not important or anything.

While I understand that layoffs have to happen to keep the company afloat, its the IT departments managements responsibility to properly "sell" his/her departments business value to the overall functioning of the company. Too many times cuts are done without looking at the long term ramifications to the business operations.

Furthermore, if you are an ITIL shop, it behooves the director of IT to build value to the company to prevent even the thought of cutting. This is done with metrics that translates into dollars if they decide to cut along with an updated service level agreement that reflects the reduced staffing levels.
 
Its because IT is overhead, and reducing overhead costs is always the first thing that upper management tries to trim.

The problem is that they don't realize that IT affects the bottom line in industries where virtually everything is done electronically on various software systems and hardware platforms.

Well said. Let me give you an example:

Company A is a trucking company that mainly transports goods from New York to California at an mutually agreed upon interval. Lets say they have 10 trucks that run at 75% engine max performance but they get the goods on time with minor delays due to factors out of your control. Overall your customers are very happy and rarely complain. Well next year you lose a client but gain a few more at less income but same workload and distance. Upper management has a meeting and decide "Hey why not sell (layoff) five trucks and let the five remaining trucks do the same work and the same expectation of service to clients. One of the managers raises his/her hands and asks how can you do this with less trucks and they are told "Do more with less" or find another job. The manager, wanting to keep feeding his family tells his truckers to load up the remaining trucks even more and run the engines at 100% all the time.

After a few months of the trucks start breaking down and critical shipments do not make it in time and customers get angry. You start losing contracts because you were unable to meet customer demands based on the resources available.

One of the most critical jobs of a department director is to show how his/her department provides value for the company and back it up with dollars and nice charts.

Same issue here with Barclays. If they are an ITIL shop, I hope they told upper management that the current SLA's are null and void.
 
Cheaper is more like it. My company recently outsourced:
1) 3/4 of HR (I'm not kidding)
2) 1/4 of Finance department (again no joke, even though the overseas counterparts supposedly doing the busy work are insanely slow and barely speak English and are afraid to ask questions)
3) 1/2 of IT (got a helpdesk... fine, but also outsourced most of the network team, the sharepoint team, and 1/2 the server guys)

Their counterparts in my experience so far are borderline RETARDED... but when they'll work for $10K a year and consider themselves wealthy, hard to compete with that even if it takes three of them to do the job.

This is why companies who outsource jobs like this should get ZERO tax breaks.
 
Outsourcing is slowing being cut back. A lot of NCR call centers in India are showing stagnant growth. Nowadays, automation is cheaper then some outsourced labor, as
1) no labor problems
2) lower capital investment
 
IT seems like its always the most understaffed and overworked group, and the first ones to be cut.
Its because IT is overhead, and reducing overhead costs is always the first thing that upper management tries to trim.


I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.
 
I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.

Everything you do well be under under appreciated, except maybe fire fighter.
 
I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.

Whats really daunting for entry level people is when they want you to know A, B, C, D & E. Oh F too, and G & H will help you get in to door. It's litany of products they want you to know now.
 
I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.

If you are high-skilled (even if you're not high-experienced), you'll be extremely successful and have a great career.

The people at risk are the ones who don't "get it", haven't been at it as a hobby, or simply aren't enthusiastic and gave up on learning/changing.

I made nearly $100k out of college thanks to the IT industry. If I left my job tomorrow, I'd have one the day after. It just takes effort and making sure you meet/know people.

IT should be fun to you, it's the only way you'll survive.
 
If you are high-skilled (even if you're not high-experienced), you'll be extremely successful and have a great career.

The people at risk are the ones who don't "get it", haven't been at it as a hobby, or simply aren't enthusiastic and gave up on learning/changing.

I made nearly $100k out of college thanks to the IT industry. If I left my job tomorrow, I'd have one the day after. It just takes effort and making sure you meet/know people.

IT should be fun to you, it's the only way you'll survive.


Pretty much. Although I have met a lot of people in the industry who have taken a few certifications but might as well be worthless. Let's face it, a fair amount of IT support can be done by automation. It's just management doesn't do it because they know it'll make a lot of people obsolete.

When I left my IT Support position to take a manager position elsewhere, I automated everything so I didn't have to hire grunts to do simple shit. It allowed me to focus on efficiency and expand my skill sets elsewhere to grow in the company.
 
My current company which is a large financial institution, outsourced approximately 97% of their IT support staff. Every time you have an IT issue, it takes a minimum of 1-2 hrs to fix.

I once had to have an application I needed for work installed, it took 3 weeks. How can it possibly take 3 weeks?!?!? There's also the language. I really tried to speak to this guy in IT from Mumbai and I him repeat things 3 times because I just couldn't understand him. One of these days, it will blow up in management's face. Or at least I hope.
 
I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.

Don't waste your time. IT is a saturated field with lots of laid off people that are constantly hunting for work. They're willing to take anything and are pushing salaries and wages downward to the point where most of IT is just another McJob. There are very, very few positions in which you can earn a lot of moolah and they're usually specialized, depending on the good graces of a certain company to continue making and selling a product that needs highly qualified and expensive people. When one of those super expensive software packages or systems reaches EOL, then the people who were super-deluxe awesome at it now have a pretty much useless skillset and get to go back to a call center to work for peanuts.

As far as the stress part, well that happens at any job and it doesn't matter what you do for a living, but what kinda person you are and how much you let things bother you. I wouldn't factor in stress at all since pretty much all of life and work sucks and is stressful with the only way of getting out of it all being in a crappy box, feet first.

That said, you could just try to marry someone rich and be a person of leisure. Find a cougar with some lootskis from a dead hubby or three under her belt (assuming you're on the guy half of the gender fence) and then just get some kinda do nothing job to kill time.
 
In college one of my computer science professors said "In the 70's it was hard to do computer science, in the 80's it was cool to do computer science, in the 90's it became profitable and soon it's just going to be a bitch."
 
I do know some IT folk that make good money but it's true that what they do is very specialized. There are some older systems that are very good to learn. An example is Epic, the system that runs hospital records. It's too costly for hospitals to change their system so they just keep hiring the IT professionals to keep it running. Find your niche.
 
NOT tears for "IT people" now a days.
When I was in the field as a technician you had to do it ALL.
Networks, computers, printers, wiring, PBX, software support etc. The only exception was programming.
My job now is supporting technical people in the field. Support specific equipment, but NOT any software on PC sides. Had a tech installing a high volume printer for the output of a banking specific software package. His job was to make sure the printer was working. A whole room full of IT people and NOBODY would check the software setting because it wasn't "there job". You want a definition of WORTHLESS? All they had to do was get on he phone with the software vendor and run down some settings checks. I had to have my tech do it because we couldn't test effectively otherwise.
 
Don't waste your time. IT is a saturated field with lots of laid off people that are constantly hunting for work. They're willing to take anything and are pushing salaries and wages downward to the point where most of IT is just another McJob.

Probably depends on the area. Around here, it is very difficult to find qualified IT employees. Qualified being the key. We've had a programmer position open at this company for over a year now, and a basic helpdesk support position open for 6 months. We get plenty of applicants, particularly for the helpdesk position, but none of them are qualified. Almost all of the applicants don't even have basic computer skills. They just want a job, any job, and expect us to train them. We are understaffed and don't have the time to do much training. We've had only a handful of qualified programmers come through, but they all wanted at least double what the position pays. They might get that in a big city, but not here.
 
That said, you could just try to marry someone rich and be a person of leisure. Find a cougar with some lootskis from a dead hubby or three under her belt (assuming you're on the guy half of the gender fence) and then just get some kinda do nothing job to kill time.

While that is no doubt a great advice, attending your granny mistress is hardly nothing. You gotta make her feel special.
 
Hey, you must work in IT ;-)

IT seems like its always the most understaffed and overworked group, and the first ones to be cut. From my experience, its because upper management has absolutely no clue how IT works, or how much/what they do, until something breaks. So, when everything is running fine, they just keep piling on the work or start cutting staff. This is true for just about any sector of the workforce, but IT seems to be especially susceptible since most of the time they don't have anything to show or generate revenue. We just keep all your shit working, we're not important or anything.

I would agree with part of this. Upper management wants to make a phone call when something isn't working and somebody magically "fixes it". There is no understanding how anything actually works there; all is offloaded on IT.
But at the same time the IT field has been so compartmentalized and specialize until you have a group of people that are experts on narrow specific tasks and won't touch anything else. So this breeds a "not my job" mentality.
And really this was a lack of leadership and direction in organizations.

Remember the huge push for everyone in a computer related fields to rush out and get your MCSE certs and expect a huge jump in salary. I knew a bunch of guys (and some gals) that did this. And some had the gall to demand more money because they got certified on something they had been supporting all along.
Some demanded they are "certified" so they shouldn't have to do any dirty work; only sit behind a keyboard.
I could not believe the egotism of some of these guys. I rejected the idea of gaining a cert suddenly made you move valuable as if you just completed a college degree.
If you recall there were MCSE "boot camps" where you could take a crash course to pass the exam and have NO real skill with networking, PC or software.
The company I worked for hired a couple guys like that and had to fire them for incompetence.
Several times my company was hired to "fix" everything a group of MCSEs did on a cutover. They would upgrade PCs, servers, but because they didn't support printers so NONE of the printers would print. The following day no business could be done.
 
You keep thinking that IT is the only group which is not understood. Let me put this really simply to people; if you do not directly contribute to revenue, management really doesn't know what you do or care what you do because they in all reality want to get rid of you because you are not bringing money in the door. Sorry, business, for the most part, is about measurable metrics.

Now, if you could show your management how you DIRECTLY adjusted that income stream, then they will learn your name a fucking hurry.
 
I'm just going into IT (entry level) and have heard this kind of stuff almost everywhere. I'm currently trying to come up with a new career path, soon. Is just seems too stressful and permanently under appreciated.

Eh ...., the only way to not be permanently under appreciated is to run your own business, it's still stressful though.

The very foundation of employment is underappreciation because you get paid less than the value you generate. That's what capitalism is all about.
 
Probably depends on the area. Around here, it is very difficult to find qualified IT employees. Qualified being the key. We've had a programmer position open at this company for over a year now, and a basic helpdesk support position open for 6 months. We get plenty of applicants, particularly for the helpdesk position, but none of them are qualified.
Which is so strange considering the offer of $10 an hour... :p
 
You keep thinking that IT is the only group which is not understood. Let me put this really simply to people; if you do not directly contribute to revenue, management really doesn't know what you do or care what you do because they in all reality want to get rid of you because you are not bringing money in the door. Sorry, business, for the most part, is about measurable metrics.

Now, if you could show your management how you DIRECTLY adjusted that income stream, then they will learn your name a fucking hurry.

Truth. But even with measurable metrics, it's really hard for some poor managers to understand anything but sales = revenue = profit. Coming from something like fraud, I've seen some incredibly dense people that couldn't comprehend that spending $1M/year to prevent $20M/year in losses was a good deal. "But you're spending $1M you didn't generate..." :rolleyes:
 
Which is so strange considering the offer of $10 an hour... :p

No one in our IT dept makes anywhere near that. It's quite a bit more. The compensation package is very competitive for this area. There just aren't enough qualified people looking for work. Hell, I think quality labor is hard to find in any line of work. Sure there are tons of unemployed people looking for work, but how many of them are really really good at what they do? How many people currently employed are really really good at what they do? I have a feeling it's a small minority, and everyone else just skates by. I don't do helpdesk anymore and haven't for almost a decade, but the amount of stupid I had to deal with was mind blowing.
 
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