In addition to ongoing engineering performance challenges, a lack of transparency around progress, and significant network and connectivity problems, we are now encountering scheduling issues with India-based engineers. Several have declined to attend meetings scheduled after 10:00 a.m. Central Time, citing the late hour on their end. In some cases, there is resistance to meetings held after 8:30 p.m. local time, which would require U.S.-based staff to substantially alter their work schedules by starting meetings as early as 6:00 or 7:00 a.m, a practice that falls outside standard industry norms. These scheduling disputes are repeatedly raised while the engineer declines to attend meetings or take on work, leaving the engineering lead and offshore vendor to sort through the issue. This pattern can persist for weeks, during which the offshore engineer continues to submit and receive approval for full 40-hour weekly timesheets. This outcome reflects the risks associated with outsourcing while eliminating experienced in-house talent.
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@1jk I like the way you put it. Let's bring this up in all staff AMA calls. Put them on the spot. No more implicitly expecting us to cover.
Boomers are 63+ years of age and extremely rare here. Lots of ageism at the bank and anyone with a brain, near the end of their career takes the first exit ramp. If there are any actual Boomers at the bank, they likely can't pull their heads out of their boss's back end to know it's beyond time to go already.
@1 - Why would I choose to sacrifice my own work/life balance to attend 6am meetings? I can understand offshore workers not wanting to work late, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to wake up insanely early and mess up my sleep. The bank needs to decide between teams that share working hours or being able to exploit people for cheap labor. They don’t get both.
I led a cloud migration for an app as lead engineer of several offshore contractors this year. Yeah they end their working days early in CST & have their own worklives to balance, shocking. The problem I had with it was turnover on their side & disparate technical knowledge (some were legit, others were clearly skating-by, shouldn't touch a cellphone leave alone a VM or DBMS). As for the timing gap, well, you can choose success or not success. I chose success. That means yeah I woke-up early & was online at 06:00CST ready to meet with them & discuss what was done overnight from our docket of tasks in our own little mini-scrum & team I was head of. Guess what? It worked. Of all other migrations & people on our side resisting, my project is live in its new cloud environment, theirs are not. My contractors sent me endless thanks, appreciation, & gratitude for my leadership, flexibility, & shifting meetings earlier. Direct quote from one: "You are the nicest & best app owner I have ever been able to work with here."
Does this get me anything here? Nah. Not even an exceptional rating & oh they're going to loan me out to a different group as a secondment (again, for the 3rd time in my 8 years here, if I say no, likely job loss, so I have to feign being willing to my director, I'm not willing, pick someone else this time, leave me the fck alone dude, sick of it boomer). So yeah as an org we DO have serious problems & need to stop the talent bleeding & annual staffing clusterfck shenanigans. Our leaders continually fail us because their leaders are playing silly minmax staffing games (low up-front cost, disastrous long-term costs to an org; predictable short-term gain executive thinking playing-out since AC took over as CEO, amplified under GK).
While I understand the need to btch & moan, & I don't like the offshore thing nor H1-Bs one bit, I'm not going to sabotage my own success like a stick in the mud I'm going to adapt, succeed, & quietly grumble while I wait for the economy to improve & jump ship for a huge salary bump. So OP isn't entirely wrong about the broad situation, but their response to it is. There's plenty of locals in this dumpsterfire of an org who will sabotage you without your having to do anything, or, you can do your job competently for years & they'll just move you or worse terminate you for your mistake of giving this broken company even a micron of loyalty at all.
This issue is ki-ling daily scrums
@OP Just wait till they go missing for things like Teas, Matinees, and Carnival. Yes...thats a real problem.
GK was ranked 23 on Forbes list of 100 most powerful women
My stand-ups start at 6:30am to accomodate offahore. It's already happening.
@a3 This is sarcasm right?
I don't work past 2:30 pm ever since RTO so I'm not gonna be a hypocrite and blast my Indian colleagues.
This is also a reason cracking down on flexibility for the West Coast ki-ls collaboration and teamwork. If pragmatism and doing what makes sense is dead and we have to sit in traffic to make sure our butts are doing the traditional a 9-5 in office, setting a meeting before 11 CST is unacceptable. That's noon for the East Coast. If that becomes a thing I'm not going to flinch before setting mandatory meetings for 3pm PST.
Epic response below. This is exactly how employees are made to feel. US Bank now goes more power and agency to a contractor in India than their own employees. How embarrassing.
Hello concerned employee, HR here. We are deeply invested in better ways of working and empowering our employees. To alleviate this issue, we will be outsourcing the remaining engineering roles in order to avoid scheduling conflicts. Please visit the hubs page on the intranet site to see open roles in our new offshore hub. If this doesn't fit your professional goals we enthusiastically support you seeking employment elsewhere.