Hahahaha at natwest trying to blame a indian worker!!

NAR

NAR wrote: »

That's a massive jump! What has been said on these forums is that the work had been outsourced to India to less experienced staff than what had been doing the work in the UK.

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Its not outsourced, it is an RBS employee. At no point has RBS said it was an indian person nor what level of experience the person had. Even the Registry's claim only said it was a junior member of staff and made no mention of their relative experience to others that were working on the project.

Nobody is correcting you on the "outsourcing/offshoring" issue. I was replying to you making an unsubstantiated claim of racism, by stating people on these forums were suggesting that less experienced Indian staff had caused the problem. This may be correct, or not, however no one, whose posts I have read, were being racist! :mad:

thelawnet

callum9999 wrote: »

You say that as if that's an unreasonable request? I don't judge my friends in real life based on a comparison of their wealth or living standards, I see no reason why that should take place in the business world...

And people keep going on about "cultural differences" - how on earth does that affect a financial system? Of course it may affect a personal relationship, but my (admittedly almost non-existant) understanding of things like automated banking transactions is that they are relatively culture-less? "There's a glitch in Sundays reports that needs looking into", "maybe so but you like Bollywood and I like Hollywood so no, I'm not taking advice off you"?

That's inane.

Offshoring has the goal of reducing onshore salaries, and making people in the UK unemployed.

As far as UK workers are concerned, the pool of Indian workers is effectively infinite.

If you get a new colleague from the UK job market you know, generally speaking, that if he is more experienced/capable than you area, he will get paid more than you, and vice versa. That's unproblematic.

The problem with Indian workers is that they will do a similar job for far less money. They want to put you out of a living. Make you unemployed.

The newly qualified graduate who just started, sitting in the next cubicle might be keen to impress, brighter and more hard-working than you, but you see him every day, you understand his motivations, and there's only one of him, and he'll probably take a job somewhere else if he can get a payrise.

Onshore workers have a strong incentive to make the offshore workers look bad. Of course they do. If the offshore workers look too good then the onshore workers will all be out of a job!

It is nothing to do with Bollywood or whatever other nonsense you are spouting; a team of developers in Bishopsgate on many times the salary of the team in Bangalore are not going to be to keen to say 'oops, we f***ed up, you're right, silly us.' More likely, they will find mistakes and foolishness made by the Indian team, and highlight them to senior management, in order to portrary themselves as indispensable. And it's nothing to do with reasonable request or otherwise, it's just bloody obvious that if you hire workers on 1/10 of the salary to do the same job, then the higher-paid workers are not going to be too happy about it.

callum9999

thelawnet wrote: »

That's inane.

Offshoring has the goal of reducing onshore salaries, and making people in the UK unemployed.

As far as UK workers are concerned, the pool of Indian workers is effectively infinite.

If you get a new colleague from the UK job market you know, generally speaking, that if he is more experienced/capable than you area, he will get paid more than you, and vice versa. That's unproblematic.

The problem with Indian workers is that they will do a similar job for far less money. They want to put you out of a living. Make you unemployed.

The newly qualified graduate who just started, sitting in the next cubicle might be keen to impress, brighter and more hard-working than you, but you see him every day, you understand his motivations, and there's only one of him, and he'll probably take a job somewhere else if he can get a payrise.

Onshore workers have a strong incentive to make the offshore workers look bad. Of course they do. If the offshore workers look too good then the onshore workers will all be out of a job!

It is nothing to do with Bollywood or whatever other nonsense you are spouting; a team of developers in Bishopsgate on many times the salary of the team in Bangalore are not going to be to keen to say 'oops, we f***ed up, you're right, silly us.' More likely, they will find mistakes and foolishness made by the Indian team, and highlight them to senior management, in order to portrary themselves as indispensable. And it's nothing to do with reasonable request or otherwise, it's just bloody obvious that if you hire workers on 1/10 of the salary to do the same job, then the higher-paid workers are not going to be too happy about it.

Absolute rubbish. They don't want to make you unemployed any more than someone applying for a job in the UK wants to keep the other applicants out of work. They want to live a decent life/feed their family just like anyone else does...

Of course the higher paid workers aren't going to be happy about it - but I hardly see how that matters. Quite frankly, if anyone deliberately ignored a problem to try and make another colleague - onshore or offshore - look bad then they would get instant dismissal from me. By all means, dig up problems that they've made and lobby against them if you must, but to deliberately leave a problem to fester is gross misconduct.

The "nonsense" I was spouting was in response to the people moaning about how "cultural differences" cause errors...

Debt_Free_Chick

I am persuaded by this account, which is NOT posted on The Register but on another completely non-IT forum.

Source at the end .... Text in quotations is from the (RBS) source. In italics, my comments.

"CA7 was updated to a new level last weekend. It was causing problems with the schedules on Monday so was backed out on Tuesday. The backout caused the "queue" of jobs for that batch to be unexpectedly deleted. "

This is consistent with comments of RBS spokesman on Channel 4 news last night.

"RBS wasn't actually affected directly as the schedule is on a different LPAR - however focus was on NWB & UB and normal everyday errors on RBS side were not getting dealt with."

This is consistent with my own experience, as an RBS customer i.e. not impacted at all. LPAR is, AIUI, a separate partition on the Bank's mainframe computer i.e. it was isolated from the partitions affected, which were for NatWest & Ulster Bank.

"Not sure why DR wasn't invoked to be honest, but it wouldn't have made much difference as we'd still have been hours behind on our batches."

" I'm sure that the discussions were had about DR and there must have been a good reason why it wasn't invoked. In truth DR is great in certain circumstances if it works, but in this one it wouldn't have. Obviously I can't go into too much detail here, but although the outsourcing to India did not cause the initial problem, the recovery has prompted questions to be asked as to who thought dumping over 50% of the UK support staff was a good idea - indeed people made redundant less than a month ago have now been offered short term contracts to come back and help. Unfortunately, the balance sheet and pressure from the government to become independent again hasn't helped in the outsourcing/offshoring decision and I speak as a someone who was due to have been made redundant two weeks ago. "

DR = Disaster Recovery

Source: as is obvious from the above, someone actually involved at RBS, posting on another forum elsewhere.

Fascinating stuff - well, to a saddo like me who simply has to "understand and rationalise" everything in the World :rotfl:

At a guess, backing out the CA7 upgrade seems to have resulted in some unexpected issues - like deletion of the jobs in the queue. Normally, a "restore" is the first option anyone would try, but it seems like the restore option didn't work. Perhaps this is why RBS is looking to see whether it has a case to sue CA Technologies? Perhaps CA's code caused the unforeseen deletions resulting from the rollback?

BTW this guy is on his 5th 12-hour shift in four days :eek:

Debt_Free_Chick

No mention (above) of anyone from India, or the offshored facility being involved (consistent with RBS's formal announcements). The suggestion of an Indian worker being involved was simply lazy journalism which regurgitated speculation on The Register. But if you read ALL the posts on The Register, you'll see that this is denied by a couple of RBS IT folk. One guy even refers to the IR (Incident Report) and states that there is no Indian name on the IR.

Outsourcing/Offshoring is not the issue here. It was "just one of those things". !!!!!! happens (and happens a lot, in IT)

Fiddlestick

InsideInsurance wrote: »

For both people who claim to have worked in IT for years and for websites claiming to have "insider information" it is amazing that all don't know the difference between outsourcing and offshoring.

The RBS Indian Development Centre is an offshoring exercise not outsourcing because it is not outside of the company. All the staff there are on RBS contracts.

That's not really the issue.

The problem is that the process - whatever you wish to call it - ultimately resulted in the redundancies of many of the old-hands that had the institutional knowledge not only to avoid such a problem but to recover from it quickly.

Race isn't the issue - you can get black idiots, white idiots or brown idiots but an idiot is just an idiot no matter what colour of skin they have.

callum9999

Fiddlestick wrote: »

That's not really the issue.

The problem is that the process - whatever you wish to call it - ultimately resulted in the redundancies of many of the old-hands that had the institutional knowledge not only to avoid such a problem but to recover from it quickly.

Race isn't the issue - you can get black idiots, white idiots or brown idiots but an idiot is just an idiot no matter what colour of skin they have.

Is it? What specifically went wrong - and what specifically happened because the people in charge weren't "old-hands with institutional knowledge" then?

thelawnet

callum9999 wrote: »

Of course the higher paid workers aren't going to be happy about it - but I hardly see how that matters.

You don't see how it matters that your best, most capable, most employable workers are disgruntled?

Glad I don't work for you.

It's pretty simple to be honest.

You've got a team in Bishopsgate and one in Bangalore. The team in Bishopsgate get together after work and know each other personally and professionally. They are a team and their interests are with their team mates for many reasons.

So if Joe in London sees that his colleague Fred, sitting in the next seat, has checked in some bad code, he might be go over and say 'Hey Fred, this code is no good, you should do it like this'. No harm done, damage fixed.

But if he says that Deepak in Bangalore has done the same thing, there's a powerful motivation to say nothing, pretend he hasn't noticed, because it's going to reflectly badly on the Bangalore team, which helps to secure the Bishopgate team's position.

Of course Joe could just send Deepak an email saying 'Hey Deepak, this code is no good'. But he really doesn't have any incentive to do so. He can escalate it directly to management, but it just makes him look bitter. 'Why didn't you just tell Deepak? Don't bother us with this petty politics.'

So the safest thing to do is nothing, I never noticed it. Let the merde hit the fan.

Quite frankly, if anyone deliberately ignored a problem to try and make another colleague - onshore or offshore - look bad then they would get instant dismissal from me.

Really.

How would that work? 'Hey Joe, you're fired for not spotting Deepak's f***-up' Yeah right. Joe: 'Sorry boss, I didn't know anything about it.'

The "nonsense" I was spouting was in response to the people moaning about how "cultural differences" cause errors...

Of course they do. The users hate dealing with people in India. They don't understand the place names, how to spell people's name, they have strong accents, they lack cultural context of working patterns, office setup, so many things.

Lots of people say that Indian workers are too literal and lack initiative, but you don't even need to go into that to recognise that it's more difficult dealing with someone in Mumbai than Manchester.

stormymonday

As the Inquirer has pointed out this IT debacle is in inexcusable.

The issue is not that an upgrade went wrong or that someone may have made errors since these things happen all the time in IT. Instead, the real problem is that the technical governance within RBS\Natwest\Ulster Bank has been so poor that 10 days after the backout took place the systems are still not running properly. Some customers have not had access to their money for nearly a fortnight while others have suffered numerous unexplained movements of funds in and out of their accounts or seen sums go astray. Given that the basic function of a bank is to take in deposits, handle payments, transfer money and carry out the basic accounting related to such processes this is failure by RBS\NatWest\Ulster Bank at the most fundamental level. The responsibility for the inability of the bank to meet its customers simplest needs must lie with the senior management who are clearly not overseeing the day to day operation of the bank properly rather than with the IT staff regardless of whether the latter work in the UK or India.

Mandelbrot

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

Sadly one finds invariably that
1. There are those who know a great deal about the issue being discussed, usually as a result of their employment. They are therefore banned by their contracts from making any comments on it. So we don't hear from this group.

Not straightforwardly, of course.
But there are anonymous ways of putting information 'out there'.
And if there is sufficient anger at things being done ...