Hire Local!

Earlier this year, I was laid off from a job I held for 15 years. In that time, I progressed from a Junior DBA for a startup company to a Senior DBA (likely on the verge to take over as management) of a company created out of a divestiture of the same product by a Fortune 500 company. At the time I was laid off, 132 of my very talented co-workers were also laid off. Most of us had been with the product since it's creation.

Our layoff was supposed to be the last of the "post-divestiture" layoffs. We were told that the company was going through financial restructuring...that they needed to make some hard decisions. In the 3 months since that layoff, the company has gone through two more. The latest happened last week...300 people which basically accounted for the remainder of the operations and development staff based in the US.

It was about 2 weeks after being laid off that I saw the first hints of what said "financial restructuring" really was. I was logging into LinkedIn...as I did every morning...to look up any newly posted or suggested positions. I found it interesting that this particular morning, LinkedIn's algorithm matched me to a database administrator job with none other than the company I was just laid off from! Curious, I pulled up the listing. The job description matched my old duties; however, it was posted in Poland.

My curiosity raised! I conducted a simple Google search: average salary dba Poland. I immediately see an "Oracle DBA" figure of about 96k PLN. I quickly took that number and put it into a currency converter. It came out to just over $26k US! Now, I know you probably don't have the average salary of an Oracle DBA at the tip of your brain, so I will put that in perspective for you. The same position in Poland pulls a salary that is less than 1/3 that of the average US salary, and just over 1/4 of what my salary was before being laid off! As a matter of fact, most of the operations and development people I worked with made very high 5-figure to low 6-figure salaries.

The "financial restructuring" that our company laid us off for was to get rid of highly paid US workers and replace them with low paid workers overseas!

This fact was further brought home talking to some of my old co-workers who were part of the recent layoffs. Since the initial operations and development layoffs in September, they say a bunch of overseas people were hired in to take our place...from Poland and India. Because the company got rid of so many experts, the product has been suffering. There are regular service outages, and customers are leaving in droves. These newly hired people from overseas are not coming up to speed fast enough to support the product.

To add insult to injury, many in the last round of layoffs were actually given a future termination date instead of a severance, and are basically being told that they need to train their replacements being brought in from overseas. Upper management is no longer hiding their new financial model: executives and company headquarters will be US-based, while all the workers will be located overseas.

Now, you would think with all of this talk the last few years about immigration, and folks asserting that there is not enough available talent here in the US, that my co-workers and myself would have no issue finding a new job! Sure, it is a pandemic and all, but there are numerous postings out there for quality operations and development people, aren't there?

What I've been finding in my job search is that for every US-based operations or development job posted on various job boards, there are no less than 5 posted for Poland and India. It has never been about there being a lack of talent in the US. As a matter of fact, operations and development jobs are so hard to land here, because there are too many candidates to choose from! Companies have their pick, so they take their time...often months...collecting and screening every person they can looking for that magical unicorn that checks off every last one of their boxes. US-based companies are starting to expect operations and development folks to do each other's job for the same pay for one job...they want people who can maintain the server, do all of the database administration, AND do all of the coding to access that server and database! If the operation is small, this may be doable. But as anyone who has worked in operations or development knows, it is near impossible to wear all of these hats in a large-scale environment! You need no less than 3 people to cover all of these tasks. You need experts in each of the areas to make sure things are done correctly. "Jack of all trades, master of none" does not really work in the world of data that we live in!

So what happens when companies must face the fact that they need individual people in each of these areas? They take operations and development overseas where they can hire 3 people for the same as 1 US-based person!

So, the real problem is not the lack of highly skilled US workers. The problem is with corporate greed! If it can be done for cheaper, they WILL send jobs overseas. This leaves US workers out, carrying the burden of education debt for degrees and other credentials they cannot use. Some will be lucky enough to land positions in lower paying public service jobs (government, public school systems, etc.). However, those jobs are not as plentiful. Others may be lucky to find a company that still prefers to have their talent local, but there is always that fear...what if the company or product changes hands, and the new executives want to "financially restructure" the company. I know that will always be my fear, now that it has happened to me and hundreds of others I've worked with for a very long time!

I don't know how to fix this growing problem. I just know that it needs to be fixed. The financial gap will only continue to grow in this country, otherwise, until there is not much of middle class left...just a bunch of highly skilled and educated people fighting over the few retail, food service, manufacturing, teaching, and service jobs out there. Few will make it into the executive suite, some will make their way into public service organizations, and then we will have our medical folks. This is NOT the way to build a thriving economy!