This is not at all surprising.

It’s horrible, but merely an intermediary step towards automation. The moment some AI or semi-AI (or even just a shell script) becomes cheaper (not necessarily better) than the IT worker in question, that’ll also be the end.

And that is happening very quickly, by the way.

What is a little mystifying is that I’ve been on the other side of offshoring/outsourcing (though never laid off), and without exception the support is worse, slower and of extremely low quality.

In addition, the company will lose the flexibility and years of accrued knowledge and experience that long-time IT staff will possess.

Cengage talks about flexibility, but in reality all that just went away; major changes they want to make in the future will be difficult to nearly-impossible as they are now locked into that vendor, and it will be difficult to extricate themselves. And having just discarded all the institutional knowledge possesses by their IT staff, it won’t be long before no one there actually knows how all of their systems function.

But hey, they’ll make more profit for a few quarters! That’s what it’s all about, right?