Immigration
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Dell was famous for their customer service. As a matter of fact, the reason I bought a Dell PC and a laptop was because of the customer service. They moved the customer service to India. There were so many customer complaints and the sales were way down. A few month later they had to move the whole customer service back to US !!!!!
Lesson Learned !
Actually I am trying to do that right now. If I call any company's customer service and it is answered by an Indian, I immediately ask to talk to the supervisor, if they hang up my phone. I call one more time and if it happens again, I call to cancel my service and go to another company.
Usually mid-size or small companies do not go offshore because it is not cost effective for them. So I change my bank to a local bank and they have wonderful customer service.
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Because I did not want to work with the offshore "developer", I asked my manager why we could not go to a local university to hire an intern, at least they speak english and work in the same time zone. A college intern costs about $15 / hour. My manager said $15 could pay for 3 offshore "developers".
Fine so I found another job and let the offshore "developers" do my job.
Actually I wrote an Oracle query to get the data and loaded into SQL Server table. So I could write a report from the SQL Server table. The whole report took me 16 hours to finsih.
The other group wanted to write the same report for the internal customer. They gave it to two offshore "guru". They spent 4 months and got nothing. So they asked if they could "borrow" my code. I said ok. But still they could not come up the report because I wrote another query on the SQL Server side to finish the report which they did not know.
Finally after six months, the manager had no choice and gave the report back to an US developer.
I interviewed a lot of college graduates, not all of them asking for "125000", usually the one graduates from the Ivy league school has that attitude. I hired one from Cornell, he thought he knew everything plus he was watching the stock market the whole day. Then I hired a local state university student who was excellent worker.
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This year I had fun talking to a help group for a 'pay as you go' cell phone company. Over several days, I ended up talking to three different people. Their names were Adam, Jane, and Tom. None of them spoke english very well. I've worked with people from India, so I can recognize the accent fairly well and all three had very heavy accents. It's no wonder people hate dealing with tech help and it's pretty sad when a company has to have their help people lie about who they are. I ended up going to another company and wrote the first company a long letter about why I switched (it wasn't just their help desk). They are still trying to get my business back.
-SQLBill
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Bill - just to clarify - people are not made to "lie about who they are"...it's actually part of their training in India - believe it or not - it's a whole new industry back home (my home ie) - entire training institutes have sprung up where they teach Indians to speak "American" - change their name to one that's easily recognized by Americans etc..someone with my name (eg.) would just be shortened to Sue but complicated non-translatable Indian names (of which there're zillions) would be changed to Jill, Jane and Mary etc.
As for the outsourcing issue - guess I've just been lucky - I've never lost a job because of this - maybe it's because I've been working mostly on govt. contracts.
Lastly - it's funny about the language problems that many have complained about when dealing with Indians - I have come across very few people here in America who have even a modicum of the communication skills that many of the Indians I know have - so if language was the sole reason why there must be no outsourcing then there really is little to choose from...
Guess it really all boils down to where you get the most bang for your buck -
**ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI !!!** -
Some very interesting comments and thanks for all of them.
I think anecdotal experience is nice, but with most employees, some are good, some not so good. I'd like to think that most native employees (in terms of national origin) will do a good job and their salaries roughly reflect what they're worth. It seems to me that it's relatively rare someone is way over or under paid, but these are the cases we remember the most.
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AAARRRGH!
<<Insert a whole bunch of stuff I won't say on here>>
Check my blog, but prepare to be offended. Please leave comments - feel free to check out past blogs too. I don't think this discussion should continue on here...
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