Offshore Business Practices
 

I work in wireless telecommunications. For the past year I've been training a small team of offshore workers from India to take over my role and responsibilities. Layoffs have been announced at my firm and I'm expecting walking papers sometime Q1 of 2005. My entire organization, roughly 150 positions from one facility, will be moving overseas. Additional local layoffs, not to exceed 2,000, will continue for the remaining 18 months. My employer is making considerable money, but will save more utilizing offshore workers. The stockholders responded positively on Wall Street. These jobs will not be returning to the United States soon.

This topic is not to request pity. I'm confident in my skills and am capable of finding another employer. As a matter of fact, I've not yet formulated a concrete opinion regarding this subject and am wondering what others think of offshore practices. The parties in my microcosm are too close to the topic for a decent discussion.

Should we be concerned about the loss of jobs? Does this free up people to pursue even more education and technically challenging fields? Is this the natural course of events as “globalization” takes effect? Will these fields eventually become too saturated with lower-paid workers to make it a worthwhile career track? Should the government force companies to stop or limit offshoring? Should I do what I can to help a third world country out?

These are some of the questions I've heard from co-workers and family. I just don't seem to have any good responses.

Thoughts?

Personally, I don't agree with pushing jobs overseas. There seems to be a big thing over here about moving call centre jobs to India. A lot of these are for banks and financial companies. I don't like the thought that my bank details are available to people thousands of miles away, in a country where there are so many people that a criminal would never be traced.

Sorry but that smacks of racism. What makes you think that a hard working indian call centre worker who ahs trained for often a year or more for the job and works on a different timezone than the rest of his country just to keep it is more likely to swipe your details than a minumum wage worker in the US? What makes you think they're less traceable? Get over the pictures of shantytowns.

It certainly is the natural path of globalisation, the blue collar classes got fucked by this long ago, technology now makes it possible for screw the white collar workers as well. Watch the engineering grads sweat as the tens of thousands of well trained, eager hard working chinese engineers come on to the market. Is it 'right'? Well why do they have less of a right to a good job than you? If they're willing to work harder for less cash why should the government mandate that you should be hired simply because you're American? After all doing so is simply hurting American Companies (exuse the giggle, they're all based in the caymen islands anyway) ability to compete on the Global Stage.

Yes and no. Losses of jobs can wreak havoc in local economies and on Wall Street. Some areas are largely dependent on large firms and companies that employ thousands of their local populace. A mass layoff can all but devastate a local economy. On the other hand, there are other jobs out there and many of them pay decently. However, they're usually a far cry from what people have been doing. Plumbers and electricians, for example. When's the last time you heard of a waterworks firm sending their plumbing positions offshore? The layoffs can set back people and communities, but how far back depends on the individuals' situations.

Sure, if they can afford to pay for it without a job. Folks should be constantly educating themselves anyway, especially if they work in a technical field. Mix two or more aspects of the same career line. Give them more reason to keep you once they have you. [/quote]

It's not going to stop anytime soon, if that's what you mean.

I really couldn't say because I don't know the world of the wireless communication worker well enough. But I'd figure one could still make a decent career out of it, provided they stay one step ahead of everything. For example, there will still be a need for technicians here in the US for the things that people overseas can't do. A person in India can't make physical repairs here if a board shorts or if a hurricane damages a dish. So if one aspect of a job is threatened, get a leg up on another aspect of the same job and get there early, so you won't be one of hundreds coming in at the last minute. Smoother transition that way.
I don't know if they could really get companies to stop, but I do think they could get companies to limit their offshoring. I think there should be limits on it, as the loss of these jobs takes away from the prosperity of this country. Someone laid off from a goodpaying technical job could fairly easily find a job at a retail store, but that would be a dramatic cut in pay and could completely throw off this person's financial situation. They may not make enough to cover the standard expenses. They may have to move to a smaller house or apartment and sell the car for a used/cheaper one just to pay off debt or make ends meet. Prosperity in this country is generally measured by what you can afford and if people are forced to be able to afford less and less, then we become less prosperous. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if companies offered options for other positions or if other companies in the same field did reachouts for the skilled people who are losing their jobs.

Do what you feel is right, but being forced out of a job shouldn't be part of it. If you feel helping out people in a third world country is worth your job, you should have the option to quit and open up your job to someone else, not be outsourced.

For the customer support aspects of it at the very least, I suspect that within another year or so there will be a backlash--most people can't understand the Indian accent, and out of frustration they will take their money to companies that provide tech support with an American accent. Good customer service is still an important part of the American economy, and people are willing to pay more for it.

On the other hand, I know the call centers in India are already trying to counter that dissatisfaction by giving special speech classes to their employees to help them speak to American customers.

I think that, once enough jobs are offshored by corporations looking to enhance the bottom line, there won't be a sufficiently affluent customer base to buy whatever they are selling. It is difficult for people with no jobs to buy whatever a given company is selling, and I don't think it is possible for the USA to be populated entirely by CEOs of service-based companies whose labor profits are generated by the efforts of third-world employees.

Eventually, American companies will have to start marketing their products in India, where all the jobs are.

Just an aside....a number of larger Telecom companies who strive for an 'American' accent from their call centres...find it.

In Canada.

I know from first hand experience...(Worked for two of them.....)

Absolutely. My old company outsources a lot of their work to India. Shortly before I left they shut down our LA office, and cut jobs at almost every other location. It was only a matter of time before I lost my job, so I got out. I hated the place anyway, so it wasn't that big of a loss to me, but it certainly was to other people.

The thing that bothers me the most is that they ship these jobs to India to "remain competitive" yet upper management's salaries were getting bigger and bigger. In the end, it's padding the pockets of the big guys, and the peons are left working at the Food Court in the mall.

I suppose it's not really that simple, but it sure is sad to see employees nearing retirement with many years of service being kicked to the curb. It's bad for the employees who lose their jobs, bad for morale of the remaining employees, and bad for the economy. :(

Not far off it. More an issue of poor corperate governance. It's the job of the board to keep renumeration reasonable to maxamise profit for shareholders (at least in a public company).

From the Wall Street Journal of 15 September 1993

Number 1 rule of Capitalism - "You get what you pay for"

I wonder what a company that has its customer services centers elsewhere does in terms of the local national holidays or religious holidays. If the bulk of the customer service center employees follow Islam, for example, will customers who call have to put up with no answer or an automated system when the employees take time out to pray? What about Christmas? Since they don't celebrate it, does that mean customers get to have customer service as usual on Dec. 25th? How about on July 4 or the last Monday of May? And what about the other way around? What do the customers do when the employees have a holiday they normally take off but we don't?

That's the Cliff's Notes version. The actual stone tablet reads " You get what you pay for...or less." :eyebrow:

I placed a phone call to a customer service/catalog order department today and was quite surprised to find that my call had actually been connected to someplace in America.

Yes, United States of, not just "North".

The last couple of times I called EarthLink, I got an Indian-sounding person with an American/Christian name. Too funny.

I saw a feature on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago. Rooms full of people who were practicing saying "Hello, my name is Barbara ..." These workers are given classes in colloquial American English and accents. A lot of people that aren't getting jobs in acting are going to work in these call centers, as they are able to make money hand over fist by their standards, and it's really a form of acting. I've never spoken (as far as I know) to one of the 'good' ones on the phone, but some of them are very convincing in terms of sounding American.

It was interesting when they were interviewed individually and they gave their real names and then said their "work" names ... Sanjiv, Ram, and Purnima became Steve, Ron, and Betty.

Damn. Their even training immigrants to replace Barbara Walters?

I'm not sure how to react.

tw made a joke. It is actually quite funny.

I shall laugh. :D

That's twice in the past week, is it not?

American does not even know how to speak a foreign (English) language. It's "They're".

What have you done with the old tw?

He's a pod.

It's the only possible explanation.

Originally Posted by richlevy
Number 1 rule of Capitalism - "You get what you pay for"

We pay our guys in India $400 a month, and we get what we pay for.

What we're discovering is that the Indian workers cannot for the life of them think outside the box. These are highly-educated, friendly, very nice people, with no capacity to reason outside what scripts they are given. This situation is not improving for the 9 months this has been in operation. Half our day is spent fixing the issues the Indians screw up. Luckily, our portion of the call center is not going to India in the near or forseeable future. That's not to say they wouldn't try to move it.

What I find disingenuous is the Dell commercial where the idiot is lying in bed calling Dell tech support and reaches an American. They moved their support to India. Only Dell business support was moved back to the US because the quality of support was so horrendous. Foamy the Squirrel has somthing to say about all this.

What pisses me off to no end are people that bash lassiez faire capitalism [no beef with the bash], and then tell me to look for my cheese elsewhere . People have criticized the book I linked to as being overly simplistic, and a tool used by management to brainwash their employees. Right on both counts. Our management had us attend a "Dealing with Change" session that featured the book.

I fully expect that there will be tech support opportunities elsewhere, as our counterparts cannot repair or construct machines remotely, but this MBA, next-quarter-is-all-we-care-about-til-we-fulfill-our-exit-strategy-mentality is destructive and can't go unpunished.

This isn't an Indian thing. Being like that is demanded in call center policies here in the US too. Going beyond the script isn't encouraged much because that potentially increases call times and in some call centers you have to take X number of calls an hour to be considered productive. I've run into enough of it, as the operator and as the customer.

FWIW, my husband says the same thing about all the outsourced Indians he has to work with who are supposedly programmers and developers for his company, too. He says even management is aware of it, and they have mentioned closing that office and bringing all the jobs back home if the Indian office doesn't start solving problems without having to be babysat through each one.

(Although in reality, what will probably actually happen is they'll close that office, and just dump all the extra work on the already-existing American employees.)

my personal favorite indian call center experience was with a mortgage company. i called them inquiring about a payoff. the first person read their script and i asked a question she was not prepared for and she said she couldn't answer that. i asked for a supervisor who said the same thing. i went through 4 "thickly accented" supervisors before they transferred me to a dead end voice mail box.

apparently there isn't anyone who is authorised or able to answer anything off script in that particular center.

What quality and production can you expect from a manager of electrical components whose name is Randy Shorts?

I had to deal with McAfee online tech support recently. A transcript is in either the internet or technology thread... I cancelled my McAfee service and I'm still working on getting my company to stop using them as well.

Its rather silly to blame WHERE support comes from. Devil is in the details. Do it yourself. Here is a Gateway computer model GP7-600. It had only 64K memory. I want to increase memory. No problem. Their support page is http://support.gateway.com/support/default.asp . Enter the serial number: 0018640774 . Access what is provided to tech support.

Now imagine yourself as a support technician. What size memory SIMMs can be installed in this computer? What software will upgrade this machine? For example, what is the latest BIOS and what does that upgrade do? You tell me. You have everything that tech support has.

Surprises. I could even run the program that (supposidly) identifies all upgrades unique to that machine - and still get wrong answers. They list an NIC that was not provided with that machine and that still is in that machine. They also list sound cards that don't exist. And they list software upgrades that already exist in that machine.

Now it gets interesting. I get two 128 Mb SIMMs. They will not work. Why? Jumping ahead a few hours later, I learn these Gateway computers, even after upgraded with the latest BIOS, will understand 8 chip 128Mb SIMMs, but not undertand 2 chip 128Mb SIMMs. (I learn this from other sources outside of Gateway). How is tech support suppose to know this? Tech support has access to the same web site information sources we have. They have virtually nothing.

So we blame tech support for being stupid? This Gateway support was from the west coast (confirmed by asking about the weather). He claimed he has access to information I did not have. So I asked him to read from his pages. Then I described the chart on his page or completed paragraphs (from memory). I had access to everything he had. Tech support would be just as bad anywhere else in the world.

Its not about where tech support comes from. In fact some of my least technically informed tech support people are Americans. Its about top management. BTW, Gateway has long been removed from my list of acceptable machines because of management decisions. This story only confirms my decision.

So how does technically incompetant management blame someone else? They put the tech support in Ireland or India. Then the racists among us quickly blame ... them others.

Gateway should long have been removed from your 'acceptable' list. It was that obvious some years ago. Rarely matters where tech support comes from. But some will never believe this.

Why do I call tech support? Because their own web sites are so devoid of facts. In an America where so many computer builders don't even know what is suppose to be in a power supply; that is also the mentality of their top management. Management protected by an anti-American concept called "Buy American". Don't like the tech support? Then look who is running the company - and therein lies the problem. Bad web sites not constantly upgraded to include answers to latest questions. Foreigners doing American jobs is secondary.

Tech support moved to India? If you have any doubts as to the intent or why, then first ask - does top management even know how to use the product? Did they come from where the work gets done , or are they graduates of the business schools? Anything may be called symptoms.

Posted above is a Quality Coils story. That abridged Wall Street Journal report also discussed other companies. They provided the names and dates. It is long, therefore it was worth reading. Find details of their top managers up. Notice their educational backgrounds.

We had a massive NE blackout one and a quarter years ago. Who created it? Foreign employees from Argentina? Would not matter who was doing the work. All top management in First Energy Corporation was so devoid of technical knowledge that they even ran a $400 billion Bush Cheney fund raiser so they did not have to fix a potential Three Mile Island problem. We could be reading the book "We almost lost Toledo". Blaming foreigners is too often akin to being racist. Blaming others only because they are different? Where is the technical ignorance that was not first in top management?

You have an example from Gateway. You tell me how I was suppose to know what SIMMs go into that computer AND that 2 chip type SIMMs will not work. You want to blame someone. Start there. Why can I not get simple technical support?