MikeStanton

Don't take it so hard. I was going to make it 4/10, but I thought "Hey, the guy's a teacher and needs some encouragement."

Of course, if this was Oz, I would be awarding you a cup for breathing and a certificate for putting your underwear on the right way round.

Badge

Nothing to do with superioty. People get annoyed when the person on the other end of the line cannot understand them. No 1 problem with overseas call centres.

BM

Badge

lol. Mike maybe you do have a personality after all.

BM

anya4oz

Did you guys ever read Charles Handy's book 'The Empty Raincoat'?

In it, Handy explains that, because of the factors you outline here, we must bring up successive generations to become, effectively, one-man corporations, in charge of their own business destiny - and careers. To survive, each of will have to develop strong sales, marketing and financial management skills - and most important of all, the ability to spot a trend, run with it while the timing's good, maximise profits from it, then drop it and then move on the 'Next Big Thing'. Fascinating stuff.

'The Empty Raincoat' was published a few years back, ISTR (1995?) but still worth a read, as the points he makes seem even more relevant today.

Cheers,
Anya.

Amazulu

A few thoughts:

Amec (large UK engineering company) have offshored a lot of their CAD work to India. It has been a disaster, the quality is abysmal.
A lot of US companies that moved their operations to Mexico, have now moved back to the States. Again, quality was crap.
I've had a mixed bag when dealing with Indian call centres. Dell was totally crap, I'll never buy their products again. OneTel have been ok. I think a lot of companies are going to get sensitive about their offshoring, if they start to lose customers, they'll have to think again.
We elect our government. If offshoring starts to piss off the voters, then government is going to have to get involved.
Lets hope we stay friendly with India & China. What if China, sometime in the future gets an expansionist or militant leadership. They'll have our manufacturing industry & our food production will have nearly all gone. We'd be their bitch & would not be able to stand up to them. I don't want to have to learn chinese.

Our corporations are playing a dangerous game.

bondipom

Dell experience with me. Screen on laptop is missing lines, Screen in missing lines in bootup including the Bios. Technician request. Have you updated the video drivers? Indication that technician is not qualified or trained. Nearly every time I have an argument with them and they always eventually agree with my diagnosis. I normally have to point them to known issues with Dell machines and ask if they know a fix yet. The Dell us forums come up the answer much quicker so I now always go there.

HP are worse although I now have access to their Australian call centre who make sense and manage to log a job in under 3 minutes. The Indian centres normally take 20 minutes to log a similiar job.

I am also sure that they write everything down put you on hold take 10 minutes to enter the info then get back to you.

TheAncientGeek

The company I worked for before started out with getting some work done by contract programmers based in India.

Then they decided to set up their own wholly-owned subsidiary out there and employed a couple of programmers.

Next they thought they would augment the UK support services with support staff in India.

The next bright idea was to take on QA staff in India.

Shortly afterwards telephone support was fully transferred to India, the UK-based QA staff were made redundant and the development team in India grew drastically while the UK-based one shrank.

Net result - products taking 3 to 5 times longer to be delivered. Product quality levels nose-diving, customers getting angry with poor support.

Even worse, in my opinion, some of the UK management seemed to treat the Indian staff really badly, viewing and dealing with them as cheap labour I guess. Because the pay was relatively good and because of the fantastic personalities involved, our Indian colleagues took it on the chin. Still didn't make the way they were spoken to and treated like young children right though.

Amazulu

A lot of companies offshoring have this illusion that has this endless supply of cheap, well educated labour that wants to work in call centres dealing with our crap. In Bangalore there are plenty of jobs for good graduates & the call centres get the rest, there was a program on earlier this year that showed call centres taking people off the streets.

I can see a customer backlash coming & it's going to end in tears.

Badge

OzT raises a good point. What should we working in/working for. What is the next killer application in IT (or in any industry) I wish I was a tradesman sometimes, earning 25-50 bucks a hr for an honest days work. I would advise any son of mine to become a tradesman but maybe there will be a glut of builders and chippys.

Luckily if my professional white collar skills go up the spout I can resurrect my old practical skills.

What you need is a profession with
a) technical knowledge base - so not everyone can understand it.
b) people interaction - less chance of automation or off-shoring.
c) well paid(!)
d) inelastic to demand, price ie will always be needed, at a good wage.

My ideal job would be using
-the brains of a graduate, bit of arts, bit of science, bit of analysis but not too
white collar or process-orientated;ie no meetings, no reviews, no workshops, the job is technical but you don't have to analyse it to the cows come home, just be mission orientated and keep up to date.
;not office based all the time, but you'd need good skills in IT to use, write databases, spreadsheets, web programming skills
-customer service,
-people skills (obviously),
-chance to lead by example, teach and train - ie the motivation side
-not mind getting hands dirty - its amazing how lazy people are.
-fitness of say, a SAS trooper, county athlete.
( I add this in so as to blow away the competition lol)
-the practical skills of a tradesman,
-the ""resourcefulness"' of a bushman - ie the x factor..
- a tiny bit of danger (controlled) to put off competition but not so much you can't control it..see what I mean? eg when I used to parachute - this is fairly safe 99.9 of the time....but its seen as dangerous so you get charge extra...get the idea..
and all 45 mins from home...what could I do - any ideas??

There must be a perfect job out there!! i thought of tree surgery as you need to be fairly agile to get up the trees...(!)

BM

renth

I used to work for Dell. I've never come across such a bunch of greedy, self centered w*nkers in all my life. Absolute bunch of tossers. Example - every morning there would always be brand new Mercs or Porches in the disabled parking spots at the front of the office.

I managed to stick it out nearly 2 years before I was made redundant the day before my twins were born. I wasn't even allowed to return to my desk to get my coat.

I hope they all die.

bondipom

Sounds like computer salesmen to me. People buy Dell because they are cheap. Give people a savings of $10 and they will take it and regret later. Dell knows it and takes advantage of it.

anya4oz

Answer is obvious: prostitution!

Ongoing demand, very difficult (impractical and unpopular, surely? ) to 'offshore' that - and, as a former schoolfriend of mine proved, you can make an *awful* lot of money out of it.

Sadly, I think I'm too old for a career change now tho, so will have to stick with being an 'IT whore'.



Anya.

Badge

you lucky bugger. Being a bloke I can't do that sort of work.

MikeStanton

'Age of Unreason' is one of his best books. He is one of the management gurus who actually deserves the title; albeit his books tend to be a bit samey. And he's Irish, so none of the US b*shit.

MikeStanton

I was dealing with a Mumbai-based call centre the other day : the operator was courteous (yes, fellow Brits and Aussies, do you know what that means?) and helpful. Like all things, a mix of good and bad.

Eg how many times have people dealt with UK or Oz-based call centres only to get crap service? If you want to waste your life, try calling the Westpac invesment call centre.