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Dell Moves Call Center Back to US
alphakappa writes "Fox reports that Dell is moving its call center operations for the Latitude and Optiplex computers back to the US from Bangalore, India after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses. Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?"
Some functions outsorced to India (or wherever for that matter) work out well, and some don't. Speaking from experience, we just completed a major project with a firm in India, which helped us greatly, producing quality code with few bugs (about the same ratio as an equivalent U.S. Programmer).
However afterwards we didn't feel that for our clientele they would provide adequate support and maintenance programming capability so they were released from there. So now it's my job to do some of the front line maintenance for this code and respond to customer issues with minor tweaks as needed.
In short: no one solution is a magic bullet, everything needs careful analysis.
...in bed
This won't matter when AI technology comes of age. Then you can talk to a computer and it should help you out. India would be outsourced to AI.
I don't mind competing with other programmers for jobs, regardless of where they're from. I just wish that employers were able to recognize who is qualified for a job and who isn't. I've personally lost plenty of opportunities to US programmers who were not qualified and screwed up a project, only to have the client come back and have me fix it, except now most of their budget is gone.
no the language barrier is not a problem... the Quality of the code certianly is.
Code quality for a couple of the vertical apps we use cince it was moved "overseas" has dropped so far that several of the offices here have reverted to a version that was pre-outsourcing just to avoid the bugs and instability.
when your product quality drops so badly that your customers will happily use a non-supported version and pay the IT guys to write a data-conversion tool to use it? something is certianly wrong....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
From the article:
In afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Dell was up 67 cents at $35.19.
There are social movements about to save american jobs in the technical sector. As horrible as this is bound to be for the economy at home, it's always been "bout tha dollar dollar bill y'all" so this is the one and only thing that will bring these jobs back to American soil.
My girlfriend and I had dinner one night recently with the CTO of CS First Boston (he's a church buddy of hers) who was responsible for the decision to move many of the jobs of his subbordinates. This is a topic that I feel quite passionate about, but due to the nature of the social occasion I was understanably polite about it. But I felt the need to at least mention it and perhaps have a rare opportunity to get into the mind of someone calling the shots in this capacity.
Among the points that I raised was that from a national security standpoint, American companies are creating a great incentive for cultures across the globe to become technically savvy. A good many of these cultures may likely be unfriendly to the USA and the companies creating these incentives. By the same token, I believe that knowledge of computing is so far reaching that there is an element of historical inevitability to all cultures acquiring this knowledge. But I still believe that American companies are accelerating forces that they may not even realize are beyond their control in order to impact their finances in a very immediate way. In my view, it's just myopia. Plain and simple.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
Agreed. When the almighty buck is most important, companies will find a way to get around all barriers. It shocks me that Dell is moving the operation back to the US, instead of dealing with the issue, and hiring language coaches (and no I dont want these jobs to leave the North America to begin with). 10 to 1 says they move back with 5 years.
Money is money. Bottom line!
Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognize that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centers around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?
No, because that would imply that a major American company is taking a diametric turn from the growing trend to consider employees as completely interchangeable commodities.
That happened to me in spades at my last job, from which I was unfortunately laid off recently (sad to lose the pay, not the job). I am a Windows developer with 16 years of professional programming experience and long history of developing superior code, but was directly told to write no code which could not be understood by an entry-level non-C++ programmer. This does _not_ mean to write good, clean, well-documented code. This literally means that I was not allowed to write anything more complex than brain-dead C code, even though this project was developed with Visual C++. For instance, all memory allocation was done in fixed-size arrays, meaning if you exceeded one of the many arbitrary limits, the program crashed and you had to hunt down and find the proper #define to increase to make the array big enough. Of course allocating 70-some thousand instance of some object that was used many 500 times was one of the lesser adverse side-effects of such nonsense.
The idea of using something so simple as a CArray was beyond these people's experience and they were afraid that in bringing too much of this thinking on board, they would find themselves at a point where they couldn't swap bodies and have a new person pick (who theoretically didn't have any C++ experience) could pick it up and run with it.
Encapsulating the hard parts to make the rest easier to use was not only met with resistance, but actively condemned. I was truly being treated as a body warming a seat rather than having my substantial skills and experience utilitized in a meaningful way.
Why, might you ask, did they hire me then? I don't know, and no one could answer that question. On the other hand the pay was decent and it gave me something to do (struggling to keep sane from boredom is a challenge). I fear for the project, however, since I was just about the only one asking the tough questions, while the party line was to blunder along blindly and fix problems only when they showed up.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I hope the business world is playing close attention- and I hope all the "lets cut our budget for customer service" pencil necks are told promptly by their CEOs to, well, just shut the hell up. The customer is always right. Always. Repeat that. Keep the customer happy, and they will keep buying from you; keep more customers happy than your competitors, and you will do better than your competitors. Do it with efficiency, and you will make money. That's what all business boils down to. Good product, good service and efficiency = profit. Walk into any small manufacturing business, and you'll probably see the same sign I've seen countless times: "for every customer you who walks away angry, you loose 10 more." "Joe's Iron Works" understands it better than Dell, apparently...and one exec at Dell makes probably more than all the employees of JIW combined.
Any management listening? Here's an open threat from those of us that have to buy stuff from you. Make my job harder when it's most important, when I'm most in need, and you'll find an instant enemy and I'll screw you at every chance. That includes cheap equipment, harassing salespeople, any more than 2-3 voicemail choices for getting support, waiting for more than 5 minutes for support, or dealing with someone who I can't understand or is incompetent. Show competence in my time of need, and I'll reward you with praise to my supervisors- and they're the ones deciding where the money goes. That simple.
Please help metamoderate.
Basically, this is one small happening against the general tide. India seems to be against elocution classes but there are plenty of other countries w/ no problem at all. Take the philippines for example. The medium of instruction is in english. And the elocution classes are quite popular there.
I have a friend in the philippines now who told me of a guy he met there. This guy as a bar trick would speak in a different american accent every couple of minutes. Southern, boston, brooklyn, etc. My buddy grew up in Queens and testified that his Brooklyn accent was spot on. This guy is probably on the higher end of the skillset but the call center he worked for paid for his training. The deal was that they would speak to whomever called in a similar accent. They even had scripted "i am from Prattsburgh!" responses (close to the caller but not close enough to be quized).
Point being is that the jobs won't move back to the states but the skillset will improve to the point where we can't tell the operator is overseas.
Actaully the opensource car machanic isn't that far off. Not the machanic but the diagnostic codes and workshop manuals. Car makers have been pricing those so only the dealer can afford them where as the independent shop can't. Only recently has the courts started forcing them to be reasonable.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7345 841.htm
"We did not send back any calls to the U.S.," the Dell International Services' spokeswoman in the high-tech hub of Bangalore, said on Tuesday. The spokeswoman said she did not want to be quoted by name.
"Now, I don't know why Jon said that," the Dell spokeswoman in Bangalore said. "We are committed to India and we are growing."
I don't want to diss anyone from foreign lands, and i don't mean to make blanket statements...
but a majority of the things i hear about using coders and admins from these places sounds as though it would be a counterproductive business strategy.
A case in point- a friend of mine (who btw, isn't prejudiced at all) used to work for a county job in SoCal. He would say that a lot of the code written and sent over by the interns from the middle east was just horrible. Often it would just barely "function", and when it would break, whoever was stuck with maintaining it would take one look at it and decide it would be easier to just rewrite it from scratch.
Things like variables named sequentially ("aa, ab, ac, ad, ae..."), no comments, or comments that rarely made sense or were ambiguous, etc etc.
Sometimes the application wouldn't work at all, and it would have to be either rewritten or have hundreds of hours of time invested into it before it could be used.
Sure there are plenty of native coders that get pumped out of some 2-year degree mill and are probably just as bad, but the job market seems to be infiltrated with foreign coders doing just this.
The main thing is that they aren't ready to do the job they are doing. With some more practice and experience maybe, but they aren't ready to make market-ready code. This sort of thing wouldn't fly from a U.S. coder, but businesses put up with it from the offshore coders because they can pay slave labour wages to them. It is sad because native coders and admins are out of work, and the offshore coders are being borderline exploited.
Hopefully businesses are learning that this sort of thing often means having to do stuff twice- that their own greed is costing them more money than they thought.
do() || do_not();
A company that I did support for recently moved from a shop in the US (my company) to one that is in India to 'reduce costs'. However, they have since hired more second and third level support reps in-house to maintain quality. So, they went from spending a minor amount having us do their support to spending far less, then increasing costs even higher by hiring more people at their location.
If a company is trying to save money, moving to another country isn't always the best option.
I honestly belive it was q huge mistake for them all to move their call centers to India. To my knowledge the only company that has remained local is IBM and for that I am grateful. It was because of Dell's horrible service that we switched to IBM in the first place and we will never go back. Roughly a year ago Dell started scaling back. I recall speaking with various techs in the support department while trying to get a new part shipped. They agreed with us as to what the problem was but the execs at Dell had put a piece of software into place that tells the technician how to diagnose issues. The software kept telling them the issue was with the hard drive, so they shipped the hard drive. All the while the techs knew it would not resolve the issue. The onsite support showed up and replaced the hard drive and it did not resolve the problem. We called them back and went through the process again. This time the software said the issue was the motherboard so they shipped the motherboard knowing it would not resolve it. Again, the onsite support showed up and replaced the motherboard. Problem was still there. I believe it was the fourth time where the techs said screw the software, I am going to be a technician and shipped us a new lcd like we had asked for in the first place. If the execs are trying to save money, they should stop making stupid decisions like taking the technician out of the technician. It wasted my time and their techs time not to mention the time for my user that was down from not having a computer.
Yeah, and this past weekend I called HP to get support for my camera. Not really support, wanted my money back. Guess who I ended up getting...... Mike in India. Pretty funny. They gave me the run around. I am still pissed at HP. Stop moving everything out of country!
alias dir='rm -rf
I had to try it. I went to Intertran and grabbed the closest language they had: Turkish.
"Are you sure you want to delete this file?"
becomes
"Are sen emin sen istemek -e dodru silmek bu ede?"
in Turkish and becomes
"Are you safe you wish for had straight wipe this file?"
translated back to English by a computer with a dictionary. Imagine what a fallable and awkward human can do with a phrase they don't understand ("All your base"?). Oh, and use TP when you wipe that file and wipe it straight - not crooked...
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
>Users are going to click "YES" anyway, without reading the warning, then call you later to say they're missing a file and need it restored from tape.
That's the problem with India. Their responses to double negatives are actually correct; unlike North American dialects.
"Would you please not to delete this file?"
What you expect to answer depends on your dialect. I'm dead serious on this.
'Yes' and 'no' agreeing to the form of a question, not just its content --
A: 'You didn't come on the bus?'
B: 'Yes, I didn't.'"
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
Oddly enough, in Dell's case most of the Indian support is full Dell (blue badge) employees. The US support is about 50% contractor temps (red badge) and about 50% blue badged full employees. Most of the temps are "converted" to full time employees after about 1 year if they prove competent, if not they are washed out.
And an NDA does not mean much when you're dealing with a foreign outsourcing shop. Would you want to have to go to court in a foreign country to enforce it? I wouldn't bet on you receiving a fair trial in most cases.
Just about every company that I have been with over the past four years has at some point decided to take dev and/or support to an outsourcer in India. In every case, and I do mean every one, they end up moving the critical components of the dev cycle back to the United States.
This seems to be due to cultural and communication issues. The culture of India is one where saving face can (and notice the use of the word can here) lead to a group of unsupervised programmers to do things their way no matter what the company wants. In all of these cases, deadliness were missed due to the fact that once we got the code and saw that it would either not fit into the parameters of the overall program or it was not optimized correctly, leading to slow operation.
The other issue is one of communication. It is really easy to look racist on this one, however it cannot be ignored that if your customers cannot talk to you about what is going on, and those are not being communicated back to those that can fix it, then you have reason to have a support department to begin with. Support is not only key to customer satisfaction, which to a company like Dell is a huge thing, but it is also the front line of the war against defect and defect tracking. Properly used support and properly utilized support can make the difference in releasing a product that is alright or releasing a product that fixes your customers issues. I can guarantee that these issues were not being reported to Dell in the manner that they needed for proper and timely utilization.
This is a real hot button issue within the community right now. I would hope that we can look at this issue from the point of view of pro con and not just from the POV of them thar Injuns are taking our jobs. The former will work to the upper level muckeety mucks. The later just makes us look like every other UAW worker that ever bitched about a Honda.
"The company in North America would just say "we want software that does x."
My experience as a consultant is that the "does x" is something like "increases sales" or "reduces costs".
Most of project management and software design is translating "does x" into a set of requirements that can be realised as a piece of software.
If you do not have an ability to map business requirements to software requirements in-house the likelihood of getting something usable from an offshore development company is akin to winning the Powerball lottery.
In 1996 I helped setup the 1st US/Mexico call center for a large US bank, where we sent calls to Mexico for Spanish speaking customers. This worked great until the company got greedy (paying the agents about $50 a week) and started sending English calls to English speaking Mexican agents. The accents in many cases were almost non-existent, however we received a lot of complaints from our customers about their ability to provide good service. Eventually we determined the cultural differences between the US customers and Mexican agents were so great, the Mexican agents could only handle the simpler calls even with rather extensive training and reference info.
In the end most English calls went to back to American agents.
1) The Indian contractors have excellent attitudes, are friendly, and want to do a good job. I still keep in touch with one guy who was here in the states for a few months - before he went back for his arranged marriage - picked out by his mom from a book.
2) They are excellent at following a set of predefined steps to solve a problem, but run in to real difficulty if the problem requires deviating from their memorized steps. My education professor friend tells me this has to do with how their education system works. Deviation from the presented method is discouraged.
3) The language and timezone differences are both killers. It's frustrating and unproductive for all parties involved.
My company is on its third attempt at outsourcing design work to India. The first two attempts failed and the managers responsible for the transition are no longer with the company. They had no idea what they were getting into, which is a shame, since they were both decent managers. The current attempt acknowledges the failures of the past and is to focus more narrowly on software areas we think they are capable of handling. The result of this exercise has been a long list of stable software that hasn't changed in years and rarely has a problem. This, of course, leaves everyone questioning 'why are we doing this again?'.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, you should learn a bit of their concepts and their language....works for me. Japanese, Korean, Mandarin/Cantonese, Indian & Malay.
It's not easy, so don't get me wrong. And it's not for everyone. But again, to survive, we all need to adapt at one point or another. I enjoy managing Indians/Malasians etc. remote, but some days you dread opening email or answering the phone, when it seems like the people on the other end are just never going to get it. But once they do, and all the hassles are behind you, there is great pleasure (and good pay) in remote projects....an E ticket.
I live just a few miles from Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) and know many people who work there. Several people I know have been called back for call center customer support jobs. Considering they have been out of work for 6 months or more they are very pleased to be going back to work.
*BUT* they have been told these are temporary jobs and will only last until they can get call centers in (IIRC) Tennessee up and running. Seems it is a lot cheaper to live in Tennesee than in the Austin area so they can pay less. These folks are facing the choice of being unemployeed again or moving to Tennessee at a lower hourly rate.
The race to the bottom for technical salaries has not slowed a bit. Dell just found that there are other factors that affect the total cost.
Stonewolf
Likely, it's more than the language issue. There's the "mail stuck in customs" issue.
There's a whole different mindset on jobsites without 100% reliable services. For most US companies, the attitude is "We must have it, and we must have it now!"
One time we had to teach a technician how to use a cresent wrench. How do you think that technician works with say power tools?
It is illegal for US companies to pay gratuities or bribes, and in some parts of the world, nothing moves without some palms being greased. Some firms know that they need to hire a "facilitator" to assist with transactions in places where some assistance is needed.
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
You can have disgruntled employees in the US or in a foreign country, but the US laws and courts are a known quantity. If nothing else, you can get a DMCA-based injunction against a former employee threatening to reveal a backdoor in your software. Good luck when it's somone in eastern europe. The only way to prevent this issue is to keep these jobs in the US, or open source your software.
last few times i called for my latitude, i couldn't tell if i was talking to a person or a machine with an indian accent. and one guy was incredibly rude to me, declaring that there's no way my case could have broken in that way. how dare he insult an american who created his job!? of course when the technician arrived he told me that the latitude is a piece of shit, and he sees the hinges breaking all the time. well anyway, hurray!!! i like talking to people i can understand on the phone.
What's worse than scripting? Reading the wrong one!!
My cable went down and after a day or so (I didn't want to be too impatient), I went ahead and called tech support to see if there were any outtages (Earthlink, FYI). After a 5 minute hold, the polite Indian female told me there wasn't an outtage, rather it was scheduled maintenance. What?! Scheduled maintenance that causes a downtime of more than 24 hrs? She reiterated that she was sorry and read the scheduled maintenance script again.
I maintained my composure and ended the phone call. When Earthlink emailed their survey regarding my satisfaction with my recent call to tech support, I told them to let their call reps know that it's ok to check into the problem or simply admit they don't know what's wrong. It's not ok to lie about it.
I had the cable company come out the next day and fix the line that was damaged when the neighbor ran into the hub with his lawnmower.
There was an article I read not too far back about a Pakistani woman threatening to release private medical information of patients for a particular hospital because she hadn't been paid for her transcription service.
Turns out the hospital had outsourced it here in the US, that company had outsourced it to ANOTHER company, which then outsourced it to Pakistan.
Speaking for myself, I'm not very thrilled with that many groups having access to my private info, let alone groups that are outside the reach of US law enforcement.
I worked in a cube farm for Sykes, which had a contract with e-machines at the time. Clover Kicker is right, the script monkey has procedures and scripts.
My evaluations were only 30% technical, the rest was procedure and being halfway nice. It truly was a nightmare for me and my customer-victims when I first started out because I was way undertrained and way overworked. Once I did get a clue, the requirement for following a script didn't go away. Nobody ever told me to use my brain, or gave me signifigant power to skip steps, so I never did. Sorry e-whores, I'm loyal to whoever signs my check.
Occasionally I did get someone who knew what they were doing, and was willing to play the game. I always cut the procedures to the bone for them. The tech-gods who tried to play games and fake that they were following along were made to follow every last trick. I know it is kind of juvenile, but it was protection for me.
Remember folks, when you (thru the manufacturer of your machine) hire someone for low wages, put them in a cage, and hit them with a stick every 12 minutes, you get incompetent, angry, dung-flinging techno-monkeys. The really smart ones insist on being transfered to a more interesting account or quit. BTW, don't talk to a call center drone after their shift for about an hour. Don't touch them, don't even look at them wrong if you want to live.
e-machines/Sykes Rant Follows
They both suck.
e-machines is possibly the most incompetent company I have been involved with. Some of the early e-machines 200 & 300 models were solid little performers, they hardly ever broke down. It all went to hell after that. We would learn about new models of computers from the customers.
They ran out of power supplies at the fulfillment center because the only factory that made them was in Bangladesh and it flooded. One third of the country is below sea level, duh! Instead of pulling power supplies out of the machines in the fulfillment center, we had to tell customers to send their whole machines in and that they would be sent a replacement machine. I'm serious.
One of the supervisors thought it was a good idea to walk up and down the cube aisles complaining about her PMS issues, and how tense she was. An overstressed cube dweller does not need to be hearing these things.
e-machines finally took the support account away from Sykes and gave it to another company, Stream something, I think. The rub is that they didnt' tell the customers or Sykes. In effect, you had two companies working in parallel whithout communicating and without the customers knowing. That period was one of the few times I tolerated swearing from my customers, I was barely not doing it myself.
I ain't even gonna start about the wisdom of calling a person with two days of training a "Qwest Internet Support" person.
I know this is seriously off the original topic, but do you see how this could beat down a person's will? All I had left was the pride that I did my job exactly as specified and lived thru the day. That's a pretty small thing to hold on to, but there it is.
One of the few times I was proud of my company was when a storm went thru the state of Georgia, wiping out modems by the thousands. The line supervisors came by and told us to just get on with giving out replacements. The script went something like "So, you can't dial out? From Georgia? Hold on I'll get you an RMA." It was one of the few times things made sense and a genuine thrill.
Just a bit bitter, ain't I?
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
This can frustrate both ends, as the programmer thinks the stuff sucks, but keeps quiet because that's how it's done in his culture, and the boss is upset because the stuff comes back just like he said it, but it sucks. This can then lead to the outsourcing company being fired and lost productivity, etc.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Are the host countries going to go after one of there own and help out a Chase bank, I think not.
And why not? Chase Bank is giving their economy an enormous boost. It would not be in the nation's best interest if Chase decides they can't do business there and withdraw, costing thousands of jobs in the process.
Dell Australia Tuesday said the U.S. support service would eventually be routed backed to the Indian call center--but in bites that its Bangalore support staff can swallow. It appears that Dell overestimated the capacity of its Indian call center when it made the decision to divert U.S. customers to the new support service. A spokeswoman for the system manufacturer's Australian operation today revealed that for Bangalore it was a case of too many calls, too soon. "A lot of [the customers] were moved in one go and that was where some of the complaints had arisen so what they've looked at doing is moving some back and then moving them off in smaller increments," she said. Dell has eased the burden on it Bangalore operation and appeased its business customers by diverting U.S.-originating enquiries pertaining to its corporate OptiPlex desktop and Latitude laptop computers to a facility believed to be in Texas. How the customers receive the return to an India-based service is yet to be known. While the problems with the center were isolated problem concerning the scale of U.S. Dell executives have been shy about revealing the nature of the complaints maintains. Also, U.S.-based analyst with research firm Technology Business Research, Brooks Gray, said language problems and delays in escalating enquiries to senior technicians was the source of grief for many Dell customers. For now, Dell's U.S. corporate customers are the only group to receive local service. Dell Australia said there were no plans to make similar arrangements for its Australian corporate customers. The company insists that current service levels were "satisfactory" and the problems experienced by U.S. customers were isolated to the segment of the Bangalore operation covering that region. "The U.S. situation is purely based around scale and the quantity of customers being moved over in one go and that's not an issue that we've had in Australia," said the spokeswoman. Dell's Asian and European support lines will remain routed to Bangalore. Dell's decision comes amidst allegations and grumblings that support operations outsourced to India are not performing as hoped. -------------www.StopOffshoreOutsourcing.com
Success factors are:
- Experience in sucessfully completing projects. Companies
that fail on in-house projects will also fail on off-shore
projects.
- Experience with the off-shore development method,
which requires that you rigorously define requirements
and monitor carefully. This applies to both the project
management and staff. A long term relationship between
both companies is even better.
- Competent and communicative management at both ends.
- Occasional visits (in either direction) that help
detect all the stuff that falls though the cracks.
- Both the local and the off-shore company having a stake
in the success of the project.
Obviously, much of the success dependend on experience, which you can only get by having completed off-shore projects. This means there's a relatively high barrier to entry for the company that wants to save money by off-shoring projects and they must accept a slow payback. The low risk strategy is to start with small, low risk projects (which are usually cheaper done in-house!) to build up experience.There are a lot of 'hidden costs' associated with off-shore projects, that you won't encounter until it's too late. Most of the problems relate back to two factors:
- Cultural differences - Even when you take this into account,
you'll get burned. Things you take for granted will be evaluated
completely differently at an off-shore site. It's not that's anybody
is right or
wrong, it's just that 'they' have different answers for things that
are obvious to 'us'. This means that lot of extra communication
will be needed (about stuff you never ever dreamed could be a problem).
- Geographical separation - Informal contact between management,
users, developers, etc. makes up for a lack of rigor
when specifying systems. We're all guilty of not being exact and
detailled enough when writing specs. Indeed most companies can't afford
the rigor (or the testing!) required to produce a functioning system
and survive because all the stakeholders are close by and take the
time to interact 'outside official channels'. This generally isn't available
for off-shore projects, except when the teams have been working together
for a number of years.
The conclusion: there's no silver bullet.BTW: When problems happen in off-shore IT projects they lead to failed projects and companies lose money. This also happens in foreign relations it leads to real problems.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Here is a story someone (not me
----------------
QuarkXpress was indisputably the #1 publishing layout software in the world and almost all its users ran it on the Mac. In fact, this issue of graphics and publishing software on the Mac was probably the primary reason Apple computer even survived.
The original owner sold the company and the new owners fired the entire development staff and outsourced all development and customer service to India. They claimed that India had far superior developers who worked at a lower price and produced better, more stable, more feature filled software because of their better education and attention to process, a la the Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
The project to port Quark to OS X, a simple carbonization exercise that many other programs of similar complexity accomplished with a modest staff over a period of a few months, dragged on and on in India. Eventually, the resulting version 6 was delivered two years late and at a far greater cost tahn any one could have imagined. But many customers had held on during these years and ignored the technically superior, file compatible, and less expensive Adobe InDesign (built in the USA, oddly). Customers had even refused to upgrade their hardware because Quark 4 (most skipped v5) didn't run well on newer machines that could not boot into OS 9. Apple's hardware sales suffered as a result. Apple even provided, free of charge, Apple consultants to India to assist with the port. But finally, very recently, version 6 was released and customers started to upgrade their hardware and move to version 6. During the two years, Quark went from around 90% market share to about 50%, but they still were a major player. Customers had a long history with the company and much invested in understanding the quirky and nonstandard ways that the software worked, and they did not want to give up on that investment.
Here are customer reviews of version 6:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos x/ 11887
Read all 261 reviews.
Among the problems are file incompatibility, draconian licensing, sluggishness, poor feature set, nonstandard UI, instability, and so forth. In addition to this, the program reuires a flakey and unreliable dial up activation scheme as well as a dongle and can only be run on one computer total. If you want to work on your lap top AND your desktop as just about everyone does, you MUST buy 2 licenses at an outlay of two thousand dollars. In addition, customer support is abysmal. for your money you are entitiled to only one customer support issue through email. If you have a second issue, you must pay $15 for each emailed-to-india question. Customers have found that Quack hangs up, refuses to answer, provides nonsensical answers, and requires you to pay multiple times in a single-issue guessing game in which they play stupid in response to your questions in order to bilk you out of additional support money, just like a phone sex operator tries to keep you on hold as long as possible.
In the last three months, of the 50% of the market who was waiting for Quark 6 to come out, most of them have upgraded their hardware and tested Quark 6. The result is amazing -- almost all customers, within days of acquiring Quark 6, bought InDesign and are in the process of migrating, never to return. Adobe's sales have flown through the roof in the meantime.
So the market leader has completely gutted their business. No one will be left to buy any version 7. It's the last straw.
As a side issue, I'll note that in the last few months it has been extremely entertaining to watch questions posted on programming lists from senior engineers with quark.co.in and other
cpeterso
Familiarity with the system and the business processes at a low level has always been highly critical for me. The biggest advantage is knowing which "requirements" are based on the users misunderstanding of their own processes. You can easily cut a projects time down to a third with this understanding.
if you think this is bad, you should have seen my last sig
Dell denies moving Bangalore jobs to US
November 25, 200314:32 IST
Last Updated: November 25, 200314:49 IST
Dell India on Tuesday dismissed reports that it was shifting its technical support service for its business customers from Bangalore to the United States.
"No, we are not shifting the work. Dell is committed to India and are growing," a spokesperson for the Bangalore-headquartered Dell India told PTI on Tuesday.
She said Dell had over 2,000 people working at its customer support centres in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
The spokesperson declined comment on reported complaints by its business customers in understanding Indian executives because of differing accents.
Dell, the world's largest PC maker, opened its Bangalore centre in April 2001 and rapidly expanded its workforce to over 3,000 employees.
A spokesman of the Texas-based company earlier said there were complaints from clients, but declined to discuss their nature.
However, media reports said these were about differing accents.
"Corporate customers were telling us they didn't like the level of support they were getting and in the normal course of business, we made some adjustments," the spokesman was quoted by InfoWorld, which specialises in IT news, as saying.
"What (customers) said was, 'You guys have been changing some things and we don't like it as much'," Steve Felice, vice president, corporate division, Dell, told Mercury News.
It's interesting that Dell attempted to move it's support center to India, but never attempted to move it's phone sales away from agents in Texas.
To gauge how the customer really feels about this, try doing that for just a quarter. I guarantee that you'll get a crystal clear picture of the impression that makes.
--
$tar -xvf
Or a few planes take diversion over skies of chicago and LA....
Actually, they did use enums.
I never liked STL. It's extremely cryptic and not object-oriented, it's a kludge to work around limitations in the language, gaining efficiency at the cost of being confusing. Given my druthers, I'd rather use my own tools, but at least the MFC collection classes are easily understandable.
Believe me, I threw out some ideas that just got blank stare. Even the simple ideas rocked the boat. When questioned why I used Hungarian notation (a name that my supervisor thought was some kind of joke), no explanation I could give could convince her there was any value to it.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Several decades ago, American phone companies started centralizing their "information", typically in rural midwestern places where the accent wasn't as deviant (;-) as in the even cheaper South. A real problem ever since then has been the odd pronunciation of many place names, which the phone-company people generally can't guess.
This is partly because of all the place names taken from abo/native/Indian languages. But not entirely. Thus, here in New England, we have towns like Reading, pronounced as if it were "Redding". I grew up in the Seattle area (which I've heard pronounced "seat"+"ull" by Easterners). One of the fun place names there is Puyallup, (mis)pronounced by the locals as "pyu-Al-up".
Sometimes this causes serious problems when trying to communicate with the phone-company person. They just can't map your pronunciation to anything in their database, and you can't guess how they expect place names to be mispronounced. My wife is from the Hudson River valley, where there are a lot of place names pronounced in ways that really surprise outsiders. But the locals think that's how they are pronounced, and are really upset when the phone-company person thinks there's no such town.
There has been a bit of a move away from this centralization on the part of some phone companies. They also have software that can take a semi-phonetic spelling and match it (sometimes). But it's still an ongoing problem.
Possibly the wierdest example was when I called an Arizona info line and asked for a person in Phoenix ("fee"+"nicks"). The person on the other end couldn't find that town in her listing.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
It gets rather harder once you cross the language barrier. You can teach a person how to program relatively quickly. Teaching them how to comunicate effectively in a foreign language is a different matter.
This is exactly what happened in Ireland over the past twenty years. Not so long ago Ireland was a place you would outsource to for cheap labor. Not any more, the wages there are high and rising. House prices are going through the roof.
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