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Orwellian Tech Support
alteran writes "Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center. Makes working for Initech seem good. Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
When I ordered DSL, it had to be MSN. It never worked. But even as the Tech Support guys (in India) could not find the problem in their database (and therefor could not solve the issue, I just bailed on DSL for cable), they where polite and actually spent lots (LOTS) of time with me. Now the Comcast guys, they suck, tried to stick me with a "premium" install service charge even though all they did was drop off a box and a disc (my wife, the barracuda took care of them).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
According to the article, it's even worse than that. The people with ultra-short call time averages - those who basically just hang up on people - are promoted. Repeatedly.
From the IT dept of a very large phone manufacturer to an even larger outsourcing company, I can reveal that my job is now no longer to fix problems and design solutions to help my colleagues, it is instead, to make money at the expense of my former colleagues.
Unlike the article, we do currently actually fix the problems, but guess what. Now 60% of fixes have to be within 24 hours, so what do you do with troublesome customers? Ticket goes on "waiting for customer" immediately, call them back at lunchtime, three calls and it gets closed. The metrics look good.
That Apache upgrade? Not part of baseline break/fix. Now costs you money and 3 days of my time (how much per hour?) as we update the OS, apache rev, modules. Oh, it broke your application? But you approved the change managment and we don't support homegrown applications.
Grid computing. Yum. $100/month/machine for supporting workstations becomes $1,000/month/machine as the desktops are migrated to *clustered* servers in the machine room. And you thought it was such a good idea before the outsourcing, at least they aren't on your budget, I wonder is it corporate who're taking the financial hit as the numbers of supported servers rockets?
Out of hours support? I'm off at 5 mate. Hourly rates double in the evening and double again at the weekend. And they start in 3 digits. What? You want a production system upgraded at the weekend? Oh you need a DBA and Financials administrator as well? And that 100Gb restore which is taking 10 hours? You get billed for every second which is out of baseline hours.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
just to give my fellow slashdotters an idea of what working for this company is like:
they employ over 5,000 of the worst possbile computer illiterates I've ever seen. most have never even seen the inside of a computer. they specificly say during interview "We do not prefer experience or certifications. we will give any one with computer knowledge a job but prefer that *we* train you"
they pay $11/hr WHILE logged into the phone, minimum wage when not logged in (which btw will be most of the time).
security is soo tight there all employees are run through a metal detector coming AND going from the complex (would say building but there are 6 of them). I asked once why they did this they responded "to protect the employees from the employees" referring to a couple times people started shooting guns in the call center.
This company is evil incarnate. the place is a total sweat shop. 3-400,000 sq ft per building of cubicles. it's soo disorienting navigating the cubicle farm you have to go by the signs posted.
Oh and everything the article said about the place is true. yes they are one of the largest support providers, they do compaq, HP and IBM, plus bellsouth/comcast, directv, and a bunch of others. All they care about is getting you off the phone in 12 minutes (thats what the dead giveaway was, totall company policy, if you spend 15 minutes you have 3 supervisors breathing down your neck). they will even go so far as you find a reason to manually disconnect @ 13 minutes telling you to call back again.
ATTN Florida Slashdotters: Can someone back me up on this place, I know someone else has to have worked there. I can't possibly describe how bad this place really is since I only worked there 4 days, but man it did ring some bells.
Oh btw, here's the whois info:
Registrant:
TAG (TAG6-DOM)
7562 Southgate Blvd
NORTH LAUDERDALE, FL 33068
US
Domain Name: TAG2.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Nunez, Juan (JN8854) jnunez@TAG2.COM
TAG
7562 SOUTHGATE BLVD
N LAUDERDALE, FL 33068-1362
US
(954) 724-6745 fax: (954) 726-0015
Record expires on 08-May-2008.
Record created on 07-May-1996.
Database last updated on 23-Feb-2004 12:07:40 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
CMTU.MT.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 12.127.16.69
CBRU.BR.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 199.191.128.105