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The Hidden Cost of Outsourcing
Alien54 writes to tell us CNNMoney is reporting that outsourcing may not be as big of a bargain as some might think. From the article: "With consumers enjoying more choice than ever before, evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention. To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
To cite just one example, a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
If this were true, Dell would not be the number one mfg of computers after losing 75% of their base. How many people here have called tech support and gotten someone with a thick Indian accent named "Steve"?
The problem (if you can call it that) is that Dell offers decent CPU's for cheap. Rather it be for the home or business, people are more willing to take the chance on a computer that's $200 than their competitors.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
The article is terse, inapplicable to those many markets which are almost entirely price-sensitive, and ill-supported. Pension policies don't really compete on price; they are about service and ROI.
And people often say that they will take their business elsewhere, but then stick to the cheapest vendor when push comes to shove. Self-report is not the best indicator of actual behaviour, especially for a hypothetical.
What's a pension?
How about intellectual property? Spend millions of dollars in the U.S. on research and development and then outsource the manufacturing to China and then wonder why the Chinese develop a very similar product. Duh!
I remember a few years ago around 2003/2004 reading article after article that IT in USA is finished all the jobs will go to India, CHina and other. But here we are few years later and the IT job market is pretty good, atleast I think so. Its probably still tougher for somebody with no expierence than it was around 1999/2000. But I am no longer afraid I won't have a job in the IT sector... atleast under current conditions.
Outsourcing does not mean, bad service. It's about getting a service from abroad with most probably lower costs. It's evident that same quality of service taken from India, or China is a lot cheaper than the one taken from US or some other European countries. Companies should be more selective on outsourcing, then they won't lose customer due to bad service, but in no way there's a direct connection with outsourcing and bad service.
The author is thirty years behind if this the first time he's run across this idea. There have been shitloads of studies done over and over again that show that most (i.e., >50%) people leave/switch because of shitty service from their existing supplier/provider/brand/etc.
It's a good thing that inhouse customer service can't be terrible!
Seriously, this just means that you have to be careful who it is who provides your outsourced service just like you'd have to be careful who it is who provides your inhouse services. The big difference is that outsourced service contracts are generally easier, quicker and cheaper to terminate and replace if they're don't meet the agreed standard.
"a recent survey of pension policyholders in the United Kingdom found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service."
People say they will take action all the time. How many actually do? Well they do take action. They tell all their friends how shitty "the company" treated them. They go into detail about how "the company" doesn't care. And then next money they send "the company" a check for the bill.
Replace "the company" with practically any business name.
This article is evidence that its best to let free markets decide the value of things such as out sourcing. So long as consumers have choices, they'll be free to make choices based on what they value. In this case, people don't like the out sourced solution and they are moving to the competitors product.
This is all a lot more neat, clean, and effective than a heavy handed reponse from a clumsy government. Consumers always win when they have an array of free and voluntary choices.
Most people resent having been sold a product/service and find out that their most personal details are in the hands of a company that exists in a country that does little to recognize privacy laws of the originating nation. Yes, there is a problem in the U.S. but it is being pursued daily to tighten the laws at hand.
Additionally, getting a "script monkey" on the support-line does an unbelievable amount of damage to customer confidence in the company in question. Knowing that you will have to endure the reading of a fixed script that, at it's conclusion, will not be relevant to the problem at hand anyway does not underscore confidence. Colloquial understanding and language nuances go completely over their heads.
Cheaper is not always better.....
/*Dave
From the article "A 2005 Gartner study predicts"
Okay, I understand Slashdot seeks subjects which spur debate but this one is on the edge. First this is a study which is "predicting." That's the first clue that something is wrong about this, you can make stastics say anything you want. But the real problem here is that they automatically assume that outsourcing will result in a bad experience. Who says? You can have a bad experience with a customer service person (who is American) and just doesn't give a damn. There is no golden rule that the people working for you have any more motivation to help you than an outsourced worker. The article quotes human nature as why they won't identify with the organization...bull. This is nothing but a hyper-general statement to support their conclusions. (Aside from the words likely to, tend to, which are all assumptions.)
The real problem is not that there are companies which are outsourcing -- it is that companies are not caring whether the service rendered is good enough to begin with. If you set a level of expectation for anyone working on your behalf and follow through to ensure that level is being reached it won't matter whether you have employees working at home, in the office or in another country. Far too many companies simply outsource and say do it without monitoring the level of communications to make sure they are doing it right. Saying that outsourcing will automatically cause problems is just an over generalized conclusion.
The one point they did get right though is that it is silly just to compete on price alone. That is actually true, however, they are trying to make this point by generalizing on something which may or may not be true and by missing the real point of customer service.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
"evidence is growing that great service is essential for long-term customer retention."
To me this is a remarkable indicator of the high cluelessness level of a very large number of businesses. This is such a basic truth, it's like "Please open mouth to breathe".
Happy Customers/Happy Employees can make a successful business even if the product is just 'adequate'. People resist change more when they are happy than not. F---ing duh.
-- kortex "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts"
From the article, "you'll soon figure out that competing solely on price is a fool's game"
Quote below taken from DNUK's website
... found that 75 percent would leave their current provider if they experienced bad customer service ...
I keep thinking about that whenever one of my witty, insightful and intelligent comment is modded down by some idiot moderator on Slashdot. Why do I keep coming back to same abuse day in and day out? I really need to go somewhere else.
There are other hidden costs to offshoring deriving from cultural differences and communication problems. I was involved with three software development projects that had been outsourced to three different firms in India. In only one case was there a marginal win, despite net billing rates that were perhaps half of what we would have paid for domestic IT talent. Much of the cost overruns arose from miscommunication backed by a desire on their part to not appear incompetent. The engineers would come here for several weeks to gain understanding before returning to India to work on the project. Despite this, I found out there were fundamental knowledge gaps that should have been cleared up in the first day, let alone two weeks after they had returned to India (and billed us for two weeks of apparent head-scratching). In my opinion, the only way to make technical offshoring work is to make it onshoring, by opening a local office in the country where the talent lives. I doubt there is a similar solution for offshoring customer support.
Clearly you don't have any experience of the postgraduate environment in our universities. Half of the brightest students are Chinese, and they take their doctorates and fantastic brains home with them.
They don't need our or anyone else's stinking IP. You've been reading too much western propaganda.
And by the way, "Intellectual Property" is a term created by lawyers for the purpose of getting the different issues all mixed up so that they can profit from "expertly" separating them again. Don't fall for it. Talk about copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets separately.
IP == Internet Protocol
When you call JetBlue airlines and talk to one of their reservations agents, you talking to someone sitting in their home. ALL of their reservations agents are home based. They get away with cheaper labor and a happier workforce.
Not that there's anything wrong with Indian call centers but half the time I can't get past the Indian accent to understand what the hell is being said. There is a limited amount of things they can do as well and to say that Indian call centers provide "customer service" would be an overstatement.
When you call a company for customer service you should be able to get someone able to bend the rules if circumstances warrant. The "paid parrots" of Indian call centers can't do that.
Often this is not the case. As a part-time marketeer, I can tell you that often what I do to lure customers away from my competition is:
1) "educate" my target segment to expect a higher level of service (change their expectations)
2) tell my competitor's customers that my competitor does not offer that higher level of service (given the new expectations, make them feel unhappy with their current provider)
3) make damn sure my own company offers the higher level of service when my competitor's now-unhappy customers go looking
4) don't compete on price; higher service can demand equal or higher price
5) repeat as necessary
Believe me - I'm not the only out there doing this either.
But since this is nothing new and Dell continues to sell it also means that either this does't happen to a lot of people or people just don't learn.
I buy from local shops and NEVER call in with a problem. I put the defective product on the counter on a shopping day (thursday evening or a saturday) and speak loudly about how I want it repaired or replaced. Works wonders. Over a phone they can and will try to tell you that a brand new HD is supposes to show badblocks or that a single wrong pixel in a lcd is acceptable. It is offcourse. If your stupid.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh Slashdot, why are you being so left wing?/ 03/1712242&threshold=0
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03
Just yesterday the President [God be upon him] was telling us that Outsourcing is GOOD for the American workforce. Please don't contradict what the President [God be upon him] says!
Yes I'm being sarcastic, thank you for noticing.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This is the thing nobody apparently gets.
It is an utter waste of time to study scenarios where customer orders product and pays for it, vendor ships product, customer receives product, end of story.
The _important_ metric is always the worst case scenario where the customer ends up falling in between the cracks in between different departments within a large organisation, nobody the customer contacts has responsobility, nobody has authority, nobody has motivation, nobody has their ass on the line if it escalates.
Anyone can sell acreage on the moon, you judge a company or business by how badly its worst mistakes fuck customers over, and you place the responsobility for that exactly where it belongs, on the directors conference table, and let it run down right through the company.
The reality is the bigger the company the more likely its reaction to a fuck-up being escalated through inaction is to undulge in ever more psychopathic behaviour.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Okay first the disclaimer:
/.ers on this (maybe I should be submitting this to Ask /.) Is the quality of the outsourced job really terrible?
I'm currently working as a Customer Support in a local company in Malaysia where we help our client's client (mostly from the US and UK) troubleshooting their generic computing problems over the telephone.
Anyway, I've been working for a almost a year now and from what I've seen, the company I worked for has been recruting really skillful/talented people (most of them have CS degrees from Australia) to do the support.
However as you may know, most of these people speaks really poor, non-standard English. To make the matter worse, most of them (including me) have problems with our clients' American/English accent. Personally I'm sad that I've had clients that hanged up on me because they couldn't understand me in some occasions.
Okay so now, I would like some opinions from my fellow
Well, here's a true story. A DG (I will not mention which DG) of the European Union has outsourced it's software system that is responsible for the registration and follow-up of requests that basically seek funding of the EU government. That same project is running on it's last legs. The reason is quite simple.
After version 4 and 5, which worked but were not 'modern' enough (not using EJB's in a J2EE server) version 6 was outsourced, and contractor architects designed a J2EE application that should bring the next installment of the software which was untill then running just fine. The rules were a little more complex than before, and some political choices undoubtedly had their effect on the overall design of the system, but so far so good. Of course, the EU is a 'fair' institution, meaning that everybody should be allowed to bid on a contract that allowed the contractor firm to (and here it went terribly wrong) design and implement of a subsection of tha entire application. Ok, ok, not the best solution in the world, and you know, maybe this would have worked if the staff (of which most of them serve lifteme sentences):
- had at least been knowledgeable of J2EE
- had reduced the complexity induced by splitting the application
- if the number of contractors involved in the project would be limited.
- if each project would have had a propper code-review follow-up and an architecture steering group that had an overarching view on the system
- if testing frameworks had been used to test the software
- if project leads would not have been pushed around like toypuppets, from 'dev' to 'organisation', from 'infrastructure' to 'dev'
- if projects themselves would not have been pushed around. Basically they were extremely good in killing all forms of know-how about their own system. Hand-overs were cabinets full of stacks of paper that nobody reads or cares about.
None of these things were there. Can you imagine the mess they are in? I guess you need a little help, let me refresh what can go wrong: XML stored in relational databases, CMP and XA transaction management all over the place, code that is oblivious to memory and performance consumption, timeout periods that allow sessions to continue to run 3000 seconds, and worst of all, session security is only invoked 'once every n times', and n varies per subsection between 5 and 500. (luckily the application runs within a secured domain, but still.) Some modules implemented their own database operations when the responsibility for the tables they access belongs to other modules. Security is implemented in 3 different ways, and doesn't even have roles and users, like every other security has. Code-reviews are dangerous for your health. Tables are being updated by hand, XML's are being edited by the helpdesk by hand, and 'development' people are filling in forms because the users are unable to, while at the same time they are debugging the database because parts of it have been corrupted.. The whole server system has to be restarted each morning, and around noon at exactly 12.19, 'something' brings the servers to the point where none of the applications respond in a timely fashion. I spell it like d.i.s.a.s.t.e.r.
But there's another surprise.. the new next version 7 is due by the end of the year. And that has been decided politcally. I don't think I have ever seen a bigger mess than this one.
I worked there briefly as a contractual agent trying to clean up parts of the mess and bring rather basic things like source-control under their attention. All events, persons and organisations in this text are pure fictional and do not adhere to reality. They really don't!
With great power comes great electricity bills.
In the boston area, software salaries have been effectively capped. In the company where I work currently (which I shall be leaving soon), a raise that accompanies an excellent review is less than 3%. Complaints are met with the following justification: "You are getting paid about 10 times what someone from India gets for doing the same work. We cannot justify higher raises to the board/investors".
I recently found out that the following policy has been instituted. If an employee gets an offer from another company at a much higher salary, make no attempt to match the salary, just let him/her go. Hire someone else, if necessary at the higher salary. But do not give a big raise to any existing employee!
Unfortunately, this situation seems to be more and more prevalent, my friends who work in other companies have reported similar policies being instituted. I don't know where all this is going to end up.
Magnus.
Some firms will compete through cost while others compete through quality of services. Considering customer-service of a specialized product a non-core part of your business is idiotic: intricate electronics have their own personalities, someone from Dell is not likely to be able to trouble-shoot a competitor's product-specific problem. Consider the difference in incentives between someone like Dell and a contracted company. Disregard the part of the article where they clam that the name on your work-ID effects your quality, that's bunk.
To Dell, satisfying a customer can be meassured in terms of future revenue, while a contractor is going to view each call as a cost to be paid out of their contracted fee. Changing the incentive structure would change the results drastically.
Imagine: You get paid some amount of money per week to deal with customers, out of this you must pay for staff and equipment. More time spent on customers means more staff must be hired. What would be the profit maximizing solution? Spend as little time on customers as you can while maintaining sufficient quality that you contract doesn't get canceled. You know there are no substitues for your services, customers MUST come to you unless they wish to incur the cost of a new computer. If you breed an atmosphere where your workers try to minimize the duration of calls, your quality will degrade and people will not purchase that brand in the future.
Now imagine a setup where you get some smaller amount of money, almost enough to keep your doors open, and your customers rate your performance as "poor", "okay", or "good", and you get paid a small bonus for being "okay", and a larger bonus for being "good". Being "poor" most of the time means you go out of business (hopefully for the customers' sake you lose your contract first...) Pass on part of the quality bonus to your employees and they will spend more time, making sure that they get their extra money by being helpful. In order to realize the largest return possible you will invest part of your profits in training and more staff (for a decreased wait-time).
The contracting firm of course needs to ask if they can do it for less money, but cheaper labor means a smaller fixed cost, so it would likely end-up outsourcing to another firm somewhere were wages are lower, say in rural Kentucky or purhaps off-shoring it to somewhere in the British Commonwealth. Basic microeconomic lessons: if your product runs the same software as your competitors, then your cost/quality combination must be more attractive if you wish to capture or retain that marginal customer; time spent on the phone listening to recorded messages tell you how much your business is valued is considered a cost by consumers; and incentives matter.
Does that mean that good customer service can only come from the United States? That seems fairly sensationalist and egotistical.
A well-run call-center gives good customer service. No more, no less. Bad call-centers exist all around the world. Yes, including the U.S.
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
#2 and #3 are flawed. In practice, #2 is often false or provided by sabotage. As a salesman you really have no control of #3 and may be as duped as your customers.
Cingular's "Raising the bar" is a great example. Instead of building out their network, they are spending money on exclusive phone deals and billboards. The purpose of those billboards is to expect a fictional level of service and simply say, without proof, that theirs is better. Having had Cingular and Sprint, I can say their promise is bogus where I live and I enjoy better service than Verizon and other incumbent subscribing friends do. "Education" has to be built on fact.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, there really isn't much of a correlation between poor service and outsoourcing... Wordt customer service I have seen in over 5 decades was a local TMobile helpdesk.
There ARE, however, very real hidden costs to outsourcing that make it a difficult prospect at best; poor customer service just isn't one of them.
The worst is managing the relationship of your US staff and the outsourced staff. I have seen numerous examples of subtle or even outright sabotage of the project by the US staff.
One of the most successful outsourcers in the United States has a "core values" program for it's US staff...the ability to maintain political neutrality while acting as a good will ambassador is a key core value.
Western and Hindu culture are very compatible if you take care to manage the intercultural references, whch can cause major difficulties. For example, many Hindus will say "You are correct" to acknowledge they are listening. What they MEAN is "OK" or "Uh huh", but Westerners often take is as arrogance or judgmental.
Worse yet, Westerners take it as meaning that their point is understood, and it's culturally difficult (impolite) to ask for clarification if the other speaker has gone on to a new point. Its is very important to make sure what you think you are saying is actually what they are hearing.
One minor point on an underlying theme of these comments. Believe it or not, institutional economic analysis shows that India isn't a serious problem for US jobs, not like China is, anyhow. The reasons range from cultural differences (India is highly conservative, for the most part) to the fact that the level of convergence is much higher, as well as a much higher integration of Indians into American culture. I suspect the reason India is getting such favorable treatment from Bush is that they are viewed as a "client state" of America, not an independent nation, probably for good reason.
Most outsourcing decisions are made far up the corporate food chain. It's the job of the management staff to handle any difficulties before they are visible to those at the highest levels. As long as the work is passable and any damage canbe contained, no one hears anything and nothing gets fixed.
Also, those complaining about outsourcing are probably wasting their breath. The next round of outsourcing is going to be targeting all the "innovation" jobs in IT like systems architecture and design that we thought were safe. I'm planning to stay in for the long haul and hope that some of this comes back around. However, we need to adjust our expectations to the new reality. If it's cheaper, it will be done. Unless consumer prices and our rampant spending are adjusted, we have no way to compete with people who will do good enough work for 10% of the price.
The real hidden cost of outsourcing is the loss of a talent pool. If and when I have a kid, I'll encourage it to be smart and study, but I think I'll encourage it to be a lawyer or an MBA. They're not replaceable, and the professions (medical, law, etc.) have a very strong organization that keeps the barrier to entry and salaries high. A good example is pharmacy. Pharmacists don't make their own compounds anymore; they pour tablets from the big bottle to little ones, and get paid very high salaries to do it. All they have to be is careful.
A lot of the points the parent makes are not worthy of any response as they seem more rooted in bigotry than reason.
1) After you teach the Indian company how to write good software for your industry, a relative of the owner of the Indian company will go into business in competition with you.
This is true in pretty much any business relationship. Whomever you teach how to do a thing for your profit will try to figure out ways of doing that same thing for their profit.
3) All products require innovation. Indian programmers are not usually innovative; it's not a quality of the Hindu culture.
This is one of those bigotry motivated points.
I know enough Indian people to say this is false. You don't have to believe me though- take a look at the list of Nobel laureates. Just wanted to refute one in case anybody was wondering.
4) No matter what the project plans say, programming requires decision-making that affects the long term health of your product and your company. How often does programming require far-reaching decision-making? Possibly as often as once per hour.
The general point here is completely valid, and people will have to learn how to evaluate companies for their work performance. Switching industries- who would you rather hire to do special effects for your eature film: Zenera (my company) or Industrial Light and Magic ?
Well, ILM has earned their reputation through lots of successful high profile projects. You can look at a ton of their work. You'd be smart to go with ILM unless your project is small and you can afford a risk, then you can risk a small unknown studio like Zenera.
My pricing reflects that- I am much cheaper per man hour than ILM. That's my company giving prospective customers a valid business reason to choose us. It decreases risks in case of failure and costs in case of success.
The same is true in any sort of outsourcing- I talked about reputation, but a management team must examine who they are outsourcing to, and their prior work product, in order for the move to be effective.
5) People in India are amazingly poor for a reason. That reason may (will) affect the work they do for you.
If the parent means to refer to the lack of materialistic motive in their culture, I fail to see the validity of the point.
In general, Indian culture values education. That is valuable- especially in a knowledge industry like programming.
Mostly however I think this "point" is, again, motivated by bigotry.
6) There's a big overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. On the other hand, programmers in the U.S. may spend a lot of time playing video games rather than learning social skills; there is a big barrier between someone with low social skills and the normal world, also.
This sounds like a point, but ends up being a non-issue. Indians, or any other foreign contractors will have to expend their own internal efforts on these issues. Native contractors are likely to use that as leisure time. Both are "wastes" from a productivity standpoint.
(I know there is a point here about leisure time being restorative and allowing people to work more effectively when they are on task- but there are some studies that indicate that what is really needed is time away from the "primary" task, a secondary task is often just as effective as a pure leisure time. Let the shrinks sort it out.)
7) You may not notice the low quality of your product until it is too late. That's why you outsourced, isn't it?: You wanted to avoid giving attention to a critical area.
Anyone who outsources their critical business processes is a fool.
There are valid reasons for outsourcing, most of which boil down to focusing on where your expertise is, and letting other experts do what they are good at for you.
Using Apple as an example, they outsource almost all of their manufacturing and assembly. They focus on design and engineering. (Software and hardware)
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Sorry to reply twice... just thought of a second point.
I used to work for a "Big 6" professional services/accounting firm. I can't even tell you the number of SAP or PeopleSoft implementations this firm bungled with a staff of 100+ on a project all billing at about $200/hr.
Plenty of high priced consultants screw up too.
To make any kind of large scale project succede, you need to 1) look for - and be willing to pay for - good quality talent and 2) watch them like a hawk. Have them deliver early and often, and monitor their deliverables. Yank them out if the project gets into trouble, don't wait until you've sunk two years and $50 million in before you find out they are incompetent.
1)Kind of like after the Germans taught the Americans how to build cars they went off and built better cars no wait American cars are still pretty crappy.
2)OJ Simpson Anyone?
3)Indians can innovate. What do you call creating a business model where most of your work comes from a high living cost country so you can charge high rates but you do it in a low living cost country so your costs are lower. Thats real innovative
4)And the point is? Decisions made by an American programmer are different from decisions made by an Indian programmer How?
5) Yes the reason is most of the wealth of India was looted over 3 centuries of colonialism but then again the Indians are getting rich again. There was a time when 4 centuries back when 80% of world GDP was Indian and Chinese and we are going back to the same. Yes of course it affects how people work. When people have had to struggle to get into a well paying career they take their job seriously unlike somebody in the US who has had the job handed to him on a platter
6) Yes their is an overhead in crossing cultural boundaries. That is why companies offer lower rates so it is worth taking the trouble to cross those boundaries
7) Nobody in their right mind outsources critical areas oly non core competencies
8) If your attitude is managers suck no wonder they want to outsource your job. Whether you like it or not the world is set up where people with soft skills rule people with technical skills. Just face the facts. If you dont like it you should have spent more time at frat parties in college to develop the soft skills needed for management
9) The reason people need to outsource is that the US has an unsustainably high standard of living. When a plumber or Garbage truck driver in the US earns more than a rocket scientist in other countries somewhere the extra amount of money has to be brought in. If Engineers and IT people want the same benefits of being American that Garbage truck drivers and Dockworkers have then they too should put time and effort into forming unions. If not dont blame management for trying to balance the books through outsourcing. You want a really fair system make it so that anyone from the poorest country can come to the US and do the low end jobs. Soon the cost of living will be low enough in the US to be able to compete on salaries with any other country. Or be like the Doctors and Lawyers who use the law from preventing foreign competition.
10) Thats so freaking wrong. A Puritan culture which is bascially what the Americans started out with respects authority a lot more but that doesnt prevent individualistic expressions in the US
11) Well its true Hindus have made bad decisions in the past which allowed their country to be overrun by Muslim and Christian rulers but that doesnt mean they are self defeating. People make bad decisions. The key is to learn from the mistakes. The Native Americans made a bad mistake by not killing every white colonist on sight and they got overrun as a result. Hindus did the same mistake with Muslims and Britishers but they learnt enough in time to survive so I would say they have learnt their lesson
12) OK Companies fail for a variety of reasons . Blaming outsourcing is just a red herring unless you have specific proof of outsourcing leading to the failure
13) OK the caste systems been dead for a while. When I went through school the only place people were asked about their castes was for reservations( India's version of affirmative action for the erstwhile lower castes) . I had friends from all castes and caste was never an issue in our dealings ( In fact I didnt know their castes till we started filling forms for college admission. Man was I pissed that I was a so called upper caste and could not apply for affirmative action). Granted I grew up in a city so their might still be some vestiges of the caste system left in the really isolated villages. Its kind of like the Hillbillys . You know they exist in your country, You wish they were not so backward, you are embarressed by their presence but theres precious little you can do if some people insist on being stupid. In any case anyone who wants to be successfull in today's India better not be casteist.
**Life is too short to be serious**
1) Many Americans have come to believe that buying something or subscribing to a product is tantamount to an agreement in which the provider becomes the slave of the consumer. Therefore any inconvenience is insufferable. Dare to question the consumer or suggest an action they might take? Unacceptable. The only solution is to press the immediate "fix it" button, after which you should apologize for having wasted the consumer's (presumably) valuable time. People tend to believe their material success actually makes them superior. (You would be surprised how little wealth it takes to give people this confidence)
2) Many Americans have had very little exposure to any accent other than their own, much less ever tried to learn a 2nd language. I have had people transferred to me from other extremely capable reps simply because they could not understand the other rep's accent. "I just don't think they should hire those foreigners, i just can't understand a word they say." or even better, "You people don't need to hire someone who doesn't understand English." Of course they come off sounding incredibly ignorant and childish, but welcome to the planet. Of course, not everyone is that rude about it. I have friends (mostly older friends) who I love to death, and who are great people, but they just can't understand foreign accents.
3) Like many other /.ers, people within a certain radius of me ask me to fix their computers. I have tried to help close friends over the phone with their computer problems. Half the time I know exactly what the problem is and have a clear image of their computer in my mind. Most of the time I end up having to fix the problem in person. If someone is having so much of a problem with their pre-configured dell that they have to call tech support, they probably aren't going to understand what the person is telling them to do. (That having been said, I have heard of some incompetant computer support reps; my friend had an Acer rep tell her that the power cord was the reason her laptop was freezing up, and they sent her a new one.)
most people can barely handle telephone support from their countrymen. Even if the rep speaking from India does a flawless job, sometimes the American consumer just can't handle it. randyjg2's comment above was a great example of that. Anyway there's my $0.02.
India is seeing something like what we did during about 2000. They are seeing an extremely rapid influx of money into IT, and phenomenal growth in that job market.
.com boom -- lots and lots of people who absolutely should not have been hired to do what they are doing are working in the area, and there is a large chunk of the market that is unskilled. Remember all the horrible, awful, terrible websites made by overpaid people who barely knew what they were doing? Yeah. Think of the same thing, but in a different country.
Not surprisingly, this is having exactly the same effect as it did in the United States during the
India will straighten up their act, the same as we're doing. People and companies will start building reputations, the growth will slow to stability, etc. Not every Indian comp.* Usenet poster will be clueless. It'll just take some time.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
My first Dell issue happened within hours of turning it on. Some application, that I have yet to isolate, insists on trying to load (twice a day) a non-existent file called "Timer.txt".
Windows is no Linux, even with a sizeable collection of free utilities, but you can at least make it palatable.
Use filemon to find the offending process.
My second Dell issue concerns the USB ports. 5 USB 2 ports on the back and 2 on the front, and I normally use most of them -- (1) USB hub for wireless keyboard, (2) USB mouse, (3) USB wireless LAN, (4) USB 3-speakers system, (5) external USB DVD+RW drive (as Dell wanted too much for the internal one, so I went for internal DVD-ROM), and (6) USB hard drive.
You may be simply drawing too much power. Try purchasing an inexpensive *powered* USB hub. Plug that into the computer and plug some of the devices into it (as a bonus, this provides a rather more conveniently locatable thing to plug things into).
The problem is that hard drive failure is so serious an issue that operating systems will understandably make it priority number one and other programs/operations will suffer performance problems or worse (or even worse).
It's not the priority, but the fact that things like the pagefile being on the hard drive and executable code being on the hard drive causes some operations (like memory accesses or simply trying to execute a chunk of code) to take incredibly long.
Computers normally do a good job of faking "multi tasking" but NMI (non-maskable interrupts) rain on that parade.
I could be wrong, but I don't think that a media read error will produce an NMI.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.