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Life on the Other End of the Tech Support Line
Ant writes to mention a PC World article about life on the other end of the tech support line. From the article: "According to interviewees, entry-level jobs at U.S. tech support firms pay about $7 an hour. Workers for a third-party tech support firm in New Delhi, India, make less than half that. Akanksha Chaand, who holds an advanced degree in computer science and had a job fielding calls for Hewlett-Packard at Business Processing Outsourcing in New Delhi, India, made the equivalent of $13,000 a year working in tech support--significantly more money than many less fortunate people in India earn. In contrast, a tech support pro who now lives in Arizona says she was barely scraping by on her $7-an-hour salary with no benefits. The rep, who asked that her name not be used, said it was only a bit better than her previous job--delivering pizzas. She said she received two weeks of training before taking calls from the public. "
When everyone and their brother wants to fill a role they're not qualified imagine that, they get paid like shit.
It's like someone who studies to be a chef wondering why they don't make a lot of money at McDonalds.
There are L2 and L3 roles which pay better. I know a few L3 people at IBM and they're smart people earning decent bucks [way more than $7/hr].
So if these peeps are so damn smart don't apply for L1 support roles.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The link points to a digg article that points to the PC Mag article. Not sure what to say.
The difference in the cultures make in interesting. Akanksha has a computer science degree and holds what is probably a very respectable job in his peer's eyes. Here in the US, the job could be considered elementry. Are the standards for a computer science degree in India equivalent to those of a similar degree here in America?
Seems like a service desk role than genuine L2 or L3. L2/L3 are still paid good when compared to rest of the industry.
#include std_disclaimer.h
They may get paid half what the US employees do. But things over there are much cheaper. They probably think they're rich.
It is surprising how little they demand from L1 people. No wonder tech support plain sucks most of the time you have to call to some L1 number. Companies sure love driving away paying customers with that - especially in the cases where it's painfully hard to get past that L1 moron asking "is your power cord plugged in" to someone who potentially could help. Not knowing English (the tech support guy) for real doesn't help either.
As a customer I rather go get the products of the companies that are providing better support if I have to select from otherwise roughly equivalent products. I rather pay closer to 50$/hour for my L1 guy thank you.
The main subject of the article is tech support, and that's fine (I guess death threats and lusers tend to be all alike all over the world) but examining the difference of income between outsourced and american employees involves taking account of differences in taxation, welfare, lifestyle...
It's a broad subject that in my opinion has little to do with TFA and might be better discussed relating to jobs in general, not tech support in particular.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
From my understanding, the industries' average pay for a tech support position isn't typically that low. In the area I'm in, you won't be paid less than 8 for customer support and 9 for technical support.
That said, they are still very crappy jobs with many centers having turnover rates that would make fast food places blush.
I can't compete with someone who only has to pay thirty bucks a month for rent, and who can feed his family in a nice restaraunt for a dollar.
Environmental laws too strict? Simple, just spew your damned poison in a country that doesn't have those laws.
"Minimum wage? Environment? Health care? BWAHAHA! We're the multinational corporation, we can do anything we damned well please and there's nothing you or anybody else can do about it!"
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Zonked!
So what about this is newsworthy? The U.S. job is entry-level and staffed with the bottom of the barrel. We're talking people whose last job was pizza delivery. Of course they're not paid much by the U.S. economy's standards.
The Indian with a BSCS degree will get a job that pays well in the economy in which she chooses to live.
1. If the Indian wants more, she should move to the U.S. where the demand for degrees and pay is higher. 2. If the U.S. former pizza driver wants more, a degree and experience is the answer. I've stopped visiting this site as often because of "relevent news" like this.
All too often you get some script reader on the other end of the line :
A customer brought a PC in for service. No symptoms were described.
We plugged it it and it flickered video on the test monitor for a few
seconds before it SMOKED.
Tech Support : I need you to turn the PC on and hit the F(whatever) key
and tell me your CMOS settings please.
Me : The PC us burning when power is applied.
Tech Support : I need you to turn the PC on and hit the F(whatever) key
and tell me your CMOS settings please.
Okay Habib, I get it, you are a script reader. I need level 2 support.
Transfered.
Hello, this is Patricia(yeah right) Pat Ri Cia , heavy Indian accent,
Haw can I hep you?
Me : This PC smokes when power is applied, no signs of spillage or anything
that may incicate abuse on the user's part.
Pat Ri Cia : Will you turn on the PC and press F(whatever) while booting to
get to CMOS please.
Habibette , trained to pretend she was an English speaker, reading the
same script. Hewlett Packard was the manufacturer. Needless to say, we
refunded the user's money. We shipped the defective unit back to HP under
the "cap" allowed for defective merchandise. Screw them outsourcing idiots.
Simply befriend a nerd. They are a common species of parasite and can be found in nearly all urban centres. They charge little for their advice or knowhow, and usually can be bartered with using goods such as 'Coca-cola' and 'Chocolate'.
As a rough of comparison, a loaf of bread which costs $2.50 in the US costs a little less than 25 Indian Rupees ($0.50). US $13000 is a little less than 600k INR which by all means is quite a _comfortable_ if not princely salary to get by in India.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Remember the days when you could call tech support and get someone on the line who had some semblance of a clue?
I'm not sure why this is linked via digg. Here's direct link.
On another note, no offense to the people in the article, but do we really call someone a computer support 'pro' after two hours of training and a pizza delivery job?
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Gamasutra had an interestng article about support desks for computergames a little while ago. You can read it here.
It gives an interesting list of what to do with which emails, when to press delete and when to press reply, what to do if somebody threatens to commit suicide and so on.
My freeware games
This is a global economy, right? Shoudln't the lowest paying jobs go to places where that money can bring up the economy? If people (en mass) somewhere in the U.S. want to work for $4.00 in a call center, I have no problem with it. Maybe highschool kids or others who are physically disabled and aren't educated well enough to do other jobs.
The cold fact of the matter is that the standard of living is too high for these jobs to all be filled in the U.S. without americans paying a lot more for software and such.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Paid eight what? Grecks? Beers? Shillings? Drachmas? Space Hookers?
It only took me 20 to write this when it could taken me 5, but that's the convenience of having a 1.2 vs an 800.
There's also the fact that most American business managers consider their employees and customers to be parasites that are bleeding the company dry, and treat them as such. The fact that employees actually want to be paid for their labour, and that customers expect to actually receive goods and/or services just drives American CEOs up the wall (which is why they lobby for laws that would remove those two issues).
...so everyone can get a good payment of USD 30 an hour, like me... ...... (insert company name here) move to India if they should pay the same to the workers over there ?
and those kapitalist bastards can feel what a globalzed (globally united) workforce is.
Would
The unions must accept the fact and unite across country borders...
Ask anyone who does Tech Support and they will tell you they are underpaid. I used to work for a tech support sourcing company (Stream), doing level 2 support for @Home, cable modems before it disbanded into tthe seperate cable companies like Comcast, ATT, etc. I had three weeks of training, and got paid $10.50 an hour. It really wasn't bad pay for a kid just out of high school with no formal training. If you had asked me after doing it for 6 months I, and most everyone else working there, would have said we were underpaid. Tech support really can be stressing and frustrating. Tech support people tend to get this attitude of, "These people need me, I should get paid a lot more". But really, 10.50 was great pay for a kid in my situation. I wouldn't do it for 7 an hour, though. And you can live pretty well in india for under 5 bucks an hour.
Any information may be true or incorrect depending on your perception of said information
I have seen many people who work in tech support complain about the unearthly working hours. Especially if the call center caters to the US clients, then out of the 30 days a month, one has to work for atleast 20 days in the night shift. The pay is relatively good. But the burn out is higher. The employees are given training to talk like the americans using the american slang especially if the job involves accepting calls. It seems really surreal to see one of these guys talk. And the people stay at one place only for a couple of months and then move on.
So IMHO, irrespective of the pay, a call center job is not exactly a cushy job. One should not measure a job in terms of money alone. Job satisfaction also counts a lot.
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I live in a European country whose name shan't be mentioned, and work as, uhm, just about any position imaginable in my company. I am a part-time DBA, I do PHP and .NET (with web standards, believe it or not), I know a thing or two about interface design so I'm redesigning a lot of in-corporation apps, I do tech support, I do software architecture and some project management... And I earn roughly $3.5/h, or about $600/month. That's even a high-paid job, close to 40% above the country average (unofficially, of course; officially, I earn less, but all sorts of tycoons get in the average, and the government likes to throw mud in our faces).
In contrast, my housing expenses (incl. heating, water and electricity) amount to about $350/month in a small, 1-room house. Good luck eating for $8 per day... I can't imagine buying a car in the next 10-15 years, and I can't imagine *ever* buying my own apartment, as 1 m^2 (10.8 square feet) of housing costs about $2000 here and rising. I could buy 3 m^2 yearly if I invested my entire salary, so if I lived off mana, and under a bridge in a cardboard box, I could buy a small aparment in 20 years (and decorate it and buy furniture in 10 years extra).
$7/h? Sounds too good to be true.
The blurb links to the Digg page for the story, not the actual article: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,125537,0 0.asp
I went from tech support to delivering pizza. Pizza delivery actually pays pretty well. I averaged $12-15 an hour (with tips and gas factored in), as opposed to 10.50 an hour. Granted, this was when gas was $1-$1.25. It's funny, i remember all of us drivers standing around bitterly complaining about having to pay $1.35 for gas. Damn that was high ;)
Any information may be true or incorrect depending on your perception of said information
For anyone who wants to enter the IT industry, a tech support job is a great start. If the company has it's own technical support group in-house, you get a chance to meet all the big honchoes of the company and you get to learn and understand their vision, even if you're not hired at the position you really wanted (ie: network or system admin). Level1 technical support is commonly used as a stepping-stone so one can create relationships with managers at the company and eventually maybe VIPs, which will help them get their future position. All of this is very obvious to employers, and so they take advantage of it. Although having a small turn-over rate at a company is a very good thing (you get to retain your employees longer, which become more and more familiar with their co-workers, which usually (I did say usually) should lead to a more calmer, better atmosphere at the office) it seems like some companies just don't care. In particular, those companies that are offering in the 7-9$/hr range. I once interviewed for a level1 support job for Microsoft in Toronto and they were actually offering me $2.00/hr less then my current position at a diff company (my current position was customer support, so I already wasn't making much money... For MS I was interviewing for tech support). Although working for Microsoft would of been a great opportunity/adventure, I just could'nt take the scale-back in pay. To me, it seemed like they were targetting young adults (possibly someone who just graduated from community college?) still living with mom and dad which means the young adult wouldn't pay any food or rent.
If you are being paid 7 an hour for "L1 tech support", you are probably deluded into thinking you are doing something hard. We L2 people used to laugh at the L1 people who called themselves "support". They were customer service, nothing more. All they did was have people unplug their modem, plug it back in, if that didn't work they sent them to us. It was customer service, nothing more. No need for higher pay for that.
Any information may be true or incorrect depending on your perception of said information
This sort of misses the point of the problem. There are a fixed and small number of well paying job and special skills or knowledge are required to get them. The number of unskilled jobs is very large- more jobs than there are people to fill them. These are the jobs that our president refers to as "jobs that Americans just won't do." These jobs are almost uniformly low paying, often menial, sometimes dangerous (recent statistic about 25% of all workplace deaths involve undocumented workers, which is disproportionately high).
Unfortunately, our American lifesytle and economy seem to require these jobs. The people who pick our vegetables, serve us in restaurants, work in supermarkets, work in hotels, work security jobs, etc. They are everywhere. Imagine how life would change without these jobs/people.
In fact, the American lifestyle is addicted to low paying jobs and what they mean- $2 BigMacs, $40 DVD players, cheap vegetables, etc. Companies outsource whenever they can to reduce cost and we , the consumers, reward them with our business. Over half a trillion dollars in trade deficits go overseas every year. Half a TRILLION dollars! Two or three years ago, there was a rumor that S. Korea was going to sell of US dollars in favor of Euros. Based on this rumor, the value of the dollar fell about a percent. China owns at least an order of magnitude more dollars (and growing every day). The administration accuses China of artificially devaluing their currency to keep costs of their good low. China/US relations quite frankly suck- US spy planes off the coast of China crashing into a fighter jet, the US bombing the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, President Hu visiting Bill Gates prior to president Bush, each accusing the other about human rights violations. The list goes on and on. China is a proud nation that is rising fast, sending up people in to space, and taking a more dominant place on the world stage. If/when they want to break the US financially, they almost certainly can.
Meanwhile, we, Americans, continue to pay illegal immigrant works to do "jobs that Americans won't do." All the while paying other Americans money for unemployment and welfare (Add to that the problem of billions being spent in Iraq.) The national debt is increasing. Bottom line is that this is not sustainable. One day China, Saudi Arabia, and all the other countries that own US dollars are going to decide that the US dollar is not a good investment (would you buy stock in any company that year after year goes further into debt?). That day is not far off.
I don't claim to have all the answers but I think that it involves something like paying people in the US a living wage, increasing the wages on "jobs Americans don't want" to the point where Americans would want them, stop migrating jobs out of the US, stop increasing the national debt, ie stop giving tax cuts with money you don't have. Americans will have to accept that it costs money to maintain our society, country, and way of life. It certainly does not involve smugly saying that if they are not qualified, they get paid "like shit."
Of course, she didn't have to spend time speaking so the people talking to her could understand her, or learn her new name was "Susan."
That's because most of us are arrogant. I can take any college kid and put them in our user support help desk and they'll know everything they need to know in a few months. 2 weeks isn't enough, but I can turn a layman into a "computer pro" (according to the standards of our customers) in 1-4 months easily. And when we get to talking about salary, you can bet they all think they're underpaid, but they also think that everyone else is overpaid. The sentiment has nothing to do with tech support; pretty much everyone out there thinks that they are underpaid and everyone higher than them is overpaid. Within a year or two of getting a higher paid job, they'd start thinking the same; I only make $50,000 a year to do nothing, and jeeze, look at that guy! He's so overpaid!" It all has to do with expectations; a friend of mine is going from $7.00 an hour for 20 hours a week to $35,000 a year and his cost of living is probably around $600 a month. As soon as he got the offer, the thought was, "Man, only 35 grand a year..." We're "underpaid" in the help desk, but we make more than just about any starting job for a college student in our town. The mentality of underpaid vs overpaid isn't tech support specific, but one held by humanity in general.
-1 Flamebait. Heh. For all of us who have been and are currently in tech support roles where we're required to talk on the phone. >:|
You're nothing; like me.
$7.00/hr to be Tuttled mercilessly by clueless lumps like Jerry A. Taylor?
Sorry, but the reason tech support pays so low is simple: because it is typically the blind leading the unseeing.
If during the few events in my life where I have already RTFM, doublechecked my own assumptions, configurations, steps, etc, and would then like to reach out for a little nudge, IF I could have been guaranteed to get a knowledgable soul on the other end, I would have gladly paid the same as any other highly competent professional, let's say 70-100 hr billing rate.
But who among us has ever actually competent expereinced tech support where YOU didn't need to lead the person away from blind alleys ('I don't think my NIC settings are leading to font problems'), fruitless churnung ('I'd rather NOT reformat and re-install my entire operating system to solve a new problem with a printer driver, thank you'), etc?
I've just finished nine months of tech support.
I was paid 62k USD.
Like a lot of jobs, the range of pay depends on the difficulty of the work you're doing.
Some people get minimum wage, some people get plenty, and people in other countries find that the money they get paid buys a lot more of the local goods and services, so it's not useful in ANY way to directly compare only wages.
Film at 11.
How often do you hear of straight out of high school kids landing $100K jobs while they go to college to learn their real career? I haven't heard much of that happening. It's the norm to be paid almost nothing while in school. Sure there's the elite few where parents pay for a fullride to Ivy league schools but everybody else is in the same boat. You do the following:
Go to community college for cheaper classes (or 2 year degree)
Get student loans
Get better grades (ie, study/work harder/smarter) in order to get scholarships
Take night classes so you get higher paying fulltime work
Live with parents/relatives/roommates/etc to reduce housing costs
Live frugally
What do you mean nobody is giving you the experience? The person got a job for $7/hour. Put in your dues for a year or two and parlay that work experience on your resume for a better job. That's how most people in this country do it. The fact that $7/hour isn't enough to live the good life even in Arizona is immaterial. That's the correct amount I'd expect for somebody who answers phone calls and drones on from a script. I wouldn't expect general L1 tech support to pay any more than entry-level Walmart/McDonalds jobs.
made the equivalent of $13,000 a year
and
scraping by on her $7-an-hour salary with no benefits.
These numbers mean nothing when you compare them. How long is each person working? To get the same 1857 hours must be worked.
This is 37 hours per week and 2 weeks holiday.
And for a company not only are they interested in what they pay the people. Other factors are prices of the buildings and any other overhead cost.
Wether the people can get by is of no importance. Welcome to capitalism where prices are dictated by what you can get away with and the cheaper offer will be taken.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
That will teach them or what? :)
What's next? Slashdot dupes by linking to Digg that links to an older Slashdot story?
I used to work tech support for Comcast. I am also in an area that Comcast does not have service (Canada). So you could describe me as a person who had an outsourced job for a while.
I live in a smaller city, where there's really a University and not much else. As a result, the call center has hired just about everyone in town who has the slightest bit of computer knowledge at this point in time. The real life blood of the center though is in international students at the University. It's often difficult for them to find jobs, but they have a great deal of technical knowledge (especially the computer science students). As a result, our center was the highest rated center for Comcast for a very long time.
I got paid a little over $10 CAD/hr. I hear that it's gone up to $11.25 since I quit, but that's likely due to the minimum wage going up (it's $6.25). The call center is a complete shit job, and people only stay to earn money (providing tech support for Americans is right up there with jizz mopper), and the center has to pay us enough over minimum wage to be appealing.
But that's my personal experience. I find it rather interesting that according to the article, Americans get paid ~$3 less than us. But of course I had plenty of experiences with the American call centers. Mainly cleaning up messes that they created. So I guess that the call management people I worked for figured that the extra $3 was justified, as the results were better up here? (Seriously, I could rant for hours on the American call centers... the one in lubbock, tx most especially. And believe me, I wasn't the only one who had to clean up MANY messes from that center.)
$9.00-$9.50/hr doing tech support in Las Vegas and Delaware
Source: ClientLogic LLC
The rep, who asked that her name not be used, said it was only a bit better than her previous job--delivering pizzas
Maybe sexual harrassment? I remember a guy on a metro bus in Lancaster, PA once telling his friend, and the rest of us, how much he liked delivering pizzas -- particularly the tips. He said $50 was his record for a single tip.
So if you are toying with the idea of entering a life of tech support don't just offhand discount an honest living delivering pizzas.
Just re-read the sentence w/o the parenthesis. Wait, I'll even take them out for you. "Many countries will pay your associated costs if you want to study abroad in the USA...".
What are you reading that would have inferred the poster was saying USA was not a 1st world country?
The American worker moves to Bangalore, forwards their support calls there, and lives out the rest of their days sipping champagne and eating caviar.
Look, if your not earning a "living wage" then adapt. This means going without luxuries. I have friends who still work "dead end jobs" and they harp all the time about the fact they don't get paid enough. Yet they still want their cell phone, cable, high speed internet, and more. Of course its not sustainable on their income. Worse, all these "monthlies" they pay out keep them from having the money they need to get an education to move them up.
The real trap is that too many people are convinced they deserve the "extras" but don't want to do what it takes to have them. These jobs that people complain about are for the unskilled. We are no longer a low skill work force but we do have many jobs that are low to no skill. Every economy will have these jobs. They are mostly to introduce people to the workforce. As many know there are people out there who just are not fit to work in professional environments. They don't have the personality, the required restraint, or the discipline. As such they will work these low end jobs. Some will take on more than one.
When I worked for a large security company, think rent-a-cops, I was amazed at how little some of the people made. We even had a few of these people working the building and lot of the company. What I found was three types of people, there are obviously more. The first were students who needed a simple job with regular hours. Much of security work is sitting and they would take advantage of it by studying. They would do their walks and escort ladies to the vehicles upon request. The second were people in between "real jobs" who were doing what was necessary to keep their homes and their families comfortable. Many had the security job as their second job. The third group were the majority of our hires, they were the people with no initiative. They simply didn't want more to do. Their idea of a better job was one with even less to do! Don't underestimate the number of people who fall into this last category. Sure we can find many who are in these jobs that should be somewhere else but those people are the exception. They should be spending their off time looking for the better job and improving their skills to get that job. I know, I was in this category for 5 years after leaving the service. I got out and expected to be able to land a decent job yet I found that my skills were not needed or out of date. I spent 5 years in a "dead-end" grocery job and eventually got myself back into tech school with the help of friends and my parents.
It was an incentive to not live that way that helped me move on. During that time I did without the big cable package, cell phone, and high speed internet. I didn't party every night or see movies all the time. I had an out of date car and for most of the time a 8 year old motorcycle to get to and from work. Sure it sucked, but initiative is the key. Unless you want to improve your situation you won't, you'll just bitch about how unfair it all is and never get anywhere.
Paying a living wage can be a trap as well. What consititutes a living wage for one person is barely surviving for another. How do you decide? Also, how do you provide incentive for people to better themselves and their families position if even the bottom end jobs pay a living wage? This is the big lie being foisted on people. The caring elite don't want these people to succeed, they want them content in their bottom end jobs so they, the elite, can enjoy all their low cost living without feeling guilty. Keep the poor happy and have no guilt for living off them. Gee, how nice. The "American way" is to build a better life for yourself if possible and definitely for your children. A living wage does not necessarily encourage the attitude needed to do that. Its a crutch, like many social programs, that keeps people just comfortable enough to keep them from improving while removing any guild felt by those with more.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The L1, L2, etc. refer to tech support levels.
L1, or Level 1, is the first person that you can talk to when calling in. They are sometimes forced to follow scripts and are only allowed to solve the very basic of problems. They are also usually allowed to be on a particular call for a small amount of time before dumping it over to a higher level or "solving" the problem. The L1 techs are sometimes called "appeasement engineers" because their primary purpose is to provide a live voice and that's about it.
L2 and up are the technicians that are allowed to solve problems. In some situations, only the biggest customers (businesses) will have access to the higher L3 tier of techs.
Due to most call centers focusing on quantity instead of quality of their L1 calls, the more knowledgeable techs usually leave and turnaround is very high.
...we don't see any nationwide days of protest directed toward the technical support industry.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
I have occasion to work with a large, large number of HP products every day. Several times a week, something will fail.
:|
My calls to the HP Bangalore helpdesk are possibly the worst part of my week. What used to be a simple matter of spending five minutes telling someone from HP (that lived in my own state no less) what the problem was and having replacement hardware sent out, turned into at least a 20 minute "conversation", trying to get through the painful script reading bastards.
Same goes for Dell, IBM, almost any vendor I'm forced to deal with these days.
Fuck IT, I'm moving into law enforcement like I should have done eight years ago...
for what it is worth.
One thing I kept from my low skill days is my disdain of monthlies.
You want some real money? Simple, avoid nickle and diming yourself with all these monthly bills.
I have a pre paid cell phone. Since I have a regular phone line, without any of the silly add ons like caller id and such, I only need a cell phone for occasional use. While others I know spend 40 to 50 bucks a month I spend an average of 7 to 10 a month. Cable? I have basic cable for less that $15 a month instead of the big packages that are 40 to 60 in range. I do splurge with DSL but negotiated with my provider and only pay 40 instead of the normal 50 that most of their subscribers pay. I keep a zero balance on my credit cards, never buying what I cannot pay off immediately. When I go to buy my new laptop I will be able to pay for it straight up. Sure it would be nice to have it now but then I would have a new monthly. I don't eat out every night or even every weekend. I don't eat out for lunch at work, I watch my co-workers spend 7 to 10 dollars a day for lunch on top of their morning coffee runs, hell I bring my own instant coffee to work!
Get into the habit of not loading yourself down with monthly bills and you will see that you can do quite a bit with little money. Get into the habit of not buying your coffee house coffee every morning, eating out for lunch at work, and running a credit card balance and your income will seem to be many times what it is. Even I don't like the current prices of gasoline but since I am not burdened down with all the frivolous extras many people cannot seem to live without I can sustain the higher price of gasoline without a lifestyle change. I only have two kinds of monthly payments, my house and my car. So top that off with my bills needed to maintain the house and I can buy lots of "toys - read computer junk etc" and appear to my friends and coworkers to have more than I do. It took a long time learning what is really needed to enjoy life. Look, marketing works. You get bombarded every single day of your life. Too many people fall for it. They become to believe they need all these things, after all its less than a dollar a day, why shouldn't they? Well all those dollars add up and they reduce your flexbility and ability to deal with emergencies. If you lose your job what are the first things your going to have to give up?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here in Panama, Dell and other call centers pay US$500.00 to start. That is almost double local minimum wage.
One of the biggest challenges facing almost every support center and TAC I have worked with/in in my career is simple. If someone is really on the ball and works tech support they are at that same time soaking up knowledge, and usually getting free certifications from the company in their products (if the company has certs). This means that in a year or two they have much better skills at handling the software than the customers who are IT pros at these various companies. The software company doesn't want to pay much for support people because they view support as a cost center and need to pay bottom dollar (ergo outsourcing) when in fact some are actual profit centers.
End result? Good technician leaves support company to work for one of the customers, usually netting a 20-30% (or more) raise. Software company loses a year or two of knowledge and skill on the phone. I know of one company which believes all tech support jobs are "lateral moves" meaning someone can go L1 to L2 to L3 and literally never get a raise based on the promotions. These companies wonder why every 2-2.5 years they have an exodus of all their most skilled people.
Basically people use working at a call center as "On the Job Training"
The solution? Companies pay more for support people in order to keep skilled workers. The cost of that? Users have to pay more for support. Since users don't want to pay more for support (well a few will once they realize the return on it in quality, but still). This means companies won't pay more for tech support people, which means the cycle will continue.
Welcome to the machine.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
NTL has got a lot better since they moved their tech support to India. I rang up recently because my cable modem was acting flaky - got some Indian woman on the 'phone. "Oh drat", I thought (in polite company at least), "Here we go..." but actually she was incredibly helpful. Quite content to take my word for it when I said I had already power-cycled it, utterly unfazed when I said it was connected to a FreeBSD router but I knew that wasn't the problem, and happy enough with my concise and accurate description of the fault. A quick consultation with her Lev 2 and I had an engineer out the next day.
So just starting out and you want some experience, then look for the in-house support. It is becoming few and far between but many companies would rather have their support handled by employees instead of some outsource. They may bring in outside expertise if needed for projects or 3rd party support for a service or application.
Now I work for a consulting company, on a career level this is great I get work on systems I might have not been able to in my old job as well as the opportunity to further my certs and expand my knowledge.
Dewser - all around techy "In the immortal words of Socrates - 'I drank what?'"
I work for convergys which from what they say and ive seen is one of the largest outsourcing call center companies in the world if not the largest. We start at more then 7$/hour (well not ALOT more but definately more then that) and get at least 4 weeks training on the project im on. From what ive seen and heard all employees on all projects get full benefits within 90 days, paid vacation and sick days. There is also a very good program for students where the company pays back a fair amount of the student loan for the employee. We also get stock options. Overall its not a fantastic paying job it doesnt fit what the topic story had said.
I am surprised no one has mentioned that $13k a year (about $6.5/hr) is almost the same as $7/hr. This assumes 40 hours/week for 50 weeks.
So the question becomes, where was that money savings in shipping support to India? Apparently Americans will work for "Indian wages" for support.
One possible difference though, there is no comparison between their relative skill sets.
If these Indian tech support people have actual tech degrees and excellent educational backgrounds, why is it that I would still much rather talk to one of the $7-an-hour Americans, who against all odds seem to be able to provide better service? I have NEVER spoken to an outsourced tech support rep who actually knew what he was talking about- generally, when I start talking to someone with a faint Indian accent who calls himself "Brad" or "George", all I get is a script, and I know it's time to hang up the phone and try to contact tech support via email. All this stuff about tech support lines being staffed by highly trained Indian professionals seems like PR to me, with the actual standard being ability to speak passable English and read from a script.
I did HP Mac support for 3 months, after doing HP/Compaq desktop and laptop support. That was after I graduated with a 2.1 in Computing Science from University. There was only 2 weeks training, and most of that was relevant to the internal software being used by the callcentre, and how to handle customers.
Having a degree doesn't help. You might know IP inside out, you might be able to program and how to deconstruct the semantics of a language. It doesn't help you digging around someone's PC to kill off spyware. Or edit the windows registry. Or break the news to someone that $user_error isn't covered under warranty. I hated the windows side of things.
The mac side, I did with two dedicated other people (this was before I left to join a computer games developer, and HP two weeks later outsourced to india after Carly's management ended.) Mac stuff was comparitively excellent. Problems were easy to overcome (lacking TWAIN drivers? No problem. Open safari... etc etc, or delete this plist, and we'll try that again etc)
But, with or without a compsci degree, it wasn't taxing. The big problems were always too big, and needed coder involvement or repairs. The small problems were either not covered under support, or were solvable. When I got passed over to try to get a mentor job, I left. Never really looked back. Some people there seemed to be happy to be there taking calls for life, but I'd got ambition that wasn't getting fulfilled, and a compsci degree gathering dust through inactivity.
Don't think I'd ever do callcentre work again. It seems to be a graveyard for people unwilling to strive for bigger things.
... at an entry-level phone job (via a temp agency) right after I finished grad school. I had a masters degree in engineering, and just took the job so I could stay in Austin to interview for "real" jobs during the semester after I graduated. I think I had a half-day of training (to be fair, I was out sick during the first half of that day; in retrospect, I was lucky they didn't fire me for not showing up the second day at work). Then again, I knew more about computers than the trainers did before I ever set foot in the place.
Most of my co-workers didn't have much technical training, but most of them did well anyway (a few didn't, and didn't last very long). It wasn't the greatest job I've ever had. Dealing with mad customers (a great many of them public school teachers who were neither technically sophisticated nor particularly bright) all day long is not always fun. Then again, I got to play with a brand-new Quadra tower, and had access to a vast array of software on Apple's servers, and that doesn't even mention the free outgoing long distance during "quiet times" when the queue was empty.
It wasn't a bad entry-level job. Was I overqualified? Certainly. But all I wanted at the time was rent and beer money, and for that it was worth it.
Visit http://www.convergyssucks.com/ for more info.
Find out why being an L1 tech support for the general public sucks and most of the people working it are underpaid for the abuse they receive...
i work tech support at a university, and i think you are missing the point of working tech support. IT IS AN EASY TEMPORARY JOB, NOT A CAREER PATH. it is much like working in a supermarket, it may last a few periods NOT FOREVER. so take your seven dollars and get REAL jobs. have a nice day
Althought I know this is the case in alot of companies, I'm not quite sure what companies this article is referring to, I see refrences to HP but I can honestly say I get paid more then I should for the L1 software support for one of the big three computer manufactures ;)
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
I just ran a currency conversion between $7.00 and it's equivalent in £ Sterling.
It came out at £3.83. My job at McDonalds in England pays me £4.59/hour. When someone at McDonalds is getting paid more than the line of work you're doing, you know moving on is the bst idea.
~The TwoTailedFox posts again....
It's all well and good to talk about how much people earn, but, you kind of need to look at cost of living as well... For example, people in China earn practically nothing by U.S. standards, but, just look at their costs... They get everyday things practically for free by our standards. I don't know about India's costs, but, the general rule of thumb is, if people are willing to work for that lower price, it is because that's all they need to survive (mind you, they may be just eeking out a living, but, they are living.)
The U.S. does not have the highests costs of living (almost without a doubt Japan) but it sure as heck is a lot higher than many countries.
You can still trash a mac if you know shit about computers and insist on fucking with them. You can still fall for the ol' 'allow this program to run as root' social exploit.
They need systems which do not allow for remote changing of system code. If this requires a man to show up once in a while to plug in a device to update the firmware, so be it.
I've been told that such service jobs are the future of our economy!
Blar.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1) As commented many other places, you get what you pay for. If you're going to pay $7/hr US, or less for offshoring, you're going to get tech support on par with the kind of service you get when ordering fast food.
2) On the other side of that coin, if you are an employee of any kind, you should be doing your job to the best of your ability, not being an elitist prick to make up for what you see as an imbalance in compensation. Doing a crappy job for $7/hr isn't going to qualify you to get a job making $10 or $15. Besides which, you knew the deal going into it. You'd make $n/hr and be required to perform certain tasks (certainly including "don't be an elitist prick to customers").
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I am at work now doing tech support for Apple. 11/H Canadian is not bad, to tell people how connect to wireless networks with 3000 dollar computers and surf /.
An illuminating look at how the Indian techs on the other end of the line are told about Americans. It was on Weekend America this week: http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org/programs/ind ex_20060429.html
Both "Dial 'I' For India" and "God Calls the Call Center" are good pieces. "God Calls" is especially enlightening, as it's an interview with the author of "One Night at a Call Center." He advocates some chitchat with the tech support person as a way to break the ice, and talks about the formula "10=35," taught to workers to make them patient with the Americans, as a 35-year-old caller supposedly has the IQ of a 10-year-old Indian.
I got paid much better as a pizza delivery guy than I do at my support desk job. However, it's probably important to note that I'm in college, and it's a campus job. That's probably part of why it pays so horribly.
On another note, here's the stupidest call I've ever received at the desk:
Really stupid college girl: Um, I just got a brand new laptop, and it was working fine for about two hours, but then it turned off and I can't get it to turn back on!
Me: Ok, well, I have to check everything, so please don't be offended if I ask you a stupid question: Did you plug it in?
Really stupid college girl: Oh. *click*
I'm sure a mod is going to -1 parent into oblivion... but it's damn true. I'm so sick and fucking tired of foreign tech support. I have NEVER solved a non-trivial issue with foreign tech support. It's funny, in the enterprise the big thing is always "support support support". We won't buy a product without support. But I've found that most enterprise support is absolute garbage and not worth the time (hardware not so much, but definatly software). I'd rather post to a mailing list and talk to someone who actually understands english (as opposed to just spitting out words).
We had an issue with the Windows firewall hanging rlogin connections. I talked to about 30 dingleberry chasers over the period of 2 weeks and eventually just told the users "when Microsoft hires decent support, you won't have to wait 30 seconds to login." The Windows firewall modifies the tcp/ip stack in a certain manner. For some reason, it would block a certain packet (if I remember correct, it would block the final rst in the login sequence. It would eventually timeout and login). I don't know how many times these ass-monger specials told me to open the port via an exception. I even tried to show them the packet sniff with the firewall on and off so they could see exactly what was happening, but those super intendant chalmer dry humpers didn't understand how to read it. Mind you I made it up to level 3 support.
99% of foreign tech support is utterly useless. I refuse to ever talk to them again. Certain companies will transfer you to an American (with a wait time), others will try and pin you as a racist.
As a side note, for side work I'll only consider support contracts with solely American companies. There are many left and are usually the smaller guys. But I can't deal with another 30 minute conversation explaining why a packet sniff isn't a violation of the TOS.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
When I got into tech support in 1995, I was making $9 an hour to start. It just went up from there. By 99 when I got out and started programming, I was making about $22-24 an hour, still doing phone support. Granted, I went from product support to internal phone support, but it was still a decent living.
Has outsourcing really killed the support industry that much?
Government officials and policy makers talk about jobs Americans won't do. The reason why most Americans won't do certain jobs is not because of the work, it is because of the low pay! Americans need a certain amount of money to pay for housing, energy, food, as well as all the government-mandated expenses. Most mega corporations have become so obsessed with short term profit margins that they willingly sacrifice quality and customer service in order to squeeze another nickel in short term profits. Governments have become so obsessed with making sure that everything that is done under their auspices conform exactingly to every written specification and petty policy regardless of the costs. This is why costs are so high and service is so shitty.
What the author said is true when it comes to computer tech support. Most "technicians" receive about 2 weeks of training here in the Police States of Amerika before being turned loose on the phones. When I worked at Sykes Enterprise as a tech support agent, I was trained for two different clients. The first client was AT&T Worldnet. This training lasted about 3 weeks and included some basic computer troubleshooting concepts as well as training on how to use AT&T's troubleshooting database (Information Warehouse). The second client I worked for was SBC Internet, and this is where I received "training" on how to use their "Knowlege Base." The way "Knowlege Base" was organized made it next to useless, so a group of tech wrote a Web Browser sidebar that made finding relevant information much quicker. Many of the managers did not like that fact that this tool was created because they thought it would foster dependencey, however the technicians loved it.
The point is that different people with different skill levels become involved in tech support for various reasons. Some do not even know how to turn on a computer, while others are people who have programmed and hacked their way around systems for over 27 years. I took a tech support job because I (thought I) wanted a doorway into the I.T. profession.
I became dismayed as to how management limited my ability to provide assistance to users simply because if I provide a high level of support, customers would expect other technicians to do the same. I finally got promoted to the I.T. department after a couple of years. I ended up leaving the company in order to accept a position as a software engineer at another (small) company. About 6 months after I left the company, it moved overseas to the Phillipean Isles.
Tech support pays nearly all technicians low wages regardless of the knowlege and skills of the technician. This is the same for nearly every job in the P.S.A. What the government and corporations don't seem to grasp is that people can and do learn very much outside the confines of a four year college program. These days, if you are working as an employee for someone else, about the only way to get a good paying job is to become a memebr of the bachelors' degree club. For many who choose to go this route, they have to spend much more than four years living under slavish conditions in order toscrape together the money to pay for their membership. A great majority of those who get their degree are lucky enough to have parents wealthy enough to pay all of the membership fees. Others manage to get student loans to pay for their membership. A membership in this bachelors' degree club is considered mandatory for most well paying careers that
once accepted non degree holders.
An example of a job that now requires a college degree is that of a nurse. About 30 years ago, a person could become a nurse by studying some material and getting on the job training. Nursing school was also an option (which is a good thing). Now days, it is against the law to be a nurse without having a college degree. The cost of nursing school is simply beyond the reach of most working people. There are those who would say that this is done to protect that [patient from shoddy work. I would
... warmongering cnuts. Killing lots of people isn't going to make it better.
I'm embarassed to say, but, looking back it may have been the best job I've ever had. The pay was more than enough to live on, and since my AHT was low (you know what I mean) I had virtually no responsibilities or oversight. So I got paid $10+ an hour to surf the web and listen to music.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I sort of agree. There needs to be a widespread retail level inexpensive (relatively) home appliance that uses the television as a monitor and runs from a CD or DVD with a machine with a LOT of RAM in it, at least one or two gigs. It needs to be able to print, that's about it. You got 90% of most users covered then if they can surf, chat,do email, and do printing tasks. Bookmarks store online, documents either print out or burn to blank disk. Swap out the main disk for games disks, or just have the machine have two optical drives.
Web TV was sort of like that but had no mouse,not enough memory,etc serious bummer. Maybe a device like that (just better) and something like those alpha grips for the keyboard/mouse combo. Hit the sweet spot for price and lean heavy on the "no viruses or malware" aspects of it, make it so folks use their big screen TV and easy chair, and make it not suck speedwise, which is posssible IF there's enough RAM to hold the OS and apps. The mini linux distros have proven without any doubt you DON'T need a multiple gig operating system on a hardrive and apps package, you can get by with a couple hundred megs easy to nail all the most useful functionality. I have used several that at only 50 megs will run directly from RAM and are about as fast as you could expect, certainly faster than any normal hard drive install I have ever tried.
We are about there with the advanced game machines,the consoles, and these may very well turn into the normal computer people use. What is needed next is a generic open source type console machine(software and basic industry standard hardware), that is upgradeable as to system board and optical disk drive every few years.
WOW she actually recieved 2 weeks of training before taking calls, when i was working L1 helldesk calls they put you on the phone the second or third day and said you where trained.... answer the phone.... answer the questions.... close calls.
I worked in the computer industry and the cell phone industry and it was the same both places.
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Well its a slow day... so here is my input. I do tech support Lvl 1 for Apple. High turnover rate... poor service. Most people dont care about this job, so it results in shitty service. There are basically no insentives to do a great job and help the customer. The insentives are for selling. I dont want to sell, i rather technical help people. I find it rewarding to get someones, say a student with a paper to write, computer orking so it can serve its purpose. I treat people according to how they treat me. If your an ass, condecending, or scream at me, expect to wait abit while I read /. before i fix your problem, because I am researching the issue for you. Also if your pleasant and understanding, I will go out of my way to be helpful.
If you dont hear anything for a while after you ask, "I want to speak to the president of the company, I want there phone number", it is because I am laughing at you and your muted.
If I dont help you because you using a product I dont support, I dont care if you have used macs since 1984, own apple stock or own every apple ever made and worship your newton. ... opps got a call... gotta go.
Here it is:
:)
:)
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I do network administration and end user support. A particular clerical person was always having problems running Windows for Workgroups. The hard drive finally crashed, and when we got it back I convinced the boss to load her machine with DOS only. I created a batch file menu, tested it, and then compiled it into an exe file. When the person was at lunch I installed it on her machine.
When she came back from lunch she called and said her computer didn't work. I asked her to read the screen to me. She said "Bad Command or File Name." So I went over to her desk.
We started her machine and the file menu screen came up. It read:
1. Main Frame
2. Word Processing
Press the number of your choice and hit [enter].
It looked right, so I told her to press either 1 or 2 depending on whether she wanted to go to the main frame or the word processing package. She pressed 4. And, of course, we got the error. When I asked her why she pressed 4, she said, "It says press the number of my choice! I choose 4!"
---
it is the Matrix, man, and this chick she has no problem making a choice
(of-course the batch process should have taken care of invalid input
You can't handle the truth.
Maybe by changing your greeting you can help speed things up. I'll add the inflection and tonals
"Hello (higher and faster than normal,because you stretch it out very slightly, end the O Long "Hellll-O), you are speaking to the computer help desk (this is lower pitched and slower, just slightly, with an exact matching linear cadence on the syllables, they are all equal), this is Matt (emphasis on "this"), how may I help you with your problem?(how is treated like the first "hello", end the "you" a little louder, notmuch, just a little 'in soviet russia...YOU'..."
This is psychology and salesmanship, and double reinforces to the customer the primary thing that is going on, they aren't calling *Matt*, they are calling *the help desk and they are annoyed with voodoo that has nailed them*. It's just a slight wordage variation with the addition of just a few more words and paying attention to how it sounds, but it amplifies the initial interaction so that both parties can get quickly to the point. Also remember, you are a sales person, even if you aren't selling anything tangible per se, you are immediately in a customer/sales position. You are "selling" a service that your "customer" never even wanted to be forced to buy in the first place, so it's a "tough sell", your customer IS approaching you with a negative based mindset, ie, they already have a problem which has annoyed them to some level, so you have to be extremely delicate and precise, but control the situation and your only tools are language and psychology.
Right off the bat they will need to be defused down from their anger (whatever level that anger is at, it *is* there), and they have to be re-assured that this will "work", that by the end of the conversation they will be a happy camper-and you have made a "sale", you have "closed". Tone of voice is very important as well, it makes a big difference. You need to sound enthused, happy, and *very* confident. You only have two sentences total in the beginning to establish the mood and probable outcome of the call, no matter the problem.
Anyway, fool around with it, try some experiments, it's amazing what slight variations can do to help out.
US minimum wage is still $5.15. While some states and/or cities have chosen to set a higher minimum wage, over half the states have the same minimum wage as the federal government.
Source: List of U.S. state minimum wages
It's hard to judge that salary without knowing where you were working.
Wasn't windows advertised to make the Internet 'go faster'? At least in South Park the Movie the general had a good response to Bill Gates :)
----
* A Friend: "It takes forever for a web page to load on our computer. How come yours is so much faster?"
* Me: "Well, what kind of modem do you have?"
* A Friend: "I think it's a 486."
* Me: "Um, no that's a type of processor. What speed of modem do you have?
* A Friend: (confused) "Uh...well, it has Windows 95, it has 16 megs of RAM...I think it's a 14 something modem."
* Me: "Ok, you'll need a faster modem to download pages faster."
* A Friend: "Why would it need a faster modem?"
* Me: "My computer has a 56K modem, and that's a lot faster than the 14.4K modem you have."
* A Friend: "But why would it need a faster modem? I could just install Windows 98, right? That should speed it up."
This was a few weeks ago. Since then, he bought the Windows 98 upgrade and wanted to know if I could help them install it. He was still convinced that that was all he needed.
You can't handle the truth.
When I did L1 support for HP a few years ago we had to completely disasemble large corporate printers (the 5 - 6 foot tall ones) and then put them back together before we were allowed to take calls about one. We were able to do this and learn call control techniques in 2 weeks no problem....
I've worked in the technical support industry in California, now in Pennsylvania. I started with a company you probaby all know, called EarthLink. $10.00 an hour to start. EarthLink was outsourced overseas, and they laid everyone off. When I left EarthLink, I was making around $20.00 an hour (after 5 years :doh:). Anyway, from there, I worked at Sprint, and now I work for Suscom/Comcast. Technical support is in my blood, and I think always will be. I love working in the industry, even though I've had some bad experiences with customers. But, the one thing in this article is true. If you're not nice to the tech on the phone, we will not be nice to you, and will not go out of our way for you. Oh, and another tip. Asking for a supervisor because you're unhappy with a techs answer, is just plain stupid. Supervisors, 99 times out of 100, know LESS than the tech you're talking to.
I agree with you there. But that does not mean the rest of us should sit back and do nothing. We should try to give people every possible opportunity to build a better life for themselves, by providing more open access to education and job training, and by helping those people who are trying to better themselves to support their families in the interim.
Back before outsourcing was a big deal I worked for a mail-order PC company doing technical support. I started at about seven bucks an hour and hammered on the phones, worked lousy shifts, and was required to work every other weekend. Usually, I loved the job but sometimes angery people got to me. I did have my life threatend on more than one occasion. In one case the threat was serious enough so that the police were even called.
After a few years of doing this gig, I started getting calls from head-hunters at work and at home. The salaries that these guys were offering were more than double what I was earning! At first I resisted their efforts, I was safe and secure in my job and I liked it but one day I recieved an offer that I couldn't refuse. I was allowed to "name my price, name my conditions" so I picked a number that I thought was unbelieveably high, said I wanted to work Monday through Friday, and that I had a guaranteed one year contract. When they agreed to meet these demands, I couldn't believe it!
I went to work as a contractor and worked for the agency for over two years when the company that I was working for offered to "buy" my contract from the agency. In the end they offered me a job with another raise, full benefits, retirement and everything! The company agreed to give me up in exchange for more business from the company. I am still there and have worked my way up the ladder.
I can credit that phone-line tech support as being a great foundation for the path that I followed and the work that I am doing today. I am glad that I did it then and am not doing it now. It was an excellent and fertile training ground that opened a lot of doors for me.
I can't help but wonder how out-sourcing will affect the future generation of tech types. If these jobs aren't around to give the "experience" that so many better jobs require. If these jobs are all overseas, what is that going to do for the corporate IS jobs that demand the well rounded experience a TS job gives?
here are a fixed and small number of well paying job and special skills or knowledge are required to get them. The number of unskilled jobs is very large- more jobs than there are people to fill them. These are the jobs that our president refers to as "jobs that Americans just won't do." These jobs are almost uniformly low paying, often menial, sometimes dangerous
I think the problem is that brains and smarts can either be automated or offshored. It is easier to put domain knowlegde in software than it is to put physical tasks such as flipping burgers into software.
However, in the future when bandwidth gets cheap enough, remote-controlled robots may also do the "menial" tasks. Your burger will be flipped from Tumbuktoo. They can even repair the bots remotely.
Nobody is safe.
Table-ized A.I.
I've ditched slashdot for digg.
Came here after several weeks. Needn't have bothered.
I knew people who dropped out of college suckered in by job at a hospital. A job which is unionized and probably qualify's as a "living wage" or whatever crap that is. Nonetheless, its enough money to get suckered in - enough to get the things you relate - cable tv/modem, cell phone, etc. And for a struggling college kid, this seems like a huge improvement. But once stuck into this... they never or rarely get out. A few move up a notch or two, but most languish.
That's why any proposal for living wage is a bad idea. This lets people get complacent and satisified at a living wage with little incentive to move up or on.
For the service most consumers receive, tech upport workers are overpaid.
And do you know wno's financially supporting that rise? You are! Every time you refuse to examine a label to see where a good is made just so you can pay the lowest possible price, every time you shop at Walmart in lieu of a store where domestically-produced goods are offered, you are helping to finance that expansion. Wake up, America! Start paying attention to where your stuff is produced and start supporting your neighbours again. Otherwise your tech "support" will come from India, your T-shirts will come from China, your Nikes will come from some other 3rd-world country, and you and your children will never be able to leave the ghetto your country will have turned into.
licet differant, aequabitur
My company pays $10 to start and the top people make around 16. Of course we are a small company and try not to do the L1, L2, L3 support levels.
We also do have benefits, 401k, and paid holidays. Yes techs do have to take a lot of unfair abuse. Goodness knows I do as well. Funny and I thought that we where underpaying our support people.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Don't get married. That's the biggest monthly of all. And it's expensive and crabby. :)
Hahahahaha.Just think about Argentina, located at the bottom of the Americas.Microsoft,Nextel and many others have their support there, so many times when you call for support you are talking to a latinamerican who speaks english fluently and earns $1 (US dollars) per hour!!!!!
I started out doing tech support at 15 with no experience, under the table money. I started out at $8, no tax taken out.
I quit, came back 2 years later and made $12/hr.
Now I recently started a new job and make over $13.
"Are your servers down, or did someone spill beer on my modem last night?" Seriously.
Any information may be true or incorrect depending on your perception of said information
BACKDROP: the sys-admin is 5 levels deep in a messy-nested loop, contorted beyond comprehension, trying to debug a messy regex that stopped working 3 hours ago. No, he didn't write it.
ADMIN: Oh, how I would slit my wrists if some feeble minded tech-support dweeb were to interrupt me with some bullshit end user issue!
PHONE: **ring** caller ID: tech-support;John
JOHN: Uh, yeah, I got this guy on the other line, I've been on the phone with him for an hour trying to walk him through installing the VPN software...
ADMIN: . . .
JOHN: Uh, here he is... (xfer)
20 minutes later
ADMIN: No! That example in my email is just a picture! Nothing's happening because you're trying to interact with a screenshot! Click the link that says' h++p://intranet.corp.com/downloads/VPN.exe. GAHH!
etc etc
That girl in the TFA sounds like a well paid warm body like our guys. I bet she even gets to go home after 8 hours.
I was getting paid more as a pizza-delivery guy in highschool than my teachers, and that was with the -$10.00 a night penalty for refusing to put the stupid plastic roof ornimant on my car, but at least I never got robbed.
This guy wrote a detailed blog on the miseries of tech support at a major cable ISP: http://ooltech.blogspot.com. I worked there too and what this guy wrote is 100% accurate. It sucked, you have customers squeezing you on one side and management on the other.
The US government encourages outsourcing and supporting Indians over their own people by having a tax system that charges employers per employee.
Some big companies pay as much as $11k per head in taxes. But that doesn't apply for seperate Indian companies.
So in reality the American working for the same wage cost twice as much. That is screwed up.
http://saveie6.com/
My guess is that just as many (if not more) tech support staff browse this site as programmers, sysadmins, and other "consumers" or "clients."
"Oh, and another tip. Asking for a supervisor because you're unhappy with a techs answer, is just plain stupid. Supervisors, 99 times out of 100, know LESS than the tech you're talking to."
From one tech to another. Yeah. However one reason to ask for a supervisor isn't for technical reasons but usually buracratic reasons. Like when Ameritech kept screwing up my bill. As a tech I also booted all the lawyer (real lawyers, you could tell) calls higher up. The people who couldn't take no for an answer usually ended there as well were the supervisor would spend half an hour explaining why we couldn't give them what they wanted.
What kind of cruel Stalinist dictatorship supporting terrorist would say such a thing?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You believe there is no problem with income and cost of living disparities between countries that cannot be cured by a "good attitude".
Please provide specifics. Please provide a detailed expense budget that will allow an American to live on what an Indian call center worker is paid.
.. that you actually understand systems and have common sense troubleshooting skills.
You know, those pictures show me that the only difference in working environment between Accenture and India is apparently the Indians are far less sexist in their hiring policies.
Identical desks, Identical lighting, Identical layouts, far more female employees.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I think its more sad when a *nix sysadm/netadm gets paid less than PeeCee support.
Nations that have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_security should not compete with nations that do not have.
Otherwise it will result in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom
God and religion are distinct
The company I work for (can't say who) has a call center in Phoenix and starts L1 techs at $12/hr. The biggest difference is that you can't get by reading a script, you actually have to be familiar with various OSes and home networking. If you're doing scripted L1 support you're getting paid for your skill set, which is reading and light typing not technical ability. While there are a lot of companies that don't want to pay a skilled person to do the job domestically, not all of them feel that way. If you don't have the skills or can't find the work, then it's time to go to something else.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
Worked on an ISO2002 certified help desk / ITIL situation. They train you to accurately type the record of conversation, and follow scripts, cutting and pasting into templates, with monitors that show when you are not on a call. In addition, we did 'email' queries while talking to our clients. Talk/Type/Listen is a tough art to master.
Not being empowered to act after being told, its smoking - well we were not this bad, other than asking for defective mice to be posted back! Update scripts - I think not!
Anyway, the best operators had a trick - they talked the customers through their problem, while typing in a fictious problem / actions using prior cut and pastes.
If it went bad, they could still recall the conversation, and type up a problem in under 45 seconds. It is a skill, working on 2 problems while telling the client a 3rd, and not get caught faking it, or hanging up on ones that will do in your stats.
Thus, you wise up to making deliberate slipups, and accent slurs, as if the customer hangs up, this is good, more money for the call centre and not your fault. Using IM, if the client called back, hoping to get someone else less dense, the same script would be re-cycled. We dont care, we get paid to take calls, not actually solve issues - just like a lawyer who bills by the hour.
Thus QA are happy, managers are happy, doctored reports and stats go to the US, their management is happy, while calls keep on increasing. This will go on forever, until someone really notices what calltakers really get up to.
Don't feel so bad for the $13k/year tech support person in India. To get a similar cost of living comparison, multiply the salary by 10. Yep, they're living like they make $130K/yr in the US. A week's worth of groceries in Bangalore for a family of 4 will cost about 500 rupees if you don't shop carefully -- that's about $11. A really nice, top of the line apartment will cost around $700/month -- basic accomodations are much, much less. $1/day will pay for a maid. $30/day gets you a nice car and driver. 20-somethings in India making $13k/year are living the vida loca. Those prices are in Bangalore, which has seen rampant inflation. By the time a senior engineer is making $40K/year, they're living like millionaires. How many American techies can afford a full staff of servants?
...you sound just like the poeple who tell blacks and latinos that there is no racism, and they just need a little more motivation; bootstraps and all.
Some times there really are poeple who try and fail. Sometimes there are groups of rich white guys, or maybe rich asian guys who sit around a table and think up ways to stay rich at the expense of a targeted group.
Money and economics sometimes trump social constructs. Someone is working to make sure you WANT/NEED/GET a new car or cell phone, or DVD player every few years. Does the fact that you can't resist make you less than? Does the fact that you can't quite afford it based on your income make you an idiot deserving of a life of servitude? You DO still need a new car to get to your menial jobs don't you?
I think the roots of much of this are in how we prepare our workforce for the workplace. 87% of the highest paid CEO's in US corporations did not attend a public high school. 93% attended an Ivy League or "elite" college or university. Sounds pretty hard to compete with the big boys if you attended the nieghborhood high school and community college.
I know a mechanical engineer who only makes 60K a year, with an average job. I also know a carpenter who claims he will hit 80K before the year is out. Both required lots of time and training or schooling that may be unavaileble to many. I don't blame the poeple at the bottom for making thier way as best they can. especially when there really is a barrier keeping the masses from moving up en-mass. But what do I know, I am in a dead-end job myself.
Heybiff
Even the Sun goes down.
Worst part of tech support is that tech support is the most in touch with the customer, yet marketing never actually talks to them.
(Some yeara go...)After doing tech support for twenty months, and filling up "standard replies" that ended up becoming most of their online database, it bothered me that noone asked me what the people thought. Further, my second year got me a measly 5% raise from the original 26k. Then they hired new people at 35K. When i complained they offered to match, at which point i told them about this little thing called trust. So, i quit (i let them fill my position first) and started looking for a new job. That was one main reason i left, at least.
Ultimately, tech support know more about the company base users than anybody else. Why they are treated like dirt is unknown to me. It's like a person denigrating his own feet because they sit so low.
Have you read my journal today?
which is a little mind-boggling considering how much simpler the UI is
Such as, for example, dragging your CD icon into the trash bin in order to cause the drive to eject. Every OS has its idiotsyncracies
Sorry for the politically incorrect point of view here, but who cares that these people don't get paid much? Either the ones in the US or out of it. In my experience, they are getting paid more than their help is worth.
On the few occasions I've asked for tech support help, I've gotten people who are more interested in closing the call than solving the problem. And yes, I do read the manual (and search the internet) before calling -- there's no point bothering them for some problem I can solve for myself quicker. Since reading a manual to me and walking through the company knowledge base is all they seem to be able to do for a support customer, how much value are they really adding to their company?