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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. "
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?
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.
At least somebody understands why helldesks really exist. Very very few companies will hire anybody right into a second-level team who is straight out of school (high school, tech school, or college). Everybody must pay their dues at a helldesk and then hope to apply for a better job at the company later.
I am an intern at a large multinational firm's internal computing support desk, and that's all that 75% of the people in here want to do. I don't want to stay in the area, so after graduation (in 2 weeks!) I will be moving and will have to start all over, probably at another helldesk. That's just how business works; they make you prove that you know something, then you'll get paid a little more for it.
Hey, can I bum a sig?
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
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].
I work for an outsource company (in the states) that does 100% phone tech support for corps and get paid... oh... Probably 4 times that... Of course we specialize in obscure applications, charge by the minute, and even help people write code over the phone.
Of course I doubt you'd ever see Dell 1-800support assist its customers with Visual Studio C++ projects over the phone.
Of course the customer gets what they pay for when they use free support... I used to work at such a place a few years back for a major ISP (which I took because I was hurting for a job after the dot com crash). What they would do is just hire 50 people off the street and give them two weeks training... And they'd have about 10 of those people left in about six months.
Most of the people quit either were technically adept and just hated the shitty pay and job stress and then the other part of that was just the people who just didn't get it.
I think the only reason I stuck around was because of my prior tech background and the co-workers (a lot of us would go drinking together and even play EQ together).
Although, pretty much everyone I knew (including my supervisors) had Monster.com in their favorites.
I'm glad I got out of there after a year of it...
Anyways... Because of the experience I usually try to treat any tech support persons I call with respect even if they are incompetent. If the company was worth a damn they'd pay them more training.
And taking your frustrations with the company out on the tech won't help you any... Whether they live in the states or India.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I'm one of them. After about 8 or so months of looking for a job after I graduated, nobody in the area would hire me for programming, except the lying office of the state whose programming job required little programming. So I started applying for L1 support roles, and still nobody would hire me because most of my experience that I had in college was more like L2 experience. Finally I landed a job as an L2 support person. And it's only to clear my debt that built up while I was unemployed between graduation and finding a job.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Where are you going that bread costs $2.50?
:)
I can get a white loaf for $.85, and pretty much any style fresh from the bakery for $1.75 or less. You can spend that much on bread if you want to, but I dont.
Although maybe that's because I work in tech support
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled - R Feynman
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.)
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.
Option one is to move somewhere where you would only have to pay $30/month for rent, and could feed your family in a nice restaurant for $1.
Option two is to form a consumers' union and refuse to do business with companies who employ people in places without minimum wage, environmental and healthcare laws at a comparable level to your own. Do not buy goods or services made in these countries. Lobby your government to promote free trade with countries that have similar regulations to your own, and impose heavy trade tariffs on those that don't.
Option two is probably the better one. In the short term, it will make prices rise (goods either have to be made by well paid employees, or the importers will have to pay heavy tariffs). In the long term, it will provide a significant financial incentive for other countries' governments to enact minimum wage laws, etc. which will result in an increase in the global standard of living.
Globalisation and free trade work really well, when everyone is at a similar economic level.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
It's pretty hard to run a tech oriented business ya know. I worked for Time Warner once upon a time as a tier 1 tech. Basically we were just customer fodder. I knew more than the "have you reset your modem" drivel, but I was not ALLOWED to go beyond that because that's what the tier 2 and tier 3 techs were for. So in a sense, we were automatons with human voices that were supposed to try to pick up sales on every call from every jim-bob down the street who threatens to kill me because he can't watch his nascar racing at 3 in the morning.
Machines can't yet do that. And when they can, many people will be out of a shitty job they never wanted.
You're nothing; like me.
"There ARE higher level Tech Support jobs out there that pay more, thats true. However, there are a very limited number, how is everyone who is currently in a minimum wage Tech Support position supposed to get one, skilled or not?"
The same way I, and almost everyone I know in IT, did? By starting out as tier 1 support, learning on the job, demonstrating competence, and getting promoted?