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Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk?
theodp writes "IBM CEO Virginia M. Rometty's Big Blue bio boasts that she led the development of IBM Global Delivery Centers in India. In his latest column, Robert X. Cringely wonders if customers of those centers know what they're getting for their outsourcing buck. 'Right now,' writes Cringely, 'IBM is preparing to launch an internal program with the goal of increasing in 2013 the percentage of university graduates working at its Indian Global Delivery Centers (GDCs) to 50 percent. This means that right now most of IBM's Indian staffers are not college graduates. Did you know that? I didn't. I would be very surprised if IBM customers knew they were being supported mainly by graduates of Indian high schools.'"
You don't need a college degree to know how to work a phone. I know the HR hysteria in the USA would have you believe otherwise, but trust me! It's not that hard...
Perhaps, that is all the skills that is required for the job. Just like car mechanics, IT support is becoming less and less of a highly skilled job.
I dont see what the big deal is. I did tech support for HP when I was a high school dropout. Most of all the major problems have been solved already, its not that hard. So I should care about this why?
When I worked for an apple tech support call centre, contracted not actually apple, most staff were low wage high school educated. That was the requirement, high school. There were some college educated but you didn't have to be.
What's the big deal about that? Tier 1 helpdesk doesn't need a degree. A high-school education (even a US one) is more than enough to understand and speak English at a high-school level and follow a script and checklist. You don't need to be a cordon bleu chef to cook burgers at McDonald's either.
If they're required by policy to follow a script, does it matter if they have a degree? I'm more concerned about fluency in english, an understandable accent,quality of the voip connection, and quality of the inter-cubicle sound isolation.
...the problem is, they're not allowed to think for themselves. Education is completely irrelevant - they have to follow the scripts they have in front of them, and not deviate or they get dinged. I know, I've had to write some of these scripts for them (not IBM, but another large multinational co that does outsourced helpdesk work). The last step in any of the scripts is to escalate to Tier 2/3 - which 90% of the time is an actual employee of the company and not part of the outsourced help desk.
So how is having a college educated phone bozo any better than a high school educated one if they're not allowed to deviate from the scripts they're given?
There many people who either didn't go to college, went to college but didn't graduate, or who are still in college that are not "high schoolers," Sheesh, does Slashdot know high schoolers are manning the queue?
Have you ever spoken to these people? I used to work for a big IT company that rhymes with Hell, and they staffed all of their call centers with undertrained, underpaid Indian nationals. One time it took me 5 calls just to get a password changed...and I was on a client site at the time and desperately needed it fixed. Frustration does not even begin to describe how I felt. It's bad enough when you use it for your own internal support but using it for customers paying big bucks for support contracts? Inexcusable. I bet that IBM is working on training monkeys to follow a support script cause, you know, the wages are starting to go up in India and we've got to make our numbers this quarter - damn it!
The term "graduate" means different things in US and India. You can hold a 'diploma' that's 10+3. This 'diploma' isn't considered a graduate in the US. It's not a degree because it's shy of the typical 4 year course structure. It could just mean they have a 3 year 'degree' than a 4 year bachelor's degree. Your assumption is flawed. 1 year of additional education can make a lot of difference if you're a developer or something else, but for a help desk job, I doubt it would add much value. Also, if you have a 4 year degree, why wouldn't you aim for a dev job?
Inflammatory title of course, it implies that the people manning the desks are in high school or of high school age not just adults that only went to high school.
I thought we were supposed to complain about job ads with ridiculous lists of required skills. And if you need a college degree to do PC administration tasks, your OS is in bad shape.
Yeah level 1 tech support needs to answer the phone and search the knowledge base, does this somehow require a college degree? Geez what are people supposed to do for a living?
Beyond that this headline sucks, High Schooler - in my book that would refer to someone still in high school - not a high school grad.
Did you know that 10 years ago, if you called Dell, Gateway, HP, WellsFargo, Netgear, etc etc etc etc, that you spoke to someone making $10.50/hr, who most certainly did not have a college degree, and whom the technical skills test was "here, type this". The only difference now is, those people aren't in the united states, and they don't make anywhere near 10.50$/hr. Then or now, they never had any chance of actually helping you solve a problem.
NDA be damned, Dell had 5 solutions for ANY problem. Is it on. Check. Is it installed correctly. Check. Reformat, does it work now? Check. Does the rest of the computer work without it? Check. Replace it. DONE. This is essentially what all their scripts say. Oh sure, there are minor detailed differences, and some small portion of the people they employ to read the scripts even understand the differences. Most do not, never did and never will. They are paid to go through those scripts AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. They are not paid for your satisfaction, and in fact, you can't commend or condone them in any way, because you don't know if you were talking to 'joe' at Dell's Texas headquarters, 'Joe' at the Beaverton Oregon Call center called Stream, or some other third party call center. You can call to complain, and customer service will no doubt apologize, coddle you and then do absolutely nothing.
One customer always comes to mind when I talk about this issue. She called in over 50 different times. She spoke to as many different people. She went through every script, every troubleshooting guide. Her modem was replaced. 5 times. The motherboard was replaced, twice. The CPU, Memory, hard drive and case were replaced once each. Her ENTIRE computer (include the mouse and cables) was replaced twice. Nothing solved the issue. She called in, and got me. Now, it's 12:30am, I'm quietly handling technical calls for Dell, but I'm in Oregon at STREAM intl. She explains her story, and I look it up. Holly crap, they have done just about everything that can be done... well crap. Tell me what the problem is. "Well, the last tech said..." No lady, I want you to tell me the problem, not what anyone else said it was. "my modem won't stay connected, and often won't connect at all". OK I say... any other issues..."well yeah, I get weird lines on my screen when I try and call out, or if I walk to close while on the phone". Alright, please do something strange for me, just reach down and touch the computer, but watch the screen. "It flashed with snow". OK do you happen to have power lines in your back yard. "yes, how did you know". Lucky guess. I know this isn't reasonable, but I need you to move the whole computer to the opposite side of the house, and call me back at this number xxxxxxxxxxx. She did, and you know what, it fixed the problem. 51+ phone calls, and the problem was outside interference, which isn't on any of the scripts. This isn't a problem of language, or culture, or race, or which country your phone call goes to. It's a problem that "technical support" is neither technical, nor support. Which is why it's mostly called "customer service" now. I think Carlin best described what that means.
High school graduates. Which is perfectly normal, you don't need a diplome for helpdesk.
Most of the calls result in a ticket being created and thats where it stops. It goes out to a qualified person, usually contracted, who fixes it. Indian high schoolers are roughly as well educated as american high schoolers. Meaning they can write, read, and regurgitate information.
Beyond all of that, the lower echelons of IT work is at best blue collar. I know people REALLY want to believe that ghosting an image to 300 desktops is 'hard core' but its not. Kick starting linux servers isn't either. Nor is any other thing that can be easily explained or replicated. Theres a reason those guys get 30k. Its easy work. They just need someone reliable who won't cause problems.
Things get a bit more 'white collar' as you move into sys admin work. A lot of that is still fairly easy, but it has caveats. People who are restarting java app's a few times a day, are clearing out logs, all that crap are still fairly unskilled. Skill starts to pick up you get into work such as fixing servers with crash carts/ilo. When you have a stable server suddenly drop off the network and you log in to fix it. You check SSHD, check network, check uptime, load, all of that... but from there it can go anywhere. What if random commands are throwing odd errors? Oh no! You have entire partitions down! Remounting them isn't fixing it.. so then you start with vgdisplay, etc etc.
Thats when you start earning your money and start really needing people with college *LEVEL* education. (As there is no worth while college degree in sysadmin. Its all very much self taught and then refined through cert programs.)
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I used to work at an IT helpdesk. I only have a high school diploma myself, but I was still more competent than many of my coworkers who were college/uni graduates.
Also, as others have already pointed out, first-line support jobs rarely require in-depth IT knowledge; most of the people I worked with were no more proficient with computers than the users we supported. These jobs, especially the ones being moved to India, are heavily scripted and don't go beyond basic troubleshooting so that a trouble ticket can be logged and sent to a second-line technician (one of my coworkers used to say we're "phone answering monkeys"). Whether or not this is a good model is an entirely different question, but the bottom line is you don't need a college education for it.
Being a high school graduate and being a high schooler are not the same thing.
Wow... Article is kind of stupid and misleading.
These workers may:
- Be college students who haven't graduated yet
- Be high-school graduates who aren't going to college
- Might actually be in high-school as the article implies.
I will say that I know a lot of Indians who have moved here to the US. While my experience doesn't necessarily speak for Indians who live in India, I get the general impression that the graduates don't really want to sit in a help-desk call center.
Plus, I think hiring college graduates to work your call center may somewhat cut down on the cost savings IBM is hoping to gain by outsourcing to India.
They don't want us to realize that the reason college is so important is because children in the U.S. are deliberately prevented from learning anything valuable in their first 13 years of "education".
My dad had a friend in high school who taught shop class. He helped me about 6 years ago with his shop tools. He was forcibly retired a few years later because the administrators decided that woodworking and metal working aren't important to people who are going to college, which is all that matters in a globalized society.
Apparently that's the feedback loop: Grade school gets you ready for middle school, middle school for high school, high school for college, college for graduate school, graduate school for unemployment.
According to a book from the 1970's I found at a thrift shop years ago ("The Screwing of the Average Man"), College used to be something that the upper class sent their children to, so they'd have a leg up on the un-credentialed proletariat. After WWII Congress passed the GI Bill to pacify all those ex-soldiers, and college became affordable for everyone. I was going to say that college is a waste of money, but the real waste is in K-12 - at least in College you mostly take only the classes you care about.
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...and often quite a bit less....What exactly do you expect when you decide something is non-core commodity work and then outsource to the lowest bidder?
What you're actually seeing here is as part of the belt tightening IBM has decided good customer support just isn't important.
Fast forward a few months and they started talking about the cost of the support. Turns out, it cost IBM $30 on average for their screener to answer the phone. That was just the cost of the OS/2 support operation divided by call volume I suppose. So they started cutting costs. First thing to go were the screeners. That meant the support reps were the ones getting the customer's information and verifying that they were eligible for support. The call center also got way more touchy about call times. If you couldn't answer the question in about 10 minutes, they wanted you to requeue for a level 2 analyst call back. No more spending half an hour talking a customer through recovering their desktop. And OS/2 lost its desktop a lot.
They killed the operating system before they had a chance to move that call center to India, but I'm sure that would have been the next step. The fact of the matter throughout the industry is that the support line is populated with meaty paperweights and is designed to encourage you to solve your problem on your own. If you actually have a problem that you can't solve on your own, they'll grudgingly schedule a callback from a level 2 analyst after making you reboot your device. In this way the people you talk to now are like less-able screeners from back in the early IBM support days. They filter out most of the plonkers, do a mediocre job of finding out what your problem is and schedule a callback from a level 2 analyst.
Does that level of skill require a college degree? Not really. Always talking to a guy with a college degree would cost more than most of their customers are willing to pay. I'm sure they'd be happy to negotiate a private support contract with an SLA. It's just a matter of how large of a suitcase of cash you want to give them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm kind of surprised that they haven't farmed this out to Watson yet. It can destroy Jeopardy grand champions, and partner with medical doctors, why not ask users if they're multi-purposing the CD tray as a drink holder or if they've inserted the power cord?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
> This means that right now most of IBM's Indian staffers are not college graduates. Did you know that?
Oh, I really knew that. I really, really knew that.
Personally I find the article title a bit offensive, as to call them high schoolers is an insult to the high schools of India.
I'm guessing former auto-rickshaw drivers with maybe a third grade education. Enough, barely, to recite scripts.
Because it's all about cost, you know.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Since they killed off OS/2.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
"High Schoolers" says that the people manning the help desk are kids who are still in high school. "High School Graduates" implies that they've finished high school but don't have college degrees. There are some help desk jobs for which that's really just fine (as long as they've learned enough English that they can understand the concepts and get some practice with speaking it), and others for which you need a lot of specialized training, much of which depends on concepts you'd learn in college.
Bill Stewart
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Companies spend thousands of man hours developing a complex databse of scripts to fix problems. These knowledge bases cover topics from common password reset, to obscure directions for an IBM tape library emulator. The reason they spend all of this time and money to build these things, is so that they don't have to hire employees, and can eject contractors at will. Anyone can walk in the door and log in and read the solutions they find using keywords.
Now, how many people that work in a place like this just use a web search to find the answer anyway, because the knowledge base was written and designed by baby boomers with little education in their field that have managed to hold on to their job by stubbornly digging in and refusing to bow to progress. I don't think age discrimination applies when half of your employees are filling desks they don't belong in and the company floats on by riding the backs of a steady stream of "temporary staff" some of which will spend temporary decades in their temporary positions, and others that last just long enough to be "trained in."
Droids don't drink and so they are not allowed in the Mos Eisley Cantina.
Hey check the ratings, just because the USA rates at the bottom of the high school achievement chart, maybe good enuf for asking you want fries with that? Does not mean other countries have much higher standards...
They are NOT high-schoolers - they're all under the age of 12.
CAPTCHA = relents
...where it is diagnosed and fixed right in front of my eyes. And that was for a serious hardware problem. Haven't had a need for any product support. It just works and works and works.
Non-apple fan boys, ignite your flamethrowers. Whooooooooooosh.
CS is not IT and IT needs apprenticeships / tech schools. Even more so on the help desk / desktop / admin side.
Even in the A+, MS, ECT tests there is the book way and the way the works in the real work place.
There is a lot of stuff that needs to be learned in a tech school setting or on the job.
...anymore.
and it can mix up Toronto and Chicago
But what some are forgetting is that the high school education in parts of India is much better and they are educated to a level that easily exceeds sophomore or even senoir level US college courses.... ie: a high school graduate in India may be better educated than a 2 year or even a 4 year college graduate in the US...
You mean Appell?
Background: Indian, Bangalore and have worked for IBM. I do not know the intention behind this article, but I can assure that High school kids do not man GDC, or for that matter none of IT/ITeS companies employ Non-Grad people. They may hire non-techie grads but not High schoolers. In fact there are such a huge number of unemployed Grads roaming around for a job that you don't need to hire high school kids. Also(though not important) these days nobody in India considers a person as educated unless he is a university graduate.
should reconsider who they're outsourcing their editing to...
Most of the help desks in the US are manned by people without degrees. There are plenty of people working help desk jobs while working towards a degree also. It’s kind of the new fast food job. The biggest difference between help desk workers with a degree and those without is the ones without don't owe huge student loans. I've seen plenty of people get a degree and stay in the help desk job. One of the biggest problems is if you have a degree and have a help desk job on your resume; employers will say "I see you have help desk experience!"
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
I have to support a piece of software and IBM bought the company a few years ago, so when it came time to move to a new version I got to deal with IBM.
I spent 14 hours on the phone trying to get a price for a piece of software, most of the time I was shuttled around support people in India who couldn't help me, I was told that software prices were "restricted information", searching IBM's site for contact numbers got me developer's desk phones and they didn't know why the hell their numbers were posted on IBM's site.
Then I had months of weekly calls from sales people wanting to get a commission.
India has four year and three year degrees. 4 yr degrees are engineering, medicine. 3 yr degrees are arts, sciences, and these days include a basic Computer/IT degree.
Most IT/ITeS firms used to hire only 4 yr grads for ANY kind of work. And if you look at the job market today, you can still hire a ton of recent 4 yr grads for about $200/m.
My guess is IBM wants to get in 3yr college grads for some kinds of work, because some 3yr grads would be better than the bottom rung of 4yr grads, and they'd be less likely to demand higher salaries later.
I can only recall one IT company that hires straight out of school, out of thousands that I've heard of.
Technicians and Engineers are out of work. Cheap overseas labor is used here and abroad.
Try calling for support from a small or medium business. Too small to outsource, their staff is more likely than not to have lots of contact with the people who made the stuff in the first place. You can get good results.
I work at a larger place than that, but instead of the traditional three levels of support we effectively have two - second level and third level, all internal. The people you get on the phone when you call know how to think, and solve 90% of incoming calls (including many tougher calls because problems have escalated before and documentation and training have come down from third level so we don't need to get bothered.) If we had a lesser help desk we'd have to hire more expensive headcount to actually deal with issues - it makes good business sense to keep them in-house and well trained. Oh, and we promote heavily from within, so everyone on the desk knows it's in their best career interests to soak up as much as they can. It makes them more hire-able internally and externally. I think they handle north of 30K calls a month with 24/7 coverage, it's pretty impressive what they do with a fairly small and focused group.
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
they fucking graduated.... how could they still be high schoolers?
And custodians are important too
Folks, this is a red herring. In India, only colleges and universities accredited to the University Grants Commission (http://www.ugc.ac.in/) are allowed to grant Degrees. There are any number of unaccredited private colleges that coduct similar 3/4 year courses as the accredited ones but are legally prohibited from awarding degrees. They award Diplomas, instead. The best known in this category are the universally acclaimed Indian b-schools, called the Indian Institutes of Management.
This article is bullshit. I am in India, and I work with a large group, which has 3 colleges, and I am a part-time professor in the engineering college.
IBM employs ZERO high school graduates manning their Helpdesk. My nephew finished his engineering degree in Computer Science and worked as a night-shift SAN support engineer at IBM Bangalore. He was earning about $1,200 per month and was very good at it. But he quit because he couldn't put up with night shifts.
IBM normally employs engineering graduates and a bit of Arts and Science graduates (BSc - Computer Science etc.). These freshers work for about 3 years in IBM for a monthly salary of $ 1,000 to $ 1,500 max.
There are other companies which also provide support for IBM desktops etc. Even these companies only hire graduates, not High Schoolers, ever. The 2nd tier companies pay about $500 to $900 per month which is a king's ransom in India.
Please do not believe the bullshit being written in the article. I challenge the author, or any other Slashdotter to prove that there is a single High Schooler working for IBM in India.
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Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I've got cleaner water, better health care. Laws that make sure my food isn't poison. I've got a social safety net that keeps bands of thieves and kidnappers to a minimum. My air is also much, much cleaner. Sure, 80% of Indians never have these problems, but for the other 20% life just sucks. America put a lot of effort into closing that gap. For those of us that don't just live a charmed life we want that.
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I'd point out that due to the tech bubble, we have almost a decade worth of college drop-outs who took one or two years of courses before being hired to be a warm body in a cubicle at a startup that ended up failing because it turns out that you can't make up a negative cash flow through increased volume. So we have tons of people in the U.S. who have the title and not much education beyond high school, and never went back to get the remainder of their education.
I'd also say that the average Alok and Ananya with a high school degree in India are probably better educated than the average Jacob and Sophia in the United States, given that India never bought into the whole "new math" and "outcome based education" that's poisoned the well in the U.S..
IBM using high school kids in their call centers?
Actually, that's more than I would have expected from them.
They used to be known for having the BEST support organization in the world, second to none.
Then the bean counters took over and the company has been going downhill ever since.
Has anyone on Slashdot bought anything from IBM in the last 5 years?
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heared. I'm working for a top US consulting firm here in Bangalore. I'm in the industry for more than 10 years now. Here educations is of atmost importance. Nobody will give you a job if you are not college educated. What kind of a crap report is this? Half of silicon vally start-ups are by Indian IIT grads. College education is so cheap here and why the hell would IBM employee school kids when you can get college grands for nothing?
University level education should not be about practical forms or inventions. University level education should be about symbols, meta-level entities and thinking (pondering). There is so much over-education currently in progress that it is unbelievable. In any case the education system gives the HR the message "this person has the ability to learn". Everything else is gives a mixed message, especially in IT or "computer"-something as the subject in question is constantly changing and needs flexibility, perseverance and open mind from the learner.
I worked for IBM for 3 years so I have first hand knowledge how bad their tech support is. IBM staff has to use the same tech support that their customers use. Eating your own dog food they call it, or dog shit as the case may be.
Let me briefly describe the process you have to go through, Call in, work you way down 5 layers of automated phone messages and finally get a live person. That person barely speaks English and really hates their job. This is Tier 1. They ask you a few simple questions and to describe the problem. Lastly, he or she asked what priority you want to make it, Level 1 - call back in 24 hours, Level 2 - call back in a week, Level 3 - call back in ???, hell, I don't know, never made any level 3. You have to make it a Level 1 or you will won't get anybody to look a it for a week. Every help ticket is now a Level 1.
So the next day, you get a call from Tier 2 support. Really, this is a Tier 1 person, who has had a month's worth of training. He goes down a script of all the typical problem, tell you what you need type. Oh course, you have already done this because the those are all online. He then waste another 15 minutes of your time fumbling in the dark and then gives up.
Another 24 hours pass, then you get a call from Tier 3 support. This guys has a year or more experience and is familiar with all the features of the product. He listens to your attempts, then asks you to do something and actually fixes the problem in about 5 minutes. He is the rare bird in IBM Tech support. Also, he is so overworked because Tier 1 and 2 are close to useless that he burns out and moves to so other division just as soon as he can.
That's it. That's how IBM tech support works..
Sincerely, Ex-IBMer
As near as I can recall, there aren't any universities that offer a degree in problem solving skills. Technical support these days is a skilled trade and I'd question the real-world abilities of a college graduate answering tier 1 phones for IBM. If I were to go get a degree in anything, it would be something that interests me rather than something I already make a good living doing.
OK...Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs all dropped out of college. You do the math. These folks only have high school diplomas as well. Why will you not let non college grads support you?
You mad, bro? You want all the non college grads to become billionaires by supporting me?
John Gatto says (paraphrased) that some children learn to read when they're two, others at 8, and that by the time they're 10 you can't tell the difference. The important thing is to wait until the child is ready, and supply appropriate instruction at that time.
Good post, though. The shop teacher complained to me (years ago) about the students who'd rather be taking "baking", but had to be in his class for whatever reason...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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If it's a scripted call it won't be long before it's automated. I tihnk it's even preferrable to speak to a computer that understands english than a human that does not.
worst artical ever.... who really care's? as long as they have the correct answer to your question when they call and they are nice to talk to does it really matter. i am not more than high school educated and i do just fine, i have been in technical support for the best part of 15years. due to the massive expense of higher education in the UK i have not done it. the only thing that higher education gives you is a better earning potential but that is not at the top of everyone thougths...
Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
Your post is as immature and offensive as many of the posts seen on here and is, additionally, hypocritical to boot.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
U be talkin liek u know somethin bout americanz.
I werk at helpdesk an we ar bettr than ur 10 year olds. LOL!
Example:
Buying in America:
You something for $11.23, you tender a $20 bill, you get $8.77 back
Buying in India:
You buy something for Rs 17.25, you tender a Rs 20 bill, the billing guy asks if you have 2.25 in spare change if you do, takes it and returns you a Rs 5 coin.
Now replace the store clerk with a 8 year old vegetable seller's kid assisting his mom after school.
And this is ROUTINE.The kid is not a super intelligent prodigy
If you can figure this out, great. If not, well, validation of the hypothesis
I do not notice a difference in the quality, or lack of quality in support.
I had been breaking my head over what Cringely had been talking. Being an IBMer, I know it is a ridiculous claim, and he probably misunderstood something. Just realized he was talking about the Graduate Hire program.
If there is a plan for 50% Graduate Hire, what that means is, 50% of new hires would be coming right out of college, instead coming in as experienced hires. IBM typically hires more laterals from the market instead of fresh grads compared to the competition in India, some of whom might take in up to 90% in fresh graduates. So this program whichever Collins-Smee is supposedly responsible for, might be about a shift in that strategy to hire more freshers.
I would have expected Cringely, with his supposed wisdom of 30 years, to have cross-checked his facts rather than coming to such silly conclusion.
Random people from the US and India bashing each other based on unverifiable claims, comparing incomparable education systems which don't apply the headline in question. Is this Slashdot or Idiocracy? Shame yourself kids.
The IQ of the *average* 35 year old *anywhere* is pretty much that of a slobbering incompetent moron. From what I have dealt with in both American and Indian support calls I can confirm that the average Indian helpdesk person is no more competent or intelligent than the average American. Basically people everywhere are morons. Add your bigotry to the mix and we have bigoted morons running the world, ain't it grand?
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Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
It is drilled into the trainees' brains because they're naive enough to actually believe that, because it makes them feel better about themselves. If the average 10-year old Indian kid was smarter than the average 35-yr old American, wouldn't India be at the top of the global pecking order, and not grovel before the US for every problem it faces, be it Pakistan or China? Let's face it, we aren't as smart as we think we are. The sooner we realise this, the better it is for us. Try chewing that with your superior IQ-equipped brain.
Has anyone tried rebooting him?
So even after their program to get 50% of their staff to be university graduates, they STILL won't have college graduates manning the phones.
In many places College and University are different.
Finally I'd want a capable tech on the other end of the phone, who says they need a college or university education? Isn't the standard complaint about call centers that they work to a mindless script?
Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
You see a narrow view of the US---
- Media (which is virtual fantasy compared to real life)
- Those who call help centers... Think about it--who calls help centers, particular ones for consumer products? Mostly it's idiots.
I work with and encounter far too many intelligent people on a daily basis to believe that the "average" American is a complete idiot, unfortunately for you it's a case of dealing with a select slice of the population who cannot solve their own problems. I'm sure the same would be true for people of any country.
Attitude is another issue--people calling into help centers are often frustrated over a problem. I don't agree with having attitude toward a stranger who is trying to help you, but when you've called in half a dozen times, waited 10's of minutes on hold each time, only to be walked through a set of basic and obvious set of corrective actions you tend to get short with the people you are speaking with. So don't mistake someone who is rude out of frustration with being unintelligent.
I think Asian's man most help desks. I once had to call dlink to solve a router issue and literally the lady on the other end just kept saying "So what is it's IP address". The issue was the router couldn't get an IP address, she was sure that if you had a router it had an IP, I finally had to yell at her for being dumb as nails and she hung up the phone. This is the "quality" we've come to expect from the help desk.
3/4ths of first calls to help desks are for ID admin issues. It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to do that.
If the average 10-year old Indian kid was smarter than the average 35-yr old American, wouldn't India be at the top of the global pecking order, and not grovel before the US for every problem it faces, be it Pakistan or China?.
What you say may be true... but let's not forget the power of having certain attitudes.
The US is built in an area where the indigenous people have been virtually destroyed, those that are left are free to integrate into society, but if they want to maintain their heritage they do it on small lots of land granted to them.
"Might is Right".
So is the US a global leader because it is the most intelligent? Or, because it has (or perhaps HAD is better) the balls to make shit happen, whether it was weapons, technology, etc.? They have always been in a race to either defend themselves or over-power another aggressor.
Who comes from India? Ghandi... Mr. Passive Resistance. They're also a country that was under the thumb of the English, so they were forced into these positions. The attitudes are changing all over, India, China, etc... these are places were traditionally polite, passive and humble people are beginning to realize that you spend your short life in the shadow when you act like that.
I'm born in the US and always lived here so my view is one-sided, and perhaps all I know are stereo-types. I also don't always (or even usually) agree with the aggressive attitudes my country has toward other nations, but I do recognize that without them the world would be a very different place. Possibly under the rule of Nazi's, or a Russian Czar, who knows...
Does anyone realize that IQ scores are normalized with respect to age? The IQ of an average anybody is 100. That statement is no more an insult to Americans than it is a compliment to Indians. In fact, it reflects how poorly the speaker understands IQ.
Why does this surprise people? Here in the U.S. I once worked at a support center for an ISP, whose owner told my manager that he could train monkeys to do our task. The pay was atrocious -- literally, stocking shelves at Wal-Mart paid better. I've also run an ISP support center (at a different place, thank God) that paid it's people well, with benefits, expected professional behavior & rewarded it. And no, you didn't need a college degree to work there. Some of the worst workers there had one, and some of the best didn't.
I work for the US office of an Indian firm... I believe you have that number backwards: The IQ of an average [ANYONE BUT an Indian] 10 year old is higher than the 35 year old [anyone but an Indian]
There fixed that for ya.
I have never seen such rampant bureaucracy and incompetence in a firm since this one. I am sure they will be out of business within 2 years.
BTW: I didn't join this company... they bought my firm for a pretty penny because the owner wanted to live the good life.
Statements like these permeate the outsourcing industry and encourage VPs to offshore. Then you interview the offshore employees and they don't know anything technical, can't produce reports/statuses, and can't use simple logic. There are good people in India, but nowhere near as many as the industry thinks there are and the good ones are not working for peanuts. The going rate for competent people is pretty close to US rates, the people work gets offshored to, who can't make those rates really can't do much.
CVs from offshored employees are pretty funny and almost universally fictional (based on 25 interviews over multiple projects). The guys we hire are pretty much as competent as the ones I deal with at IBM and Oracle, and the problem is the offshoring industry (with some help from the Indian educational system that is much more stratified than the US one).
I know people who do offshoring properly (they do 55% to 65% of work onshore, pay $15-20 an hour for offshore juniors, know people offshore and know the business culture there) and make it work, but they save 5-10% not the 60% the big outsourcers are aiming for.
And clients have to figure out that if you replace one person onshore with 5 people offshore who cannot, as a group, do the work of the one person they replaced, the client is NOT saving money. "But now you have FIVE people, you can do SHIFTS." Sigh... You can change the SLA from 2 hours to five days but you are not helping your business.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
Sorry, "John", can you repeat that? I'm having a hard time understanding you because of your thick Indian accent. Something about curry maybe... ?
P.S. You people really stink. Wow! Let's make "offensive" our word of the day... here's an example: "Your stinky stink is really offensive".
India has never produced anything of value, and they cannot even control their own reproduction. That's really all that India is good at, fuc-king.
India has never produced anything of any value whatsoever, and cannot even control its own population. Indians can fu-ck, but that's about the only thing they do successfully.
Here's the captured text from a chat with the Indian Broken Machines support desk.
M_/Chicago/: S_ I’m in a room filled with 20 very concerned (edited) customers trying to run their new line financial pareto reports for the US financial accounts. This is one of the BTO transition items I have to get setup for the client ASAP.
S_/India: Yes M_ this is S_.
M_/Chicago: Yes S_ I know. I am inside of the report we are stuck on the case number selection field which has been searching for results for approximately 5 minutes without a result.
S_/India: Yes M_. Are you connected into the internet?
M_/Chicago: S_ yes I am connected to the internet. There are no values showing up in the prompt selection. The report is failing. People are not happy I’m in a room filled with upset union workers.
I’m wasting their time.
S_/India: M_ can you see if you can get to the Google.
M_/Chicago: S_ I’m connected to the internet I’m speaking to you on the internet.
S_/India: Yes M_ internet is not issue.
M_/Chicago: You and the team marked this as a passed item in your SIT testing according to the client. Note the test cases all mentioned a specific value to search on 12501 for example case number 2 does not work. The users are trying to do the same. It is not working.
S_/India: M_ yes I test the field and when the field didn’t return value I skip it.
M_/Chicago: S_ did you skip everything that was not working and just mark it passed?
S_/India: Yes M_.
M_/Chicago: So you have no idea what you’re doing? Is this a correct assumption?
S_/India: Yes M_.
M_/Chicago: I think I’m in the Twilight Zone.
S_/India: I not get message M_.
M_/Chicago: Get up now walk over to Prasad and let him know you are no longer on my project. Tell him to get the entire team in a conference room in 10 minutes and to dial in my line. You’re not invited. Do you understand this?
S_/India: Yes M_ I think there is a problem.
Separately, we have a saying in India, which is drilled into the brains of BPO trainees. It says; 10=35. The IQ of an average 10-year old Indian kid is about the same as the IQ of the average 35-yr old American. Reading the many infantile responses to this article, I begin to suspect this might not be far from the truth.
Please keep in mind that a call center worker's viewpoint starts by seeing the worst of everyone. The callers are not calling 1-800-SUCCESS, they are calling 1-800-FAILURE. They have already been disappointed by whatever the product did (or didn't) do. Coupled with the fact that so many companies are using Indian call centers (because Indian English is actually quite good), and so many help desk scripts are inadequate at solving the problems they were created to handle (not the fault of the guy answering the phone), a lot of Americans have developed an association where the clipped accent means serious disappointment - fair or not, it's where we are.
Does that give one human the right to treat another like shit? Of course not. Do they? Of course - they are selfish and rude as hell around here all day long, whether they are in a movie theater being entertained or just walking down the street. I wouldn't expect them to improve their attitudes in the middle of a product failure. I wish it were different, and I raised my son to be better than that, but we can't fix everyone.
So on behalf of a minority of Americans, here's a collective "sorry".
John
I think he is just quoting this 10=35 equation from a movie
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1593756/
How quaint. Your 10=35 aphorism reminds me of the years I spent IT consulting for a very large software outfit that, as it happens, employed boatloads of H1B's while trying not to hire Americans. The many times that I was told by the Indians that Indians were preferred because of their higher intelligence and how breathtakingly smart they were. The final straw came when I was told by an Indian that all important mathematical theorems, lemmas, advances etc. were discovered by Indians. At this point, I quite boisterously pointed out that Gauss was not an Indian as was not Legendre, Laplace, Lebesque ad infinitum. He became quite quiet and wouldn't speak to me anymore. Maybe I was too harsh on the guy. Or maybe his brainwashing had hit cognitive dissonance at a resonant frequency.
if this story is true, it confirms the above stated hardly-debatable fact, even 18-20 yr old Indian High School grads are smart enough to help sort out problems that a majority of Americans of all ages cannot figure out - there have been some seriously funny recorded calls that would shame every american, seriously dumb callers
People still treat this guy like he's important, or someone who has actually done something?
Hasn't IBM been out of the hardware business for over 5 years?
("business consultancy" and "management services", or whatever they call it these days, if that's their current line of business, means as much to me as "SAP administrator" or "flange-sprocket discombobulator." They may do whatever that is wonderfully well, but what it actually is means absolutely nothing to me. Probability of being brought is zero.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I don't understand the US obsession with "college".
There seems to be little in a normal universities Bachelor of IT that is going to make you a whizz/at all useful at troubleshooting most network, windows desktop/server or hardware issues.
I worked for IBM during my first and only year of university and for a year after that, the pay was a bit less than a petrol station attendant but a bit more than a McDonalds worker.
My job consisted of managing users access for everyone in one of the biggest banks in Australia, and a few smaller clients.
IBM gave us a talk about careers and then we did some combination of IQ and IT knowledge test which was very basic.
After this the successful applicants were all called in (around 40 in that batch) and completely randomly assigned to teams.
My career in IT ever since has been defined by this random selection, thankfully I ended up in security and not taking phone calls on the helpdesk.
All training required was provided over about 4 hours of slide shows and Q&A sessions and then we sat with an experienced analyst for 4-5 shifts to get used to the job.
About half of us were in some stage of an IT degree and the only difference in our ability was that we were more familiar with windows and some of us had used telnet clients and active directory before.
My experience was that IBM will do anything to get a contract and undercut any price or agree to any insane SLA with no thought of how or who will provide this service and then scramble to figure out how to make a massive profit later.
They also treat their employees like dirt, when they decided to cut costs by making employees bring their own tea/coffee/milk there was a lot of head shaking... if they treated their employees like google or microsoft they might stick around.
If you are posting 3bil+ quarterly profit reports and then telling your employees they have to bring teabags and milk due to cost cutting measures it is pretty clear you dont give 2 shits about them.
During my time several teams were offshored to India, the staff who went over to train the indian team were not horrified at the low pay but were horrified that they were replacing our team with less people working long hours rather than hundreds of $2/hour people to get things done...
Wow this rant got long, apologies.
TLDR: Degrees don't mean anything unless you're a developer or above. IBM treat their staff like crap.
"They have always been in a race to either defend themselves or over-power another aggressor."
What the hell are you talking about?
When has the US ever had to "race to defend itself or overpower another aggressor"? When they threw the British out?
The Japanese, Germans or Russians were never ever going to invade the US.
What about Vietnam and Korea? Why, they were going to invade the US right?
Your response to 9/11 says it all. Some Saudis attacked us? Better invade Iraq, put in a puppet govt. and kill hundreds of thousands/millions!
Hmm communism expanding into Asia? Invade Vietnam, prop up our puppet govt. and kill millions!
Yours is the only country to ever use an A-Bomb against anyone, you have the biggest stockpile of nukes of anyone, you have the 2 largest air forces in the world. You have the largest navy in the world.
These are not defensive measures, your country is a global bully.
The soviet union fell apart when the money ran out and they couldn't keep up the facade, do you really think that wouldnt have happened if America wasn't doing everything it could to fuck it up for them?
If you think people in China or India are polite or passive then I suspect that you do not have a passport.
Think about this, if you're the good guys then why does most of the world hate you?
Your country totally ignores wars in Africa but will get involved in any that are near an oil well at the drop of a hat.
How many suicide bombings were taking place in Iraq under Sadams rule? There are plenty taking place now.
TLDR: Holy crap I can't believe that your reality is so distorted that you could possibly believe anything you wrote.
Lovely. Now adult middle-class Americans will be competing for jobs with Indian children.
How many U.S. citizens have been "allowed to seek 'other opportunities'" while their jobs are farmed out for pennies on the dollar?
Globalization is zero-sum since US dollar is pegged to OPEC oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
Casteism
Of course - they are selfish and rude as hell around here all day long, whether they are in a movie theater being entertained or just walking down the street. I wouldn't expect them to improve their attitudes in the middle of a product failure. I wish it were different, and I raised my son to be better than that, but we can't fix everyone.
So on behalf of a minority of Americans, here's a collective "sorry".
Having worked in one of these call centers about a decade ago, I have the exact opposite opinion of Americans. I worked as a tech support representative for a major computer manufacturer. This was during the recession following 9/11. There weren't as many jobs going around for engineering grads, and call centers were mushrooming everywhere. So the grads all ended up manning the stations in these call centers. I remember being genuinely amazed at how patient, and sincere most Americans are. And back in those days, I think we did a pretty good job of it too, since we heard sighs of relief when the callers were told that the support guy is in India. I guess the quality of support has fallen now, since the engineering grads moved on to better jobs. I think this is inevitable. With quantity, you have to sacrifice quality.