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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.'"
I can't get worked up over "high school graduates". The idea that a college degree somehow improves the support and skill you're getting is offensively stupid. I dropped out of high school, moved to SF, signed a contract and began my career almost fifteen years ago. I provide highly skilled and knowledgeable support to IT departments. When the Fortune 500 company or government institution you work for has a services outage and you call them to complain that something isn't working? I'm the guy *those* guys call after you call them. And in addition to providing exceptional Tier 4 support (granted, I don't tend to deal directly with customers, but with other engineers who in turn deal with customers at some level), I write and compile hot-fixes to help customers out of these dire situations that can often impact tens of millions of end-users. I make about $160k/yr at it. When I dropped out of high school, I had about nine credits. Period. And that is the extent of my "official" education.
So I could not give less of a fuck whether someone has a college degree or only a high school degree or --- like myself --- not even a high school degree. It means fuck all as to what your capabilities are.