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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.
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."
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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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?
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> 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.
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"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.
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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
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!"
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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.
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.
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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..
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.
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
I do not notice a difference in the quality, or lack of quality in support.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.)
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