Slashdot Mirror
Immigration Reform May Spur Software Robotics
dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can 'reduce human intervention.' More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that 'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.' James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys 'reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes,' and by improving service delivery."
Judging from the summary, they're looking to replace support more than production. I'm pretty sure this isn't a new idea... all you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.
"The autonomic tools that IPsoft makes are designed to bring software robotic automation and machine learning to routine IT functions, such as help desks, operations and infrastructure management. In other words, with IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings could be done by a software machine."
it's either more automatic phone reply machines or possibly more of the way of doing business where instead of calling an amazon guy to setup you a new server, you use their tools to deploy the server yourself and amazon doing a robo-call to test if you're the person you say you are and instead of calling amazons support you look up their faq on their site.
dressing it in 10 paragraphs of bullshit makes a better article - for computer world. also it makes it sound more unique, which it certainly isn't, since we've been using amazon for a while with zero human interaction with sales, support or anyone.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think that's called software. No robotics needed.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
All you need is a cassette tape playing "Have you tried turning it off and on again" on a loop.
Who holds the copyright on that phrase?
Both Wipro and Infosys are the worst in terms of H1-B visa abuse and should not be allowed to operate in this country.
http://profit.ndtv.com/news/industries/article-us-senator-accuses-infosys-wipro-tcs-of-abusing-h-1b-visas-321282
But, unfortunately they're connected with Washington's elite and throw money around in DC to keep things like the H1-B program alive. Remember that during the next election cycle.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Doing speech recognition to reliably detect say even the 20 most common problems with a help desk that might be harder than you think
Which is why 90% of the time support for something is totally worthless.
Verizon wireless was rejecting some of the SMS we send our own employees. There is no one we could talk to who had any idea what to do. No customer facing person had any ability to tell us why they started doing this or if there was a process around it.
The company I retired from laid off about 5k people-- found it had to hire about 800 of those back (and is having a hard time getting suck.. people... to take those jobs).
It's designing it's order entry system to allow it to lay off most of its ma and customer support (another 8000 or so people). But it's SO obvious about it that its losing the good staff which is ironically slowing down the automation.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I would then stop dealing with them.
I have no tolerance for spending 20 minutes to get a 2 minute thing done. VZW's system is terrible. I want to pay the bill, it even offers to let you pay before you hear about your account if you select that it then tells you about your account before letting you pay. It was designed by a crazy person.
We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.
Ironically, it'd likely work just as well as hiring Indian help-desk staff.
I suspect Infosys (an Indian company) will likely end up stabbing their own jobs market in the gut with this one, should it take off.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
At least they tried to help. When one of my customers stopped getting push emails on her Blackberry, I was told by Rodgers Mobility support that push email is an unsupported feature and the policy was that she could not report delivery problems to anyone.
We had a similar issue with some provider not accepting our texts. It may have been Verizon. We had to ask one of our managers who used to work at Verizon to call a buddy of his who still worked there. Turned out that they have a different message size than other providers or something, and that if we sent something to the usual 160 character limit, it would not send at all. It was an edge case, but I am surprised it never came up before.
At this point, we need support companies that we pay that actually have employees who "know someone" inside the organization, because these big companies are about as transparent as muddy crude oil.
Not that hard? It's amazing how many of them screw up badly.
In UPS case the damn thing can't even handle my Canadian accent. Nothing so infuriating than to have to read my number, have the IVR repeat it back to me garbled and then have to tell the damn computer it got it wrong and then have to go through the process twice more before being forwarded to a support person to sort it all out. I've even tried changing my pronunciation from "Zed" to "Zee" .. still no dice.
My only thought is that they either don't keep statistics on how often that happens or that the managers who make the decisions never see them.
go away, I have replaced you with a shell script. A small one.
If you think that's bad, try getting help on a server issue when you're not a Verizon customer.
Back in 2006, I was working for a DoD contractor, and discovered that our order emails to suppliers were bouncing as spam if it went to a Verizon address. We tried for a solid week to call everyone we could possibly find at Verizon that could help, but either got stonewalled, referred to some useless person, or (most often) shoved into the standard customer tech support queue. Mostly we were treated like either a social-engineering attempt, an idiot, or something similar.
Thing is, my employer ran the EMALL website, which all armed forces used to order anything which wasn't an actual weapon. Our index was bigger than Amazon's
Finally, I gave up and spoke with the managers at DLA (Defense Logistics Agency), laying out the problem to date. We then put out a system-wide notice to all DoD suppliers that if they wanted to sell something to the military, they'd damned well better use something other than a Verizon email account. Two weeks later, Verizon came out of the blue, desperately calling us asking what they could do to help us out. Turns out they weren't fully RFC-compliant at the time; they fixed it pretty quickly once they realized that a lot of their DoD-supplier customers were suddenly asking them how much the contract ETFs came to.
Sad part is, if my employer was some tiny company in BFE, there would likely still be a problem with the damned thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine."
Software Machine? From my experience most first level support could be replaced with a batch file or python script. 99% are just following a script, or worse, just act as some sort of very faulty speech-to-text interface for turning a phone call into text in a ticket and tossing said ticket over the wall to the next level of support.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Who holds the copyright on that phrase?
I first thought of Edison, but then it occurred to me that this was actually Tesla's approach...
Ezekiel 23:20
But on the upside, we the customer, will be able to understand the bots MUCH easier than we currently can the Indian named "Bob" on that support call.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I once had the displeasure of telling our client that the vendor (luckily not our company but our partner, so I could say "they" not "us") did not support the use of the "back" button in their web interface. Any support case that involved using it would be closed as not supported. For bonus points they didn't provide any functionality equivalent to it either, so of course everyone used the back button anyway where it did work. To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We need more automation in general.
I know this means some low level jobs evaporate. But it also means companies aren't having to pay for those jobs anymore which means their priorities will shift to getting trained labor. And that means either companies will start focusing more on actually training their own labor a bit more which they can afford if they're not paying for low end labor. Or the universities will at least get somewhat competent at preparing people for the work force.
People whine about automation but its pointless. Its the future. Deal with it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Compared to most level 1 tech support I have dealt with, I would rather talk to a bot.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
You know who *used* to have a bad ass system? Sony.
You would call them up it would recognize your phone number (and what you have bought if you registered). It would ask you what you are calling about and route you to the correct repair center. If you had an open call it would route you to the same guy you were working with before and he would give you a status update. It was actually very cool to call them. No re-describing issues over and over no trying the same things over and over. *Then* they changed it out. You would then end up talking to 3 different guys who had no clue what was going on. It was rather sad.
You mean like this?
Wages are leveling out.
My main point of irritation is that I can't legally buy movies, medicine, software development packages, and many other products for the extremely low price the same corporations legally sell them to indians and chinese for.
I have to pay $19.99 for a movie selling legally in china for $2.49.
I have to pay $5.00 a day for blood pressure medication selling legally in india for 10 cents.
It's ILLEGAL for someone to buy a bunch over there and ship it back here and sell the movies for $3.49 and the pills for 20 cents (100% mark up).
A few years ago Microsoft was GIVING development suites to indians free while I had to pay $750 for the same product.
Indian wages (as of novermber 2012) were going up 20%. China is seeing 12% to 100% annual wage inflation.
It's been a long painful walk, but sometime in the next 4-8 years it won't be worth it to offshore any more. These automation programs are a leading edge. Infosys also is trying to rebrand themselves from being a company that sells legions of code monkeys and grunt programmers to a company that sells managers and ceos. That's also a sign of the increasing wage structure.
I was lucky. I lived on half of what I made since 2000 and I was able to retire early. Now I do massage therapy, draw, and paint for fun. I'm looking at doing some programming for fun but haven't done so yet. Either Libreoffice (I read they are friendly), or Android (for my dnd game), or some kind of board gaming table software.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine
MUAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAHAHA. Oh, sorry, you were serious. Oh well, MUAAHAHAHAHAHHAAAHAH!!!!
On a serious note, those of us who are in the knows, who have done some type of IT work, we know that that is bullshit. Tier I support has never been done, and can never be done with a IVR system.
For example, let's consider IVR systems, which is where these supposed "software machine" silver bullets can fit in. Call your cell phone or cable provider, and you will see that at most, what you get is an IVR system that leads you to an specialist (or sometimes someone who is reading a script of instructions) after the IVR has tried to collect some basic problem description that, in theory, helps facilitate the specialist.
That is all.
Let's call the IVR system a Tier-0 support system (or more appropriately, a routing system that takes a customer to actual Tier I support.) That is all. It's only when a human being in Tier I support fails at resolving the issue, that Tier II and Tier III get summoned. One would have to create one hell of an expert systems to barely begin to mimick Tier I support for the general-case type of problems.
All you would do is piss the customer. Case in point, look at AT&T and Bank of America, and other cell providers. They are phasing out IVR systems (or severely reducing them) in favor of actual human beings (couple that with a minor shift away from offshore call centers, but that's another story.)
And that is just for mundane tasks.
'what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line.
Yeah, because IT is like pulling levers or flipping burguers (no offense, since I once pulled levers and flipped burguers.)
Serious question: Do they even know what the hell robotics mean?????
I bet they actually do but they are simply latching to the next buzzword (since manufacturing and robotics are the hot pancakes of the day), hoping for the next business-type offsourcing dumbass to actually fall for it.
Up next on Fox News, they invented software-based monkey coders (and thus circumvented Turing's Halting Problem.)
That's because Bob in India only needs to understand "Repeat Again". It's the only thing he ever hears.
Most people who are still coming to USA fall in two categories. Some of them still love the freedom, opportunities and the general law and order and free markets etc. The other set is people who did not make the top cut in India, so trying to improve their chances by adding American experience to their resume.
Pretty soon all the goodwill earned by the top notch graduates from IITs, IISc and National Institutes of Technology, in the 1990s and early 2000s would have been totally spent. May be it has already happened. Now the fresh Indian H1-Bs are often seen as malingering, incompetent but with highly inflated ego. So even if the H1-B quota is raised to infinity, if the American corporations wise up, most of these visas will go unused. But Corporate America has to wake up first.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What seems sort of curious is that 'support' is what happens when software(sometimes hardware; but hardware at least has the decency to usually fail dramatically enough to just be swapped out, and would be hard to roboticize outside of a datacenter or something in any case) fucks up hard enough, or confuses the user hard enough, that an IT minion gets called in.
No, first line support is often dealing with people that have a PEBCAK problem, not a software or hardware problem. Or at least not one related to what you're actually providing support for in a supported configuration. I suspect that many companies don't actually want a support line, if you have a problem they'd rather you get pissed and go somewhere else than tie up one of their employees - even your outsourced call center guy. Unless it's a big thing affecting many users in which case you probably know it without everyone calling in. It's not acceptable to not offer support, but you can make it useless enough that most people won't bother. This all sounds like a much cheaper way of providing non-support while still giving the pretense that you do. Let's call it a tier zero before you even get to reach first line support, far less knowledgeable support.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And should also work better than all the lazy American, European, Asian....(add ethnicity, nationality here) bums. I don't understand the racism on these forums. If you think you are smart, there are people smarter than you in the race you are criticizing.
Hmm, so H1B's go to the best and the brightest 1st line support engineers that can be replaced by software, really?
Being dumb, being incompetent in the job but being street smart etc are kind of universal. You find all kinds of people in all castes.
You could be the typical troll who incites a brahmin-non-brahmin brawl in threads in soc.culture.indian. Typically almost all the threads there end in such a brawl. The Indian version of Godwin's law is, once the thread mentions brhamins vs non-brahmins, it is time for sane people to kill the thread and leave.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Don't bother trying to educate a bigot. I hate the H-1B program as much as the next American, but I abhor racism. Also, somebody please mod the GP down to -2.
I had one Verizon Business phone support rep tell me that Verizon doesn't offer VoIP, so there was no way for her to transfer to the VoIP support group (which I had talked to many times before but had lost the number). So I asked her, "Does that mean we can stop paying you $2000/mo for a service you don't offer?". She hung up on me.
To understand this, you need to talk to your parents or grandparents generation where they paid enormous attention to their clothes. My Italian American colleague, son of an immigrant, recalled that his dad used to pack his work clothes in a case and wear a shirt, tie and trousers to ride the buses to the factory where he would change to his work clothes. And change before leaving the factory. For him to be seen in his oil stained factory denim trousers and denim bib was infra dig. I have seen pictures of foremen ridiculously wearing a tie a shirt and a hat, completely drenched in sweat looking miserable overseeing a mass of workers stripped to the waist manhandiling girdirs or railroad ties etc. For them that tie is a status symbol worth all the misery of wearing one!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So Edison probably owns the copyright...
Is 1563649 a prime number?
It has nothing to do with racism, as you imply. The stereotypical out-sourced help desk is staffed by people unknowledgeable on the topic and reading from a printed script. Asking anything off-script will derail the staffer, and a robotic script would be no worse. The script would be better in that it can't get flustered, and cannot go off script, at least that's the supposition. I'm sure "Indian" was used since the companies referenced in TFA are... Indian.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It's not racism, it's just a sad fact and here's my experience.
For several years I worked as a Software Engineer at Xerox in the UK and we survived for 3 years after the global economic crisis hit in 2008. But management, always looking to save a few percent on the Engineering budget every year (despite always breaking even and returning to profit), finally cut it to below a level where they could continue to fund us as a cohesive unit, so they did a deal with HCL where we were all transferred to HCL who could do the work for the price (allegedly) and provide more engineers!
So HCL's plan was to take as many of us as possible off the Xerox work and to replace us with Indians, sending us newly-acquired, expensive staff to do contract work for better-paying customers (many miles from home for months at a time).
The HCL CEO sold the story that Westerner engineers are spoilt, lazy and ignorant, compared with intelligent, diligent and self-motivated Indians.
What HCL provided was very young, inexperienced and very poorly-paid Indians, perhaps straight out of university, to acquire knowledge, pick up work and to train off-shore teams of similarly-inexperienced staff.
Nothing was impossible. They were instructed to say "yes" to everything.
They were posted here for 3 months at a time, often expected to assimilated decades-worth of institutional knowledge in that time and to work all the hours god sends.
You see, they were brainwashed that everything is possible if you just try hard enough and that success is entirely down to the individual. Managers wielded metaphorical sticks, and let me tell you, they had the pointiest hair I've ever seen.
This is "empowerment."
If you don't succeed, it's because you didn't try hard enough. Not that projects were completely mismanaged...
So these poor young men and women, being paid a pittance and with no living expenses for being in a much more expensive foreign country, were apart from their families for several months at a time and living in tiny rooms, expected to work night and day, to do the work of entire teams of people who'd taken a decade or more to learn their craft and getting shouted at and lied to by their management.
That's the reality, so cut these poor guys a bit of slack. It's not their fault. It's the fault of The System.
Stick Men