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Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated
Jason Koebler writes Yahoo announced [Tuesday] it would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2,000 jobs there. Meanwhile, tech companies are beginning to see that many of the jobs it has outsourced can be automated, instead. Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it's not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: "The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now," Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings, said. "Companies are seeing that automated replacements are getting to be 'good enough.'"
I'm all for automating management with decision makers powered by random number generators. It'll be more honest and more likely to come up with the right decision.
If those are tech support jobs, then they might as well automate them. The best I can tell those workers they hire over there have essentially no skills in the products they are supporting. They basically just read what the computer screen tells them to say or ask. As a customer, I'd honestly rather be talking to a machine as it would give me the same answers but might actually be at little easier to understand.
Great, now all the tech support "guys" are going to sound like Professor Hawking.
Relax, you only have to start worrying when the tech support "guys" start sounding like HAL 9000.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Yes, those darn cashiers will never shut up... They always tell me to "have a nice day". It's truly overwhelming.