Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk? 237
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.'"
College not needed... (Score:5, Informative)
...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?
Re:No shit sherlock (Score:5, Informative)
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...
But one of the big justifications for outsourcing call centers to India was that you could get college-educated workers for cheap. If you're going to be staffing the call centers with people who have just a high school education, then you might as well do that in the United States and not deal with the language/accent barrier.
You're missing the cheap part -- highschool grads in India are cheaper than high school grads in the USA. That's why they deal with the language/culture/accent barrier.
Workers without a college degree are cheap enough in America as it is.
Pay range for entry level agents in India is $200 - $350/month [crmbuyer.com]. Where are these cheap Americans that will work for $1.75/hour?
Moreover, it's strongly implied that IBM is misrepresenting the educational level of the employees in these outsourced call centers. Regardless of whether workers in call centers should need a college degree, it's not kosher to say or imply that your workers do when in fact they don't.
Where is this implied? I never assume that first level tech support agents will have any kind of relevant college degree - they all seem to follow a script (and I wish they'd just publish the scripts online so I could follow them myself).
Re:Degree Overrated (Score:1, Informative)
Not sure what you're calling IBM for, but I support 1-200 IBM servers and at least 6 WebSphere environments, and I never have trouble with them. Maybe, if you know what you're calling for and can explain it, you'll get better support. Most of my tickets end up starting out at level 2 though (again, I know what I'm doing, what I'm calling about, and explain what I've already tried....). It could just be that your group/department need to learn to explain the problem better.
If you'd like an example, I've had an issue on and off for a while (4-6weeks) with a case open, since re-creating it has been inconsistent from one day to the next,to the point that it sometimes took weeks to reproduce, that's fairly understandable. I was asked to provide logs with particular trace strings, sent them out, was asked to run a few collector tools and given 2 debug builds to add logging around the error. The level 2 tech I've been working with was asked to do a webex with me to validate the debug code, tracing, and a few other config related items. While on the webex, he was surprised at a combination of the size of my environment (100apps over about 90 clusters and 4 physical servers) and the fact that i was successfully (for the most part) managing it via a 32 bit deployment manager. After reviewing all of the data (debug code logs, environment, etc..) they believe that I've hit the limit of a 32bit deployment manager's capabilities and have asked that I upgrade to a 64bit deployment manager. Is it a pain ? Sure, but if you know what you're doing, it's about 4-6hours work to upgrade, patch, and migrate the profile (maybe less).
Is it good that it took 6 weeks to get to this point? No, but this wasn't a customer impacting issue, we had a workaround, and the normal symptoms of an OutOfMemory situation weren't showing up. The actual error we were receiving was an undocumented error that was basically an "oh shit nothing else we anticipated caught this ! throw this error... "
They were also more than patient, provided valid feedback and suggestions based on the data I provided, understood the issue's impact and treated it appropriately (including following up in a timely manner).
Our Oracle support is pretty good too from what I've heard, though we have had a few issues that took a while to resolve with them also.
disclaimer: I'm not employed by either company, though i do run a number of environments that require interaction with both vendors product suite.
"High School Graduates", not "High Schoolers" (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:No shit sherlock (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No shit sherlock (Score:4, Informative)
Except that is exactly what IBM is doing in the GDF centers (Fishkill, Dubuque, Colombia)
They are hiring high school grads and putting them in first line jobs. If they stick with it, and get their certs/education (certs are provided by IBM) they can move up in the system. (I joined with no degree, although I have one now. I was not a entry level position either)
The pay is somewhere in the $10 to $15 range, and yes, it is hard to get people to sign on at that wage.
These resources are replacing India resources as those resources are getting harder to get. Not surprisingly, years of outsourcing to India has built an in country demand. The best and brightest head there because the hours are better, and often the pay is better too.
As for the Indian work quality... it varies. I have worked with some that were as good as any US tech, and some that are mere chair warmers.
It definitely takes 2 to 4 to match a quality US resources, but you can afford to do that.
Any customer can demand US only resources if they are willing to pay for it... but they are willing to do so.
The GDF centers get US resources in close parity, a 15 to 25% premium. Many customers are opting to use those resources in place of overseas resources. Work is still shipped over there in "backoffice" type support of the US based teams, such as provisioning of disk, etc, but the customer is not in contact with them.
There is also a growing need for "US Only" based on regulations. Governments are expanding regulations to require data and systems are handled by US citizens only because of the nature of the data. That is a fast growing quarter.
Re:The whole article is bullshit (Score:1, Informative)
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.