You get what you pay for.

Nuff said.

fuckin A. smdh

my employer, a large bank, uses offshore IT support. Needless to say, "Frank" who answers the call in India and barely mumbles English...sucks.

Same with my employer. Employees in India cost 20% of Americans, so execs prefer those when possible. H1B visa holders are next choice since they will work for 70% of Americans.

All comments about quality of work are accurate.

Before I retired I worked as a retail pharmacist for Kmart, at that time we had American IT that were really good. Then Kmart went to foreign IT which was really poor. The standard first question was “have you checked all the connections “ then it was have you turned the unit off . So we started just turning off the computers to see if that would fix the problem before we even called if it didn’t then joe could figure it out, if after about 20 minutes I would ask for a supervisor (they had a tendency to be American) who could usually get the computer up in a couple of minutes. As time went on we started asking for the supervisor right off the bat. The upper management really didn’t like for us to use the American IT, must have been more expensive.

20% - 30% of American labor rate. Takes 4 - 6 times as long to produce a result. The amount of effort to produce a result requires planning down to the bathroom break and pseudo-coding most modules for fill-in-the-blank. Most execs bury this behind "real soon now" and "saved a ton of money" as their competition flies past them.

The real savings? Still waiting to see it.

And don't forget that there is no overlap in our working hours with India.

Thank you for doing the needful.

quote:

Originally posted by PKFan:
And don't forget that there is no overlap in our working hours with India.

Thank you for doing the needful.

Your contract can specify the hours they work so they are in sync with your work hours or at least , so that they can teleconference on the starting end or beginning end of your shift.

My thing is they do a bait and switch. For the first years, they give you the best English speaking people with self-drive. Then they switch out those people with less and less technical efficient and English speaking people because their A Team is on the new accounts they just won. It keeps getting worse until you get to:

"Did you fix it?"

"Yes, can you please check to see if it is working correctly now?"

"It's still not fixed. Did you even check it yourself?"

"umm, umm, no. we fix it and we have to wait for you to confirm it."

I can go on and on with various issues.

One group was so bad no one on our end of the teleconference could understand what the other people were saying except for the IT person on our end with his heavy Chinese accent which we also had a hard time understanding.

In case anyone missed it, IBM has more employees in India than it does in the US:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/2...than-in-the-u-s.html

This is truly sad.

I manage two very large technical teams in India, the beginning was rough but they are top notch and are the best team I have ever managed. That being said they do not do desktop support and I had to make sure they had the right training. Its all a matter of managing expectations correctly. Too many companies (mine included) do not get the right resources and do not set the right expectations.