The theory of outsourcing and offshoring IT as it is practiced in the second decade of the 21st century comes down to combining two fundamental ideas: 1) that specialist firms, whether here or overseas, can provide quality IT services at lower cost by leveraging economies of scale, and; 2) that offshore labor markets can multiply that price advantage through labor arbitrage using cheaper yet just as talented foreign labor to supplant more expensive domestic workers who are in extremely short supply. While this may be true in the odd case, for the most part I believe it is a lie.
This lie is hurting both American workers and the ability of American enterprise to compete in global markets.
My poster child for bad corporate behavior in this sector is again IBM, which is pushing more and more of its services work offshore with the idea that doing so will help IBM’s earnings without necessarily hurting IBM customers. The story being told to support this involves a supposed IT labor shortage in America coupled with the vaunted superiority of foreign IT talent, notably in Asia but also in Eastern Europe and South America.
India, having invented mathematics in the first place and now granting more computer science and computer engineering degrees each year than does the U.S. is the new quality center for IT, we’re told.
Only it isn’t, at least not the way Indian IT labor is used by IBM.
I already wrote a column about the experience of former IBM customers Hilton Hotels and ServiceMaster having no trouble finding plenty of IT talent living in the tech hotbed that is Memphis, TN, thus dispelling the domestic IT labor shortage theory.
This column is about the supposed advantages of technical talent from India.
There can be some structural advantages to using Indian labor. By being 12 hours out-of-sync, Indian techies can supposedly fix bugs while their U.S. customers sleep. But this advantage relies on Indian labor moving quickly, which it often does not given the language and cultural issues as well as added layers of management.
India, simply by being such a populous country and having so many technical graduates, does indeed have a wealth of technical talent. What’s not clear, though, is whether this talent is being applied to serve the IT needs of U.S. customers. My belief is that Indian talent is not being used to good effect, at least not at IBM.
I suspect IBM’s customers are being deceived or at least kept in the dark.
Here is my proof: right now 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.
To be fair, I did a search and determined that there actually are a few U.S. job openings at IBM that require only a high school diploma. These include IBM GBS Public Sector Consultant 2012 (Entry-Level), Technical Support Professional (Entry Level), and Software Performance Analyst (Entry Level). But I have yet to meet or even hear of a high school graduate working in one of these positions in the USA.
It’s ironic that in the USA, with its supposed IT labor shortage, we can hire college graduates for jobs that in India are filled by high schoolers.
Yet in India IBM admits that the majority of its GDC workers lack university degrees. They certainly don’t advertise this fact to customers, nor do they hide it I suppose because they don’t have to.
What customer is going to think to ask for Indian resumes? After all this is IBM, right?
Yeah, right.
The most astounding part of this story to me is that one of the challenges IBM says it is facing in this project is to “establish a cultural change program to drive increased acceptance of staffing with graduates.”
So IBM’s Indian Global Delivery Centers are anti-education?
For more information I suggest you ask the IBMer leading this project, Joanne Collins-Smee, General Manager, Globally Integrated Delivery Capabilities, Global Business Services at IBM.
First!
I worked for a large telecomms OEM which outsourced a large part of software development and support to India with very mixed results.
One serious problem was with staff churn – we’d have a resource assigned to a project or handling a TR and suddenly we’d stop getting updates or any outputs. When we chased it we’d find the guy had moved on and a newbie was now assigned – and we’d lose weeks while he got up to speed.
Note this wasn’t people leaving but getting “promoted” to other projects or customers.
They’re bringing in school kids or whatever, training them up on simpler projects/support roles and then redeploying to other projects.
What customer is asking IBM for resumes? Is IBM mandating anything other than FTE’s assigned to it’s projects?
The dynamics of this tyoe of outsourcing are very complex and still not well understood.
Gareth, you highlight the key element to any and all outsourcing success – continuing to manage the process that is outsourced even after it is outsourced.
It doesn’t matter WHAT you outsource.
IT services? Check.
Semiconductor assembly and test? Check.
Telephone support? Check.
Back office accounting? Check.
Corporate travel? Check.
All of these can be outsourced successfully if the corporate executive sponsor, the business porcess owner, and the subject matter experts at the originating company continue to monitor and hold the outsourcer accountable for meeting the objectives and using the correct behaviors.
However, if the management of the originating company just throws the process over the wall, they relinquish the ability to know, understand, communicate and control the process.
If CIOs are throwing their IT processes over the wall to IBM, then they should probably not be astonished when it turns out that their internal and external customers are supported by high school grads, or people who have only just been assigned to this project and will be removed from it as soon as they learn anything useful, or whomever HR at the outsourcer decides to sit in that seat today.
Outsourcing requires just as much supervision and accountability as insourcing. It isn’t a magical portal to corporate version of the world of Narnia.
To generalize a bit, we could say a little micromanaging doesn’t hurt anything except the egos of of people who are more concerned about how they look than the job at hand.
Absolutely… offshoring can actually work if there is diligent and continuous supervision of the service provider. And it also depends on the kind of work being done. In the case of software projects with U.S.-based clients / requirements and offshore developers (which is pretty much the definition of offshoring), you need a highly competent onshore coordinator. It’s a dirty, backbreaking dual-shift job, but someone has to do it. Without a good coordinator, you might as well not bother. Even with documents and emails as a baseline of communication, there are always questions and the need for live discussion between the two theaters.
And you need to spring for QUALITY offshore talent. You don’t have to be on many late-night calls to realize that if communications aren’t crisp and effective, and the people on the remote end of the call aren’t capable, the work won’t get done right. You’ll wind up handholding the offshore team through every minute detail of the work in which case you might as well do it yourself and save the late nights. And the better quality talent is substantially more expensive which cuts into the cost savings.
Of course, this all assumes you actually plan to successfully deliver a quality end-product. If you don’t care about that, then offshoring is simply a game, as Bob says, where the company declares victory based on the APPEARANCE of saving money.
Insanely great quip, Ryan! I’ve shortened it to “Outsourcing requires just as much supervision and accountability as insourcing. It isn’t a magical portal to corporate Narnia,” & it’s going up on the wall!
IBM Global services did similar stuff outsourcing in NJ in the 90’s.
Bring in the superstar sysadmins and such to win the contract.
Migrate and document the systems and ship the jobs to Boulder, Colorado.
Send the ace types to other sites to win over customers and slot in recent grads or operators to continue the maintenance. When it fails the site ends up having to email the former superstar to get him to explain to the rookie how to restore a backup tape.
Been there — done that. Left after a couple of months of frustration as the local IBM guy on one of these outsource sites. (All the locals from the customer side all went out and immediately got the resumes out and went out the door.)
Institutional memory gone. Docs non-existant.
I did a consulting contract at Caterpillar’s Engine division in 1989 as an employee of McDonnell Douglas Systems Integration division. We beat out Andersen Consulting (today’s Accenture).
The lady I worked with said: “Andersen brings in a high profile partner to negotiate the contract. Once the ink is dry, he flies off to nail down another contract, and a school bus pulls up and unloads a bunch of inexperienced people.
“They then fight for the next 6 to 9 months to decide who will be a chief and who will be the Indians. Then they have 3 month to finish the project so they fly in more bodies and put in ridiculous hours, manipulate the project completion date to be moved back a couple of times, and eventually end up with a junk application. Their real ‘core competency’ is coming up with an excuse for a project’s failure that ‘could not be helped or avoided, and is neither Andersen’s or Caterpillar’s fault’ – which when you think of it, is a pretty good trick, but ultimately is a waste of time and money – which is why we went with you on this project.”
BTW – the project I worked on was done on time, was quite large, designed for easy maintenance, went in and worked perfectly from the very start (so no need for much maintenance). We delivered value with no drama. McDonnell Douglas soon left the consulting business, while Andersen, later Accenture, went on and on. Later, I went to work with Andersen hoping to repeat my old performance, and was shocked, almost immediately by what I saw there and how true this lady’s statement proved to be. I left as soon as I could and with my tail between my legs as I didn’t fit in there too well and never really understood their culture.
When IBM India says 50% of their GDC workforce will be university graduates , what they mean is that they will be fresh engineering graduates not experienced ,highly-paid indians ,so please read thru the lines properly, its not as if IBM has decided to favour India and the new super powers of the world , the reality is software is an over-hyped business , americans had been having too much fun(read salary) with too little work , think how america’s greatest companies are being run by software written by fresh-grads bcoz software development is not too difficult , mark zuckerberg couldnt have written facebook if software was the art of the elite and the rich , its a world flattener.
IBM India is now applying same work-force restructuring principles in India as they have been doing in the US , wats their advantage , its simple,
a fresh engineering graduate can be hired for upto 10 times cheaper than a seasoned pro(i am talking abt a 10 yrs experienced programmer in india vs a fresh engineering grad in india ) , so if u hav to build a software with a team of 10 they have 6 fresh grads , and 4 experienced guys , the fresh grads are far more flexible , they learn any new tech that the company mandates , dont complain of ultra -narrow work deadlines and relocate to the place of IBM’s choice , unlike an experienced guy who has a million preferences , IBM sells big dreams to these fresh grads , its a super kick start for a fresher from india , win-win for evrybody … this site is waste of time, move on u dumb americans , start working , ur republican masters have screwed ur country forever its over now. The party of the american dream has come to an end , stop cribbing and start adding real value to ur employer if u want to surviive , othrwise chances are u will be wiped out soon …
and for all the highly paid so called experienced software pros who lost their jobs bcoz of outsourcing , get multiskilled , jus learning skill X and expecting to be paid 100 thousand dollars evry yr for the same work is a joke for the next 100 yrs …. dont u see tht the world around u has changed , hw do u expect IBM to pay u without contributing …. facebook happened in 6 yrs and will be a fad very soon , dont be lazy …. as one f the greatest americans ever said …. Stay Hungry Stay Foolish
Whoa, someone needs his nappy changed… This poster seemingly either is barely out of school or still in and have no real work or life experience. I’d give it a year or two of work and see if the viewpoint is still the same.
You have to wonder if the high school graduates that they use are the ones that could NOT get accepted into Indian universities.
If that is true, then you are getting some pretty low quality FTE’s even by Indian standards.
More likely the ones that could not afford to go to college.
The percentage of high-schoolers who go to college in India is extremely high. The main reasons why students choose to skip it are when they just want to join the family business or need to start work to support their families.
As to not being able to afford college … Indian colleges can be broadly divided into government-aided and non-aided institutions, with the majority being government aided. I graduated from a government-aided college with a degree in Computer Science … my annual college fees were under US$ 200 per year including everything except textbooks.
“The percentage of high-schoolers who go to college in India is extremely high. The main reasons why students choose to skip it are when they just want to join the family business or need to start work to support their families.”
I think I get it, when put together with Bob’s comment about the IBM Global Delivery Centers being anti-education. Because they pay so poorly, they attract people who desperately need to earn a bit of money and earn it now. Anyone who is better off will go to college and do a Computer Science degree as they know it will be worth it and they can earn a lot more in the end. So, my hunch is that the type of people who work in the GDC are (relatively) poorly educated and have a resentful attitude towards the idea of going to college – “look at us, we’re here earning money in the real world right now” – but at the same time a bit of a chip on their shoulder about not having the opportunity to.
For their part the college graduates probably wouldn’t feel comfortable working alongside people with that kind of attitude, and in any case they can probably get better-paying jobs somewhere else. Hence the GDCs remain staffed by relatively poorly educated people with a resentful attitude towards college, and a pervasive anti-education sentiment develops.
No doubt there are bright people among those desperate to earn money, who would be capable of completing a CS degree given the chance – but they probably are the ones who move on to better-paying jobs as soon as they build up some skills.
The solution: pay reasonable salaries for the standard of work you expect to be done. But that negates the supposed benefit of outsourcing, of course.
I am not supporting outright outsourcing but I have to point out the thing that you said, as follows –
“The percentage of high-schoolers who go to college in India is extremely high.”
is a lie !
India is a country with more than 1 billion people. It has millions of students graduating from high school every-single-year
The total number of placement of Indian university?
Are you sure there are millions and millions of open slots available in the Indian universities?
It is one thing discussing the merit of outsourcing American jobs to Indian high school kids
It is another thing LYING about the “extremely high enrolment of Indian high school kids into Indian universities”
I should have been clearer … I was talking about students in the cities and not the country as a whole.
My you certainly have got a lot of resentment towards Indians ! Let me guess…paid by the hour in Beijing to post crap online ?
@penanging: Are you penang or are you penanging addressing your comment to penang, or perhaps to V Thomas???
Hee, hee, sure glad I’m not Ms. Collins-Smee.
Yes it’s all about cutting costs. I doubt there’s a cut of price to clients.
Perhaps if this involved a transition where people in India were actually trained, then they could replace high cost US labor with low cost Indian labor in a phased manner to prevent customer disruptions.
I doubt that’s happening.
That only works if training can happen faster than turnover.
I don’t know what percentage of Indian outsourcers (let alone IBM India in particular) is at that point, but the outsourcing-to-a-low-wage-country arrangement works heavily against it. The people who can learn quickly (or are most comfortable in English) are more important to winning the next contract than to keeping an existing contract that was already awarded for cheap body count.
Your column begs the question, how much, if any, diligence are US CIO’s doing when they take on IBM? I’ll bet, since CIO’s are under continuous pressure to reduce costs, that many CIO’s will flock willingly into IBM’s open arms. Or, if not IBM, to other IT service companies following IBM’s lead.
But what about quality IT support? Won’t the CIO get slammed for providing crappy service? No, just like at my last company, quality IT service gets saved for the C-suite and certain influential employees. As far as the leadership is concerned, everything in IT land is great, and the CEO is thrilled with all the “productivity gains” his golden-haired CIO is making. It helps that a lot of CEO’s have a pretty limited understanding of the true role of IT in their companies. Too bad for average employees trying to stay productive if they have computer problems.
In the end, I think IBM’s leadership is not stupid. They’ll outsource like crazy, as Bob described. Service quality will suffer, no question. But their strategy will work (regrettably) because there are plenty of CIO’s who will buy based on price, not quality. The real price will mainly be paid by jettisoned US IT guys and, to a lesser extent, employees needing good IT support to get their jobs done.
CIOs focus on the cost savings to the bottom line. Thier bonuses depend on it.
Do you suppose even ONE person from these U.S. firms is sent to India to meet the managers, supervisors, lead programmers, analysts? Walk the call center and see the support reps? Working conditions? Training? Nope. Me, I took a drug screen, my current employer ran my credit reports and a national agency check. Typical Indian contractor? Unlikely.
As someone in a global company, I can assure you “at least one” person is sent over to check such things.
Although this might have changed since I retired IBM used to send potential customers to the Boulder site for “The Tour”. The customer sees the shiny data center with it’s big board and a bunch of US workers running around assuming this is what they will be getting. Nothing is ever mentioned that the system operators are in Brazil and server application support is in India.
Sure; it is often part of due diligence. It is also often done after the decision is already made, so that the real purpose is (at best) to mitigate the risks that were accepted blindly.
Search on India Diploma Mills. Yesterday I was a Tandoori delivery person, today I are an IBM’r with a degree.
How do you know “college graduate” doesn’t mean a person who got a college diploma 10 minutes ago?
It could be read that IBM is trying to staff their centers with fresh and cheap recent college grads and not people who’ve been to work elsewhere.
Second decade of the “21st century”, is what I think you mean.
I see that this was fixed on the online version. Now if there was only someway to fix the email version to say 21st century as well…
I know this same thing to be true of India’s strategy for software development.
When I worked for Qualcomm, a large chunk of work was sent to India. We were being invoiced for 40 “senior software developers” and 8 “architects”.
Turns out that out of the 48, we’d actually been given 1 architect and 3 senior engineers; the rest were new grads, well excuse me, some of them had up to 2 years of experience. We didn’t even dig into the college degrees (or lack thereof).
Simply appalling. The sad thing is that our expectations were so low to begin with, we didn’t really even notice the lack of quality or productivity, they simply performed (or didn’t perform) as expected.
Oh by the way, you can also contact collins-smee via LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joanne-collins-smee/0/8b4/1a3
I contacted someone who used to work at IBM; he didn’t know her, but he contacted a friend who “probably did work with her”; sure enough, guy #2 did, and one of the first things he said to my friend (not knowing the reason for the contact) was “Oh God, what did she fuck up now?”
Don’t know the woman, actually as a chick one would think I should be defending her, but incompetence and stupidity should never be sheltered.
Why should anybody even consider that she SHOULD be sheltered because she’s a woman? That’s not too much of a step from saying any criticism should be disallowed because you’re so obviously sexist you shouldn’t be given a point of view, you bastard.
I appreciate this is a whole other subject but it tires me as much as the pavlovian yelps of “glass ceiling” when a woman doesn’t get a top job. Perhaps she didn’t because she wasn’t as good as the other candidate.
Just saying.
This is mainly a cultural and financial issue. Most people who work in customer support roles in India are paid a pittance(Rs.15,000 – 20,000 or around 300-350 USD per month). The companies reason that customer support is mostly a mechanical and repetitive job and can be handled by anyone with a month’s training. Why would a university graduate, with 4 years of specialized experience put up with that kind of pay?
Also, if you think that Indian graduates are happy with the level of service that their companies provide, think again. Most fresh graduates also realize the sheer lack of quality in the services, but are helpless. And since there is absolutely no need for the employers to even think about employee satisfaction, the vicious circle goes on forever.
Low quality is a feature, not a bug.
Say that you and your team built a highly functional, flexible, and efficient IT organization. Change happens, but you’ve got process and skill and you’ve found a sustainable run-rate.
Now begin to squeeze that lemon for cost-reductions. When all the juice is gone, where do you go for the next 15%? The answer is to outsource.
Option A) another highly functional, flexible, and efficient IT organization which costs roughly the same or more as your own organization.
Option B) a dysfunctional bunch of yahoos scattered all over the world who can barely manage to answer the RFP, but are really cheap.
Option A does not meet the cost-reduction level required. Option B does, and with a healthy dose of schadenfreude besides.
I say let them eat cake! Make sure there is full transparency, don’t let them hide anything, make sure this continues to be reported on and let the market decide. If IBM leadership thinks this is good business let them follow that strategy straight into irrelevancy & obscurity.
If the employees of IBM are not soldiers of conscious and cannot say or do something then they will end up looking back on this one day and wonder why no did something about it while they still had a chance.
I now say Nuff said!
I’m not sure about your “not even XYZ graduate” point.
I think you’d generally find that most people in Western IT support roles aren’t college graduates either.
In Western society, nobody goes to college to become a support technician. Architects and Developers, sure, there’s Comp Sci. Support and Consulting tend to be more vocational, less formally ratified (maybe a Business degree for the consulting types).
Support and troubleshooting is not considered a top-tier IT job. Hence, IBM and others are trying to see just how down the pole they can slide it.
I really think you’re dead wrong on your comment that most western tech support is not college degreed. Most of our internal support teams at GEHC are degreed, experienced professionals. Some, very highly.
Now the offshore support? Who knows. The churn rate is horrible, something like 3 mos average stay. they are all jr. or level 1 analysts; the US support is lvl 2,3, or 4
Not true Cringely, my sense is that it could be a difference in terminologies used. In India, after high school, you do your graduation (4-yr engineering course, a 3-yr bachelor in science or economics or computer applications course etc) and then do a 1-3 year “post-graduation” course (3-yr masters in computer applications, 1 or 2-yr MBAs,1.5 yrs masters in technology or m.tech). What we call graduate students would be under-grad students in US and what we call post-grad students is grad students in the US. Thus, the folks working in IBM are not high schoolers, they’re people with a 3 or 4-yr degree AFTER their 12th grade. No one in India stands an iota of chance of getting an IT job anywhere in an Indian or multi-national with a 12th grade certificate. There are far too many engineers or other science degree folks (let alone humanities) aspiring for these.
While your interpretation is interesting I don’t think it reflects the reality of THIS particular situation. I’ve read the IBM docs on this (dated June 27th) and it is pretty clear they are referring to people who don’t have the degrees or certificates you describe.
IBM has two things going on here: 1) they are having trouble providing quality support to customers, and; 2) they, too, are under pressure to make more money from less resource. This particular project appears to be intended to address both issues. They want to raise the quality of support by getting more graduates (that’s good) and once they have more graduates they want to raise prices to customers to reflect that higher level of professionalism.
Whatever terms are used in India, this project is being run from New York and the terms that matter are American terms and American interpretations of those terms. We ARE talking about high school graduates.
This is a very misleading write-up. You have conveniently overlooked the facts, twisted them to your needs and present a very very misleading story here. You yourself write this – “Whatever terms are used in India, this project is being run from New York and the terms that matter are American terms and American interpretations of those terms.”
Don’t you have sense to see things have been misinterpreted? What you call HIGH SCHOOL in US is not the same in India. As Udayan points out, a human being without an engineering or college degree cannot enter an IT company in India. Again you can question their quality, but to use a US nomenclature to address them wrongly is plain stupid. Now, don’t hide behind the excuse saying you are just reporting what IBM is saying.
Bob is saying (or at least strongly suggesting) that the report he saw was written in the US for a US audience. As such, US terms would be used. If the report were very careful, there would be a footnote indicating that the Indian terms are different, but US terms would be used in the body.
There may well be parts of the company where 17 years of education are required — but apparently, the majority of the Indian employees are not in such a division.
Anybody who has even a little bit of knowledge about Indian Software industry would know that it would be almost impossible to find a job without a college degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology etc.
You can question the quality of that degree – you can question the number of years of experience.
But to say that “non-graduates” work in IBM is to show your ignorance about the topic.
I don’t say it, IBM SAYS IT. It’s their program and we are using their definitions.
Do you think I make this stuff up?
U-S-A! U-S-A!!
To my knowledge there are ZERO high school graduates in India. As per the Indian system, it is called High School upto 10th grade. Then the next 2 years are called Higher Secondary Course, but that is also at School level, not College level.
Graduation in India happens only at College level, and the Colleges are ALL affiliated to Universities; and it is these Universities that issue the degree certificates.
IBM employs ONLY College graduates; and the salary levels of College graduates ranges from $400 to $800 per month. My nephew graduated from a reputed Engineering college and joined Wipro for SAN storage support; and a year later joined in a similar role at IBM GSS, for a salary of about $800 per month.
Not just IBM, even local software companies do not recruit students after Higher Secondary School; all of them recruit only College graduates.
Please do some research before making assertive statements, which can be very misleading for a global audience.
So, you are not making it up, is it IBM making it up? While there are several hundreds of engineering graduates (B.E. degree) availabe for cheaper salary why woul IBM need to go to high schoolers? besides, it neither factory manufacturing job as in Foxconn, China.
By the way, India education hierarchy is:
Primary School: standards 1 to 5
Middle School: Standards 6 to 8
High School: standards 9, 10
Higher Secondary: Standards: 11, 12 OR Diploma in Polytechnic Colleges
Then ONLY we go to colleges.
In the USA someone who completes 12th grade gets a “diploma” also called a “high school diploma”. What do a “12th grade completers” get in India? (So far it sounds like all they get is the chance to drop out or go to some sort of college.)
One more thing, Is IBM the only company thats outsourcing to India? I am not supporting IBM, but I wonder why youare ALWAYS writing something negative about IBM ONLY? if IBM is the only company outsourcing, then it is certainly not going to affect US job opportunities very much. Lots of US companies are outsourcing IT jobs, so why dont you write about those companies also?
It seems that your attacks on IBM are rather personal!
I have reading your website since I watched the video: “Triumph Of the Nerds”, all 3 parts, loved it very much, has been a great inspiration for me. Thanks for that!
After that series, I think you have done nothing great. Especially, your articles in these times (post-PC or PCplus, whatever you call it) looks outdated and out-of-sync with reality.
As an IBM employee, I am extremely happy that somebody is exposing the truth about IBM.
No, Cringely is not making stuff up or being overly negative about IBM. The reality is, the majority of IBM employees hate IBM. The working environment is extremely toxic and everybody knows that only executives are winning. We’re having difficulties getting good interns these days because even THEY know that IBM is a company that is more for the MBA than the computer science grad.
Speaking as someone who completed college in the 60s, when IBM was at it’s most famous monopoly peak, I still (as an engineer) could not imagine working for a company that decided to call itself International BUSINESS Machines, as in master of BUSINESS administration. Business is all about making money, not technology, computers, or any other product. Of course business is essential, like money itself, it’s just not something I could imaging calling my life’s work.
No, IBM isn’t the only outsourcer.
But they are the biggest survivor. How many other companies of remotely that scale are well-known as outsourcers, and not well known as just the sales organization for an Indian backend? Maybe the remains of EDS? Compuware or Computer Associates or Perot Systems or Accenture? Even if they were equally open (or he had equal numbers of sources willing to leak), they just don’t have the size or mindshare to matter as much.
Mr. Cringely, I read your posting with interest. One comment though. The statement you’ve made — “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” — probably means a little different internally within IBM.
IBM in India uses a term called ‘ELTP’, which stands for ‘entry level trainee programmer’. These folks are fresh graduates, typically with a 4-year engineering degree – may or may not be with an IT specialization — and with zero industry experience. These newly hired resources then go through an intensive 2 or 3 month training on popular programming languages before being unleashed on customers at sub-$20/hr rates.
I think your statement means that they’ll change the mix of resources so that as much as 50% of the folks will be ELTPs, rather than experienced staff. Of course, this will dilute the average number of years of experience. But that is required for IBM (in fact, for any large offshore pure play provider) to keep the overall rates low. To compensate for escalating salary costs (15%+ annually), that’s the most important option the providers have. After all, billing rates in the US increase only by 2-3% annually.
OK. Let me cut this myth that anyone with no college degree can get a job. I have a nephew who is in 2nd year college and working at these IT centers in Gurgoan. So no it is NOT necessary to have a degree before you get such a job.
And this nonsense that High school degree somehow means 12 + 4years of college is again BS. It sound nice but not true. India has same system as US. You go to school till 12th grade. Then either 4 years of Engineering Degree (college) or the British system of 3 years of B.A , BCOM (bachelors of commerce), etc
Then 2 years of MA (Masters) etc and phd.
If I have a college degree in any relation to IT do you really think I will take a support job 🙂
I imagine you’d take a “support” job if it paid enough. [Maybe that’s what you meant by ” 🙂 “.] As a computer services specialist the entire IBM company is “support” for businesses.
I guess my question is, do you really expect a person performing tech support at IBM NEEDS a college education? Why? I don’t care if the person has that, it certainly has little to do with their savvy in managing PC and communication and routing software problems to engineers.
But I get the overall point about the imbalance in the kind of labor IBM and such are employing elsewhere.
But, again, I think we all expect this. That’s the whole point of outsourcing and only a fool doesn’t realize that in the help desk and similar realms the whole point is finding the cheapest possible labor to perform a menial task.
That said, my big disappointment is the lack of training these people get (and no college can do this properly, either, for it is truly dependent more on the type of support being given, the particulars of software in question (universities, unless they are technical institutes, by design don’t go deeply into practice), and other very specific sets of knowledges and skills. And the person has to be fairly flexible and broad in approach (in my experience college or military will help a person here but is so far from a guarantee I don’t see it as essential). Regardless of whether it’s India or the US, businesses treat first level desk support with such disregard that it is disgraceful.
Companies are paying IBM good money for substandard service.
It is about costs, pure and simple. Nothing more or less, specifically salary and health care benefits. Everything else is secondary. Indian workers come FAR cheaper than their American counterparts and many do not carry the burden of health care benefits. As the cost of living in India is, eh, rather different than in this country, the economies make outsourcing so obviously GOOD that management across America cannot resist it. OH, well, GM just did and is bringing IT back inside and canning, among others, IBM. Good for them.
Cheaper yes but QUALITY service is never NEVER EVER discussed, by the shareholder boards or the true believers. And yet IBM has lost Hilton, Disney, AstraZeneca, Amgen, Texas, Indiana and others because of poor service delivery. Read that bad quality work. AS IF THIS IS GOOD THING FOR IBM???
The loss of the Texas Data Center project is particularly galling. I was with a business partner during the Akers years and if ANYTHING IBM IS A DATA CENTER company. Apple does not do data centers. AND IBM could not build and manage one for Texas. That should be a wake-up call to the true believers.
Thos J. Watson Jr., and Sr., would be turning over in their graves.
I can hazard several potential reasons why the quality sucks:
1. IBM employees in GBS are rated based on billable hours. Never mind performance or quality of work. I once received nothing but glowing reviews from my clients but my billable was lower than the average (despite being over 85%) so I received the second lowest rating possible with no salary raise. It is to NOBODY’s advantage to do the work well and quickly. Management only cares about 1 thing: Billable hours. Remember that.
2. IBM wants to sell you something new within 2 years anyways. If you think about the rapid cycle of IT evolution, what is new today will be old in about 1 year. Who cares about the quality of the application that they are building? As long as it gets done right?
3. IBM bills A LOT for each of their consultants. I can assure you that IBM’s profit on me per hour is HUGE. If you sign a contract for $100K, it doesn’t buy you as many developer hours as you would think. (And they aren’t going to lower that per person price mentioned in #2). This is why Indian developers are so great.
4. If there are good Indian workers, IBM manages to hire the worst ones. I once had to send an email explaining a technical component… did so in 1 sentence. My Canadian colleagues understood me immediately but the Indians were lost. So I sent another paragraph elaborating (being extremely articulate). Still didn’t understand. I ended up spending a full hour composing an email with pictures. It was a how-to manual at this point. Another time, I worked with an Indian who supposedly had a Masters on the topic of databases. I ended up teaching HIM about databases (and I never took a database course in my life!). My Canadian born Indian colleague was so fed up with the quality of the Indians that he fired them and hired a Chinese Canadian contractor to do the work.
I don’t know if other people have experienced other issues…..
Does this not mean that an Indian high-school graduate is educated to the same standard as a US College graduate?
It’s a different way to look at it!
For “poster children” – HP should be topping your list, too: I can’t say they’re *definitely* worse than IBM, but they are certainly no better.
With more than 36 years experience in IT, I still do not have a degree. I have a LOT of hours applicable to a CS degree. I have a stack of technical certifications. I simply never got the degree. I can assure you that I am not “a high schooler” and propose that there are missing qualifiers in the basic premiss. Perhaps looking at the degree-less staff with less than X level of experience would reach the same conclusion desired by Bob? Massage the numbers a little to make them less offensive while reaching the same conclusion. The government does it all the time.
I get your point. I remember at Stanford back in the 1970s working in the computer center there with Lincoln Ong, who was I think 16 at the time. He got his job because he was good. And I think he’s still there, 35 years later! But we aren’t talking about you, -B, or Lincoln. We’re talking about entry level support people at IBM in India — people with generally less than a year of professional experience. You and Lincoln entered the work force in a different era. The current state of the economy here in the USA has employers able to require a college degree with impunity and so they do. I’m no saying having a degree makes these people any better than you but I AM saying it’s a rite of passage that hasn’t been needed by IBM in India.
Understood and thanks for clearly understanding.
In a nutshell, this is one reason I’m considering retiring (and taking that 36 years of experience out the door). I love the work. I enjoy and respect my colleges, but the mindset that places degrees in the position they current are also seems to bring with it a denigration of those who entered the work force at the birth of the field of study (before many universities had established C.S. departments).
It’s nearly a daily event where upper management (of which I used to be one before choosing my family over a relocation to Washington, D.C.) paints us with the same broad brush of entry level new hires. This lack of respect and condescension seemed to escalate when IT got moved under Finance about 5 years ago. Once the CIO had to answer to those who don’t understand the roll of IT and to whom the CIO appears unable to communicate that roll, all decisions seemed focused on just the lowest cost of operation. In fact, it’s nearly an exact duplicate of everything you’ve written about IBM.
I’ve shared your articles with a friend who’s a current IBMer and his frustrations are similar to mine while he confirms your observations about the company. Clearly not everyone in IBM has sipped the Cool Aid but those who haven’t seem powerless to effect change.
GDCs or GDFs or whatever this IBM calls them should have real 24 hour around the clock coverage for its global customers. But it really doesn’t. I have heard from reliable sources that US IBM GDC resources are on 24×7 on-call dispatched by IBM China to fix serious problems when Indian IBM resources are available to fix these same serious problems. Also, many of the IBM USA support doesn’t get emergency callout, shift premiums, or OT pay for the 24×7 support. If IBM India has great IT talent then why aren’t they on-call? Or why is there a need for on-call support in the first place with a Global ‘smarter planet’ IBM?
I want to be careful here. I have worked with very good IT people from India. There are good and smart people everywhere. The issue is it takes years of training and experience to do the job well. There is only so much you can learn from a class. You have to do things and test stuff first hand to really understand the subject.
This problem is not the fault of the people in India working for IBM. Many of them simply have not had the opportunity or time to master the job. IBM hires them and rushes them through some basic classwork; then throws them into the job.
No one anywhere can do well under these circumstances.
I have personally worked with these people. They know they’ve been put in a bad situation. They know they are over their head technically. They’re not dumb. IBM had dumped on them just like everyone else. IT Services is BIG business in India. In time these folks will learn more and build up their experience, then find a better job. The attrition rate for IBM India is large. IBM is constantly losing their best people.
Go to: https://www.ibm.com/contact/employees/us/?lnk=fai-edir
There you can look up Ms. Collins-Smee
Joanne Collins-Smee
Email: jcsmee@us.ibm.com
Telephone: 1-914-766-2235
Location: USA
“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.”
Does it matter?
I was an ‘IBM Staffer’, not in the USA, for 27 years, for the last 16 years I was the country level support for my product area.
Guess what? My formal education ended at the age of 15 and I never even went to anything resembling a ‘High School’.
Intelligence cannot be taught. You either have it or you don’t.
Good for you, Ian. I know lots of stories like yours, the best of which is probably my friend Brian Utley who left school at 15 in the UK, moved to America, got a job working for IBM as a technician fixing punch card machines and retired 40 years later as a top executive running whole IBM divisions. Brian, who never did get a degree, was Bill Lowe’s boss when the IBM PC came to be.
But that’s not what we are talking about here. The people we are discussing are entry-level support and have generally been with IBM (and been in IT in general) less than a year. Yes, a lot of this work is easily learned but a lot of it, too, is no.t Think about the difference between your first IT job (or mine) and these people. I started as a COMPUTER OPERATOR. Remember those? I mainly mounted tapes, which was significantly less difficult than my previous job working as a busboy. So I get your point. But these people in India aren’t mounting tapes — they are supporting users in the USA. That also means they aren’t doing the other IT scutwork of pulling cables or installing monitors that our high schoolers tend to perform.
Doing the kind of support work in the USA required of these Indian IBMers, which is to say responding on the phone or network to problems and trying to find or implement solutions, generally gets handled in IBM Dubuque by a girl or guy with a college degree. The degree doesn’t help them do the job, it helped them GET the job.
IBM obviously finds the idea of having graduates important, given their hiring aims.
I was involved in setting up an Indian service center in Mumbai last year. We staffed about 20 people initially, intending to expand to around 40 people, doing IT and Finance. We contracted with a couple of local firms for the recruiting, and got hundreds of resumes.
And a bunch of those resumes – supposedly vetted by the recruiters – were duplicates. Names and addresses changes, but otherwise perfect copies. In one case the photocopy was identical down to the dust marks.
We phone-screened applicants, and then had them come in for face-to-face interviews. In two cases the person showing up for the interview was not the person phone-screened – completely different voice/accent.
The recruiters even admitted that the problem goes worse. If you hire someone, the person that actually shows up may yet be a different person from the face-to-face, different from the phone-screen.
In short – the resumes are almost worthless. Not completely, but if a bunch are untrustworthy, how do you tell the real ones from the fakes/padded/copies ?
What a novel idea for a business?
Oh wait!
http://www.thereferencestore.com
Funny, the IBM series here is all about IBM doing the same thing to its customers.
For what it is worth, I use Novell technical support for SuSE Linux Enterprise, Open Enterprise Server, eDirectory, and ZENworks.
About 20% of the time (mostly for directory services topics) I end up with a support person who’s accent is Indian Sub-content. A few have told me what time it was where they were, and it has been early morning hours.
I have been delighted at the quality of the support. I have only had one such call with which I was not satisfied. These support engineers: 1) listen carefully, 2) ask appropriate questions, 3) slip in a few pleasantries along the way to develop my confidence, 4) take pains to assure that I understand the solution to my problem – not just fix it for me and hang up.
I am multilingual (En, Es, King’s En) so I don’t have any trouble with the accents.
All of which is to say, I think you get what you pay for. I think Novell makes certain that their support staff off continent are well trained and culturally astute. If they can do this and make the support valuable to me, then IBM should be able to do this too. BTW, we pay a very modest fee for support. I am astonished at the value we receive for our investment.
I suspect IBM might be recruiting people having diplomas as opposed to university degrees. No doubt that there are thousands of institutions doling out “IT diplomas” to every Tom, Dick and Harry here in India (It’s a multi billion ruppee business with interests of several politically connected families involved); having said that, from among these thousands there are some highly reputable organizations as well, several of the top engineering colleges also have a diploma course almost mirroring the university level course. I am quite certain that HR of IBM India would have good sense to know one type of institution from another.
This post of yours, to think of it, is a classic example of cultural misunderstandings between the two countries.
Do you want a sobering thought?
Forget about who staffs your help desk. These high school graduates are the administrators of your servers, data, and applications. They probably have access to your customer records and business information.
IBM is under paying them and thinks less of them than they do of the USA workforce. To IBM these people are expendable and easily replaced.
These are the people who are supposed to be keeping your information safe.
Think about that!
And to set up the organizational changes that led to this, Ms Collins-Smee thinks little of IBM’s customers and their information too.
I work for one of the largest Indian IT companies, and the quality of the off shore resources is abysmal in general. There are a few competent employees, don’t get me wrong, but the bar here in the states is much higher than that in India. The off shore guys are loaded with Microsoft certs, yet often lack basic skills without being provided a step-by-step checklist. I would question the quality of their colleges or at least the worth of their degrees.
You can’t just tell them what needs to be done and assume they will go and do it. The mindset is completely different, often lackadaisical. In the middle of conference calls or even actual in-process activities, I have had off shore guys leave to go to lunch or even just leave at the end of their shift! They often have to rely on public transportation, so they have to leave before the last bus. One network engineer recently made a major error that brought a customer network to a virtual halt for more than half a day, and was trying to leave for the day before we could reverse the change. They seem to have no concept of what it means to focus on completing the task at hand.
We’ve had clients in the U.S. Australia and Europe on the brink of leaving, having dealt only with the off shore group, that the US on shore resources were able to salvage and gain as a customer.
I’ve seen the revolving door, too. The off shore guys are generally good for about 4-6 months, then they’re gone, when we may be on a project for 2 years.
The major problem is that they have such a huge population to draw on, they’re all interchangeable. They throw bodies at a problem and eventually it will get solved. They have people RTFM on the job to figure out a system.
The bottom line is that they really could be the juggernaut if they could do more than cram for certification tests or college exams. The Chinese also, except their lack of communication skills.
I also ‘only have’ a high school education, albeit with 160 hours of college coursework under my belt. I’m actually 10 hours and 3 classes away from my Associates in Business, after which I hope to continue on and finally complete my BS-CIS. I have certs also, from the Windows NT days and Novell 3.1. No company, including the one I work for currently, has ever placed much emphasis on certs. I haven’t pursued them out of lack of funds, but I have bought the books and studied what i needed in order to use the skills in the field, and I have 20 years of OJT. The off shore resources could probably be at the same level in 20 years, but I doubt it. Employers place their Christmas list on their job postings, but experience almost always wins out.
We have a real shortage of IT talent here in the US. Just look at Dice.com. Unfortunately, nobody wants to train anybody, least of all their current employees. There is no investment in current talent to maintain or enhance that talent. Instead, companies rush to procure new talent or contract for it. Second, there is no mechanism to create that needed talent, despite all the hoopla about focusing on STEM. instead of giving Pell grants and subsidized student loans to literature and psychology majors, they should be making them pay full boat and subsidizing the STEM students. They should also have some sort of skills enhancement subsidy to retrain current IT workers to do the jobs that are open, unlike the 1990’s program to retrain all the aerospace workers as network admins.
“albeit with 160 hours of college coursework under my belt. I’m actually 10 hours and 3 classes away from my Associates in Business, after which I hope to continue on and finally complete my BS-CIS.”
Sounds like me. TONS of hours but that included 3 degree changes before universities started establishing CS Departments. I have well over the total needed for my undergrad CS degree. I’m simply missing 2 core courses. At 57 and looking at the RIO it simply doesn’t mean anything to my career to get them. If I do walk (as mentioned to Bob), then that free time might be the motivator to finish just for personal reasons.
Building, integrating, and running systems and networks is something that takes years to master. I’ve been doing this for 15 years – and I’m learning something new every day. I deal with the ineptitude of H1B and offshore employees and vendors on a daily basis. I believe also that offshoring can work – if the correct integration of the employees into the operations are accomplished – and more importantly, as long as money is not the deciding factor.
I have the feeling that when all is said and done, the people who championed outsourcing will ‘win’ on a personal level for saving their company money on the books. I also believe they will be vilified by their coworkers for all the hidden costs those workers will have to absorb due to their decisions.
The folks in India are hard-working people and certainly they have tremendous opportunities ahead of them with the generosity IBM is providing them. So…
India –> +1
Sharedholders –> +1
US employees –> -1
Customers –> -1
Anyway, I digress, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard others in IBM saying “management” permits them to fill an open position as long as the resource comes from India. This is for PM and Executive-level positions alike. Myself, personally I applied twice for Exec-level positions only to be told by the IBM’er requesting the position that they had to withdraw the listing because management instructed them to fill it from another country (India).
Spot-on Bob.
As a Dubuquer, I have to work with India staff a lot. We used to have two good contacts there, but now we have none. I thought Dubuque was a turnover factory, India is worse. I think they’ve the same ‘retention’ philosophy only multiplied several times.
IBM doesn’t think IBM experience is worth anything. They’ll forget cost of living adjustments and consider a 1% raise a fair compensation for a 1 PBC rating. They noticed that there was high turnover and raise the salary bracket of incoming people, but didn’t adjust current worker pay.
So their logic: You have someone with 2 years experience at IBM leaving because say they were at 28k and they wanted 32k because of increase in efficiency of projects xyz ( or maybe the fact that rent increased a stupid amount in Dubuque ). Management won’t grant it, person leaves. HR sees the reason as pay, figures it’s a good idea to get someone with 2 years experience at a widget co and pay them 40k.
Repeat process for anybody who learns this is happening. Any that stay IBM thinks is a bonus.
IBM isn’t the only one that does this, though I think IBM is the only one that takes fresh grads and non IT certified folks and trains them, so there’s that.
I worked for one of the outsourcing companies that did Compaq’s 1st and 2nd level help desk back in the 90s. It paid about $13-16/hr. There was no college diploma requirement. I had buddies working across town working directly for a smaller national computer and peripheral maker, same thing.
That being said it was night and day compared to support now days. Back then you didn’t have a troubleshooting diagram for everything. You actually had to know your stuff and think on your feet. Now days it’s very frustrating if you have a problem that hasn’t been accounted for on the flow chart.
Be that as it may, I likely wouldn’t be too irked if it was first level for general office applications. However, for service and backend support I would expect a older and more experienced workers with college degrees.
[…] Are Indian High Schoolers Manning Your IBM Help Desk? 26Jul12 India, simply by being such a populous country and having so many technical graduates, does indeed have a wealth of technical talent. What’s not clear, though, is whether this talent is being applied to serve the IT needs of U.S. customers. My belief is that Indian talent is not being used to good effect, at least not at IBM.I suspect IBM’s customers are being deceived or at least kept in the dark.Here is my proof: right now 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.— I, Cringely » Blog Archive Are Indian high schoolers manning your IBM help desk? ~ I, Cringely – Cringely on technologyGiven my daily experiences, I can almost guarantee this is the case. Lets just say skills and experience are severely lacking, and Tagged with: support, IBM and link […]
woah! you have half a bunch of CEOs who are college dropouts. what about them ? people expect to have some REAL educated people to run the show, not some nutjobs who skip the college, cheat and steal others ideas and have a $100 billion IPO!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/rbs_natwest_what_went_wrong/
$20k per year to run a Bank’s batch program’s? – nearly killed the bank!
Anti-education? Nah. Anti-worthless education. Heck, most of a standard computer science curriculum isn’t of any value to these guys on the front lines. Like they need to understand compiler technology or P vs. NP.
Why waste time and money on silly academic questions?
I think we are starting to see a real shakeout of price verses quality. If a company can’t meet the required lowest cost results you reduce the input costs with labor being the biggest. What tends to happen is “like and like kind” swaps. They “sound” like they know what to do. Even though the flowchart doesn’t include that issue lets talk a good talk! Thus a bright “High School Grad” might have enough grasp to wing the flow chart if his language skills are good enough.
However, at the end of the day if the customer is not happy what’s the point as the money will dry up and they will go elsewhere, degree or no degree.
One thing that bothers me these days seems to be the fact that these jobs could be here if companies didn’t just take the easy way out. Costs and quality are important but as energy costs increase it is more effective to be able to identify with your customer even if it costs a bit more.
Don’t think that part of the reason why tech jobs go unfilled may be because it can be hard to do for real, but you also need to be paid enough for your efforts.
The program from which I graduated at my college (Electronic Engineering) is not even offered any more! Some have joked that basket making has replaced it.
I think outsourcing damages the economy by reducing our home population’s technical capabilities. This is similar to the manufacturing crisis but with worse long term issues.
When Steve Jobs outsourced production to China and had uneducated tween girls assemble Apple products, people praised him. Why is there a double standard when IBM does it?
Apparently Steve did it without sacrificing quality and his customers paid a pretty penny for the products. IBM is apparently sacrificing quality regardless of the price to the customer.
I work in process control. As part of a control system upgrade, we are converting a large number of computer programs. I estimated that I could convert all programs in about a year. The DCS vendor informed us that this is 5 man years work for their India work center.
Yeah. So, for 5 man-years worth of work, the vendor will promise to get 10 Indians on it and have it completed in 6 months. Those 10 Indians at $500 a month will cost only $30,000 over 6 months. Your executives get it done in half the time and – assuming your annual salary is over $60,000 – also cheaper compared to you. Welcome to Globalization, my friend. I am sure you will now protest: “B..But..But.. what about the quality?” – which brings us back to the crux of Cringley’s article – your executives don’t care. They hope to be somewhere else by the time it comes back and is looking to bite someone in the ass.
I am a victim of not just cutting my salary by 10%, also has all shift differential and bonus pay stripped because “we have to cut costs, and no one in the industry pays shift differentials or bonuses to any technical support personnel”. They have been posting very large profits now. US employees if we have an Email issue have to call “Peggy” in India and that is a real disaster if your issue does not fit their script. The biggest gripe I hear from customers is “I can’t understand anyone at our company HD (outsourced to India or Mexico), and thankfully you speak proper English/American and can understand what my issue is”.
Yes I know we are in a global economy and understand international business requirements. IMHO excessive Government regulations make US labor costs much higher and stifle potential job creation. I also see an issue with many young IT workers thinking they know everything and that the employers do not understand them. My biggest peeve with many younger workers is twofold, 1: think being at work on time and ready to work in not important, and 2: the company should pay them mega bucks in an entry level position.
“My biggest peeve with many younger workers is twofold, 1: think being at work on time and ready to work in not important, and 2: the company should pay them mega bucks in an entry level position.”
First of all, I’ve worked professionally for 10 years now so I don’t consider myself young. However, I do have an issue with the older generation who thinks that getting to work on time is some sign of a great worker. I had a guy on my team that got to work super early – 7:30am every single freaking day – and chose to sit right next to the manager (remote workers area). Manager was stupid enough to trust him even though he didn’t know a SINGLE FREAKING THING. He constantly asked me for help – and others on the team – while taking credit. Eventually, we got sick of him and refused to help him. Oddly, management still trusted his opinion even though he was wrong an awful lot – caused some major issues too. Here’s the thing us supposedly ‘younger’ people understand well – we know who is smart and that has nothing to do with showing up early. I’d rather work with a guy who knows what he’s doing and is answering my emails at random hours of the day (including sometimes at night) as opposed to the guy who shows up at 7:30am.
Secondly, as for pay, my entry level pay was average. I turned down another company to work at IBM. But then I kept on getting 1 – 2% raises per year while friends who took the offer from other companies would get 5K – 10K increases. I don’t expect a lot of money but when I’m told that I should be grateful for a 3% raise and I compare that to market, no, I don’t think that I’m being unreasonable. What younger people understand (and that eluded me early on) is that the best time to negotiate a high salary is when you are first hired. Switching companies is also another great way to increase your salary.
Heh, man gripes about having bennies stripped by his very profitable company and then blames government regs for labors’ problems. Hate to tell you, but your company probably wouldn’t give you bathroom breaks if it weren’t for those pesky regulations
[…] by pointing out how many smart college graduates are coming out of the universities in India. And then there’s this news from Robert X. Cringely claiming that IBM is looking for high school graduates to staff their help desks. Once again, the […]
Well, IBM Federal Services may have a problem using them. Several of the DoD projects I worked on required my company to provide my resume for the DoD project to approve me to work on the project itself.
So some do. But most don’t, which is the big problem.
My dear Mr.Cringely,
Excellent article, and eye catching title! You have out-done yourself this time. Congratulations!
But how factual you are?
Because, a little research would have made it very clear that this Graduate Hire program definitely exists and is about hiring fresh graduates. Of course then you would have lost a great and provocative title, which would have been sad 😉
With me still? *Fresh* graduates, with 4 to 6 years of college education, who are hired and trained extensively internally in the tools of the trade before being placed on customer projects. Who are the rest of the hires in IBM? Not high schoolers as you have presumed, but lateral hires having experience from other companies.
Now that you are clear on the basic premises of this article, you may still have many follow up questions, though they may not as interesting to the one above :-). I request you to ask someone in Joanne’s office instead of writing on those directly with your assumptions. Or not.
Cringely- Its semantics. In India we refer to new college hires as graduates. So the statement “50% of IBM India workforce will be graduates in 2013” will need to be read as 50% of IBM India employees will be new college hires and not lateral hires.
[…] I, Cringely: Are Indian high schoolers manning your IBM help desk? […]
I’m fairly anti-education myself, in the sense that I think most new graduates with a CS degree are fairly unqualified for practical work, and would have been better served by some sort of apprenticeship or 1-year technical training program. When I went to college, programming was done in Fortran on VAX systems. By the time I would have graduated (had I not dropped out) jobs like that were history.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Even the many IBM boosters here aren’t claiming that IBM is hunting the Indian countryside for 18-year-old hackers who already have the experience to make further schooling pointless. They’re taking whatever warm bodies can pass a test that shows they might be able to fake it long enough to make it. Some have been to college (whatever that might mean there) and some haven’t. Some are qualified to do the job and some aren’t. The evidence shows that they hire far too many that aren’t qualified, and IBM (and other outsourcing companies) are okay with that.
(And this isn’t a race or nationality thing, so don’t go there. There are plenty of unqualified American warm bodies they could hire on the cheap, and we’d have the same problem. They just don’t do that because warm bodies in other countries are even cheaper.)
The claim of the first few commenters, that CIOs have only themselves to blame if they don’t keep a constant watch over IBM’s shoulder, is ridiculous. If CIOs wanted to monitor the resumes of foreign workers, they’d call India themselves and cut out the middleman. They hire IBM and pay a premium because they trust IBM to hire quality people, or at least competent ones. They trust IBM has good intentions — it may attempt to cut corners, sure, but it’ll also try to provide the proper level of service as advertised. Are they stupid to trust IBM that much, considering the evidence? Absolutely. But don’t act like IBM has no culpability here. That’s like saying if you come into my store and shoplift, it’s *my* fault because I looked away for a minute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
[…] Are Indian high schoolers manning the help desk (Too bad to be true) […]
I think talent don’t need degree. If you have talent than you can easily grab higher job even whatever you did. But suppose You did graduation and still you haven’t talent then you can just take your job but in every time of your life, you got rape. So nothing but talent.
Late to the comments (I just found this article today), but wanted to add my two cents.
“… offshore labor markets can multiply that price advantage through labor arbitrage using cheaper yet just as talented foreign labor to supplant more expensive domestic workers who are in extremely short supply.”
Just as talented? Perhaps, but most don’t have the skills and none of them have the experience. The group of offshore ‘engineers’ I work with now, with few exceptions, lack troubleshooting skills and some basic UNIX knowledge.
Domestic workers are in extremely short supply? When I was released from IBM Global Services (“resource action”, March 2010), the reason stated was ‘lack of work’ — yet my job did NOT go offshore, nor did it disappear. Apparently, IBM hired another former IBMer (who was on the same RA list as me) as a contractor to take over the job I left, probably at a much lower pay rate.
While I agree that there are a lack of University Degrees, many “seem” to have a base professional certification. Frankly, even here in the US there is more demand for Experienced & Certified people than Degrees, although desired. We also have to keep in mind the Caste System is alive and well in India, and that must be factored in.
What I found is a major difference is that overseas there is a high turnover rate as these “Green horn” certified professionals come in, are trained, gain experience and are either promoted or leave for another company altogether.
Here in the US I see now that High School Vocational Schools (i.e. BOCES) are now offering Certification Classes to qualified Juniors and Seniors. I was bothered by two things in this new program… First, this now gave a demeaning view of IT as blue collar for what was once a prized white collar profession. Second, these certified High School Grads can now enter the entry level work force to fill the glut of low paying IT jobs.
Now my question is whether or not these Certified High School Grads will actually go on to college? I made my son promise not to forego college for this certification before I allowed him to enroll in this program, even if it means he works through college. A degree is still important and shuld not be trivialized by Certifications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcQe9IpfAa8
This is a planted story. How else, can Mr Cringley know who to contact. It is also not factual. The writer must know that all processes in IBM are audited. Sounds like some anti-outsourcing lobby at work.
GBS employs graduates with 7 years of college education and not high-schoolers.
Verify before you write such things. Is this aimed at whipping up passions? It surely is irresponsible and childish. Hope you are not advisor to Obama 🙂
What a load of rubbish!
Great delivery. Outstanding arguments. Keep up the great spirit.
As long as the techs deliver polite and fast service, customers should not need to give a shit about whether they are high school graduates or not (after all, the average 14-year-old geek knows more about this stuff than your average MBA graduate, who is usually bone-idle and hates his customers).
Mr Cringley, I work in a GDC and let me tell you that university graduates means “freshers/people fresh out of college with no work experience”