Re: [Nolug] Linux - The New 'Hot' Job Skill

On Wed September 16 2009 9:47 am, Jeremy (mailing list box) wrote:
>
> I guess it depends on who you work with. I had to work an emergency
> call with the guys at Microsoft once and I was on the phone with a team
> in India. Those guys were VERY capable. It has to be related to
> what companies are willing to pay.
>
> Companies who go with outsourcing are looking to save a few dollars, but
> it seems that sometimes they are also willing to skimp on quality and
> ability too it seems. That's the problem with the lowest bidder
> mentality - "you get what you pay for."
>

I had a number of conversations with an exchange worker from India that I
babysat for 2 months. According to him, lots of outsource providers (I won't
call names) have lots of bad habits, such as shuffling workers around from
contract to contract. For example, if Company A contracts for 5 workers and
spends 3 months training these workers, one Monday morning they find that 3
of the workers have been replaced with green recruits. According to the
contract, there are still 5 workers sitting in cubicles, but only 2 of those
workers have any clue about what's going on at the job.

I gathered that most of the IT workers in India start out by attending some
kind of Vo-Tech school for half a year or so, then enter the workforce. That
by itself isn't strange, but for many of the workers, the first time they'd
ever sat down at a computer was during class. We take computers for granted,
but relatively few average Indians own them.

Another thing that struck me was the fact that the exchange worker would
constantly make comments about how little things we take for granted in
modern offices, such as an electric stapler machine, don't exist in his
country. India simply doesn't have the technical culture that we have here.
They rely on repeated manual labor instead of labor-saving machines.

One last comment... I showed the worker my webpage, and he was amazed that I
had one. He told me the week after that he'd spent hours talking to family
and friends back home telling them how he actually knew someone that had his
own webpage. I was amazed to learn that Indian IT guys don't make their
own.... it's not in their culture to do so (or they don't know how, which
would be scary indeed).

-- 
Joey Kelly
Minister of the Gospel and Linux Consultant
http://joeykelly.net

___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org