>From Ed:
> Thanks Jim for making my comment more vivid. The situation > is growing worse and your personal experience is one of many tragic > consequences. The driving force behind hiring is the cost of labor. > People from other countries are cheaper, the young are cheaper, and > the robots are cheaper. This cost is not just salary. The cost of > healthcare, pension, and general overhead is high. As you made clear, > the quality of the person is not what matters in many industries, > only the cost. The standard of living in the US is adjusting downward > and everybody is suffering. When the inflation being created by the > Federal Reserve increases in ernest, our pain will increase again. <personal rant> Having worked in Info Tech for over 30 years I have to say that the amount of out sourcing I've experienced, professionally speaking, within the last 10 - 15 years has been dramatic. This outsourcing virus seems to have increased exponentially within the last 5 years. For most of my professional InfoTech career I've worked for state government institutions. I am currently responsible for maintaining an expensive software package that is owned by EMC. EMC is a huge conglomerate company that, among many eclectic activities, manages high volume scanning software. What we have purchased from them is a tiny portion of the company's entire revenues. As such, we're small fish as far as EMC is concerned. Whenever we encounter a problem (or bug) with their scanning software for which that we cannot resolve on our own we open up another on-line Service Request through the EMC web site. 98% of the time we will be hooked up with an individual whose name, as spelled in the English language, is a significant challenge for me to pronounce correctly. I certainly don't fault countries like India for having wisely educated a huge portion of their population base with highly employable technical degrees that presumably include accompanying skills. Just like everyone else on this planet they deserve to earn & live a better life than their parents. However, what I find inexcusable, ABSOLUTELY INEXCUSABLE, is that companies like EMC appear to have gutted a significant portion of their experienced English speaking technical staff and replaced them with a significantly cheaper and inexperienced labor force in the misguided assumption by doing so they will be able to service their customers with the same degree of expertise, and all on the cheap. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!!!! You just try conducting an on-line WebX session with an individual concerning highly technical matters when their command of the English language (combined with heavy accent) results in me hopefully comprehending about 70 to 80 percent of what they say over the phone. For about two years now we have been trying to upgrade to a newer version of a high-volume scanning software package. We had been using reasonably STABLE versions of this software for well over 5 years. Unfortunately, these older versions are going out of service very soon. But now... and you heard that right... for TWO YEARS now we have been trying to upgrade to a newer version. This upgrade has been going on for so long that this new version we are currently trying to upgrade to, we have been told by EMC, will ITSELF go out of service this summer. So, we are trying to upgrade to this version so that we can then turn around and upgrade to the next version which should hopefully last several more years longer before EMC decides it's time to pull it out of service. (I'll spare you the details about the politics involved with this "upgrade" strategy. Needless to say, it wasn't my choice.) Earlier this week I documented the fact that the software version we are still trying to upgrade to exhibits "show stopping" serious functional flaws. Our users will be unable to use the software as-is. I emailed EMC concerning the specifics of what I uncovered. I sent them a very explicit eMail message that documented the problems we've encountered. I also CC'd as my boss with my findings. I included a very clear hint to EMC (as well as my boss) that I'm recommending we seriously consider shopping around for another high volume scanning software package. (I've heard that KOFAX's, Ascent Capture s/w, is a good competitor.) I finally got a tech person who's native language is English. Hopefully EMC will take this matter seriously. Hopefully we'll get some EXPERIENCED development staff working on fixing the bugs. Hopefully this will be accomplished before I am possibly forced to retire prematurely (because someone has to be blamed) because I can't make their #$%# software work for us in our building. In 30 plus years of working in the Info Tech environment, I have never encountered a piece of &#$$ software as bad as this. It is SO NOT ready for primetime. I can understand why EMC recently announced a brand new version that they are now trying to peddle to their customers. Meanwhile, I wonder who EMC hired (and from which countries) to develop the software version we're still trying to upgrade to. When I compare the functionality of this "new" version versus what we had been using for the past five years, there is no comparison. Absolutely none. The new version has both the look and feel of having been developed by a bunch of students freshly minted from a technical-engineering college... Young people with little or no practical experience in how to write UTILITARIAN software. If the newer-and-even-better-improved version we hope to upgrade to, after we finally upgrade to the one we are currently trying to upgrade turns out to having been developed by the same team... God help us. </personal rant> Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/newvortex/
