R.I.P. Hugh. At least you're off to a better pla... Oh, never mind.
On the bright side, this is probably the stiffest he's been in 20 years!
I'll get my coat...
Posts by ajcee
5 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2012
Playboy founder and dressing-gown wearer Hugh Hefner dead at 91
BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'
eBay slammed for daft post-hack password swap advice
Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster WERE in India
Friday 29th June 2012 11:21 GMT
Re: Mr. Wak
No: the biggest issues related to outsourcing are dealing with the lack of real-world sysadmin or dev experience. Communication/oversight are indeed issues but it's the lack of experience that's the killer.
I used to work for a UK-based ISP and racked up six year's experience dealing with offshore teams in India. Every single one of them churned staff at dizzying rates of speed and after four years of banging our heads against a wall and getting absolutely nowhere, my peers and I petitioned our CTO to go to bat for us to the Board and bring the India-based techs over to the UK to work with us in the office and under close supervision. It worked a charm: just a few months after arriving the majority of them hit 5th gear and became damn good techies. Their experience started to rack up and - by the time I left two years later - they were pretty solid. Of course, it still sucks that the jobs were being sourced outside the UK, depriving any locals of employment, but - as the Indian techs were paid approximately one-third of what I'd have considered a decent UK rate - we could never get the bean counters to acquiese. We simply had to take what was on offer. The Board still saw their all-important cost savings and, after some intensive training and supervision, we got a team of very capable techies.
None of this is (or should be) a rant against Indians. If UK companies had all targeted China, South America or Eastern Europe 15 years ago for their outsourcing requirements, we'd be bitching about those people. Bottom line: it makes no difference what nationality, race, class, gender, creed, sexual orientation, etc. you're dealing with. If you're looking to cut costs and you have senior managers trying to ensure that they pay the lowest wages possible, you're going to end up entrusting your operations to people who have no business sitting behind a computer. Whether that person is sitting in Pune, Prague, Palm Springs, Panama City, Perth or Pyongyang is irrelevant.
Friday 29th June 2012 00:48 GMT
Re: According to this article
That's not the way I read it. Whilst it would appear that the CA7 upgrade and the subsequent backout a couple of days later were handled by the UK-based support team, I've not read anything to suggest that either procedure was problematic (apart from the fact that the upgrade clearly introduced issues that then necessitated that it be backed out.) However, the batch processing is done from India and - if The Reg's story yesterday about someone clearing the batch queues and deleting the schedule is on the money - you can start to hypothesize that the Indian-based staff halted the batch processing, following which the UK-based staff backed out the change. Thereafter, the Indian-based staff were meant to kick the processing off again, in co-ordance with their checklists used in such instances. Except that there was nothing to be kicked off, the queues were unpopulated and one of the staff had bolted... I'm sure it's nowhere near as simple as I think it is so - as I've bugger-all experience with IBM mainframes and CA7 - I'll await comment from someone qualified...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
