Outsourcing [split]

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nezumi
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Outsourcing [split]

Post by nezumi » Fri Jun 03, 2022 11:45 am

I do have the experience of being so poor I didn't know where my next meal was coming from. I lived on smartprice crisps and soft cheese sandwiches (and 9p noodles). My food budget for a week was about a fiver. It was a long, long time ago, but I remember always being hungry, losing a lot of weight and having constantly aching bones. The consequences of this period of about 6 months was about 7-8 years of recovery after I moved back in with my Dad (I slept in the living room on an airbed as we were overcrowded). Yes, it was mostly my own fault for reasons I won't go into but I can empathise viscerally with what people are going through. You absolutely wouldn't be able to do my old diet on a fiver a week now anyway - everything has gone up in price too much (strange how wages are only about £1.70* per hour higher than they were 20 years ago when the cheap soft cheese is now triple the price it was back then.)

So yeah, I find MP suggestions about eating to be exactly as insulting as "let them eat cake", if not more so, as Mme Antoinette would not have had access to ordinary people and would almost certainly not have really known the impact of her words. These MPs do have access to ordinary people, their job is to represent those people and the understand them. Actually, I correct myself, I find their words far more insulting than Mme Antoinette's because it is their business to represent their ordinary constituents. As much as I strongly doubt the British public has it in them, they're going the right way to enjoy the same fate as Mme Antoinette.

* I worked for a call-centre at £7.80 p/h in 2002, the same job is now paid £9.50 per hour. Although it's not, because it got outsourced to India. I like Indian people (genuinely, I have met and known dozens over the years) but I hate how work that CAN'T BE DONE PROPERLY WITH ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE gets outsourced abroad all the time. Then people get branded as racists when they complain! The first change I'd make there is a law that basically says: If you're selling it in Britain, you must pay full taxes in Britain and every single job that can be done in Britain, must be done in Britain. I'd also give tax breaks to companies that keep their auxiliary staff in-house and tax the crap out of anyone who outsources anything. In essence, in my opinion, outsourcing is a disgusting problem that needs to be sorted out along with zero-hours contracts and failing to train the young.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by noggins » Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:31 pm

So an online shop has to personally deliver the goods, they cant outsource it to a courier company, because its immoral?
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by tom p » Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:51 pm

noggins wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:31 pm
So an online shop has to personally deliver the goods, they cant outsource it to a courier company, because its immoral?
well, Amazon could certainly afford to actually employ people (as opposed to a gig economy zero hours model); however I think Nezumi's well-meaning but impractical proposal would have to allow for small, medium & micro-sized enterprises who definitely couldn't.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by shpalman » Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:20 pm

noggins wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 12:31 pm
So an online shop has to personally deliver the goods, they cant outsource it to a courier company, because its immoral?
An online shop delivering in the UK can hardly outsource that to India, even if it were covered by CAN'T BE DONE PROPERLY WITH ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE which it isn't.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by nezumi » Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:45 pm

I typed more in anger than anything else, of course I haven't thought it through. It's just irritating doing a complex job for at least a decade while being undercut by people who can't do the job as well, due to many factors, including but not limited to the fact that English is a second language to them (such as not knowing the geography, culture or idioms and therefore misunderstanding normal interactions, having zero connection to the parent company so they have, in effect, no rights and no way to fix or even mildly impact on the way the company does business), but the thing the customers directly complain about is the language barrier. It's done entirely to save money and to make sure workers can't have any power over the structure of the company. Outsourcing is morally bankrupt. There are certain things that naturally must be done from within the country the product is sold in, which includes, but is not limited to, customer service and technical support. Have you ever tried to conduct a complex and technical conversation with somebody who speaks your first language as a second language? I expect most of you have. It's not easy is it? Outsourced workers have absolutely no interest in good service as they have no stake in the company or its product, add to that a huge language and cultural barrier and the fact that these are not well-paid workers even in their own country as the jobs are ten-a-penny and you're not getting the cream of the crop either.

On the scale it's been done, it amounts to wage suppression. This is why I'm so angry. I didn't think the solution through because I have no expertise but the problem is plain and it needs to be reversed. I am happy to listen to suggestions and nuances.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Martin Y » Fri Jun 03, 2022 4:16 pm

When it comes to not thinking it through, everyone can do that. Like the higher-ups who introduce outsourcing, thinking they're shedding a lot of middle management stuff to an expert outside company while keeping the same people doing the same (now outsourced) jobs as before, just turning up wearing some facility company polo shirts instead.

I've seen that happen several times, including to me, and the work-cultural vandalism is as obvious as it would be to anyone but Marie Antoinette - a whole raft of your family of employees suddenly recognise they have stopped being one of us and instead become one of them.

I think I mentioned before (probably in the old country) when BBC Broadcasting House outsourced cleaning, catering, security etc jobs, one of the first things we studio engineers had to do was devise a way to chain (literally chain) the studio microphones to the tables.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by nekomatic » Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:50 pm

nezumi wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:45 pm
Have you ever tried to conduct a complex and technical conversation with somebody who speaks your first language as a second language? I expect most of you have. It's not easy is it?
I work for a German company so I do this a lot. My German colleagues tend to have very good English though. We also have offices in India and I’ve not had problems communicating with Indian colleagues, but these are well paid and well educated engineers rather than lower skilled customer service people.

Companies have always outsourced stuff but I think the pendulum has swung away from doing as much of it as possible to save every last penny. For reasons not worth discussing here I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone to Halifax (the bank), Octopus (the energy supplier) and Zen (phone/broadband) recently and everyone has been UK based, in the case of Zen clearly from Rochdale. In the case of Halifax being in the UK has not correlated with being competent.

I do think the line between ‘role really requires a native speaker’ and ‘pander to racist customers’ is tricky to judge sometimes.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by shpalman » Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:56 pm

nezumi wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:45 pm
Have you ever tried to conduct a complex and technical conversation with somebody who speaks your first language as a second language? I expect most of you have. It's not easy is it?
As a scientist in a non-English-speaking country, this happens almost all the time. The rest of the time, it's their first language and my second one.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by noggins » Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:58 pm

Oh we are using a special scrutable definition of “outsourcing” not the normal one. My bad.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by dyqik » Fri Jun 03, 2022 11:21 pm

shpalman wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:56 pm
nezumi wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:45 pm
Have you ever tried to conduct a complex and technical conversation with somebody who speaks your first language as a second language? I expect most of you have. It's not easy is it?
As a scientist in a non-English-speaking country, this happens almost all the time. The rest of the time, it's their first language and my second one.
Here in an English speaking country, it's called "talking to my boss". Except English is his fourth language in terms of default language for where he's working, after Chinese, French and Japanese.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Sat Jun 04, 2022 8:52 am

I've split this topic from "let them eat home-made food".

As a general note of politeness, if someone recounts a traumatic period in their life in some detail and then, as an addendum, make a suggestion which is fairly obviously written more in anger than as a well-worked through policy proposal, it's generally understood to be polite and pleasant to offer some sort of humanity or empathy in response to the traumatic bit before launching into a semi-scathing response to the suggestion.

Most responses to nezumi here were fine, it's just one or two people, but please be nicer.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by IvanV » Sat Jun 04, 2022 9:20 am

nezumi wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 11:45 am
Although it's not, because it got outsourced to India. I like Indian people (genuinely, I have met and known dozens over the years) but I hate how work that CAN'T BE DONE PROPERLY WITH ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE gets outsourced abroad all the time.
I find many people from Newcastle, Glasgow, Belfast, Louisiana, etc, hard to understand. And the difficulty we may have in understanding some Indians is really little different from that. Many Indians speak functionally perfect English, but it is Indian English, which like Geordie English has a distinctive phonology and differences of vocabulary.

So, just because they have that accent, do not conclude it is a second language they speak weakly. Even those who speak nothing else have that accent, unless they leave India and pick up a different accent. A fair proportion of Indians grow up speaking English at home, for some because that is considered the prestige language, and for others because it is a mixed language marriage that settled on English as lingua franca of the household. For many others, they routinely use it to communicate outside the house, because in practice it is the lingua franca of the numerous language communities of India. Obviously, this does not mean they all speak perfect English - the great majority of Indians don't. But given the competition for such jobs, and the quantity of people available with the language, I think you would have difficulty getting the job if you didn't have very good English.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Jun 05, 2022 2:56 am

nezumi wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:45 pm
It's just irritating doing a complex job for at least a decade while being undercut by people who can't do the job as well,
Sometimes people are just not willing to pay to get a job done well, and while that may be due to an excessively narrow view, sometimes it's because it genuinely isn't worth it to them. Just as for goods, where people often prefer to pay for cheap rubbish that doesn't last, may are not willing to pay for proper services.
the thing the customers directly complain about is the language barrier.
While customers are experts at telling whether something works for them, they are absolutely terrible at explaining why it doesn't. I'm afraid I would tend to assume that complaints about a language barrier are manifestations of latent racism unless someone has checked call recordings and verified that there was a genuine problem with language.
It's done entirely to save money
Yes, that's the purpose of running a business.
and to make sure workers can't have any power over the structure of the company.
Workers shouldn't have power over the structure of the company - that's for the owners of the company to decide.
Outsourcing is morally bankrupt.
Outsourcing is essential to society and has been since the first towns and cities appeared. With everything you do, you are outsourcing almost all the work to other people. If you have some jam, it's possible you made it yourself, but you quite likely didn;t grow the fruit, and you almost certainly didn't refine your own sugar. I can be pretty certain you didn't grow sugarcane or sugarbeet to refine into sugar, you didn't carve your own wooden spoon, nor grow the tree to make the wood. You didn't make your jam pan, nor refine or mine the metal ore. You may have handwritten your own labels for the jars, but didn't make the paper, adhesive, ink, or pen. You didn't make the jars, nor generate the energy to boil the jam (drill your own gas well, gather firewood, or whetever, depending on your stove), nor make the stove that was used. And so on. Beyond the simplest forms of agriculture, where every farmer made all their own tools, society is built on people producing things with extremely extensive outsourcing.

The economic theory of comparative advantage (see David Ricardo's example for details) explains why this works.
There are certain things that naturally must be done from within the country the product is sold in, which includes, but is not limited to, customer service and technical support.
I don't see why that is the case. If a product is made in England, do you need separate support for Scotland? For Ireland? For America, Canada, Australia? What about for France? Even if you employ French people (in England)?
Have you ever tried to conduct a complex and technical conversation with somebody who speaks your first language as a second language? I expect most of you have. It's not easy is it?
I've done it and had no difficulty. Both at the level where their English was not very good at all, to where they spoke English with a noticeable accent, but otherwise as well as a good native speaker.
Outsourced workers have absolutely no interest in good service as they have no stake in the company or its product, add to that a huge language and cultural barrier and the fact that these are not well-paid workers even in their own country as the jobs are ten-a-penny and you're not getting the cream of the crop either.
That's a problem for the people who are receiving the service. If they care enough, they can take their business elsewhere (presumably to a competitir who charges more).
On the scale it's been done, it amounts to wage suppression.
That's because the world is a very unequal place, so there are places much poorer than the UK. Free movement of work means that very poor people in other countries can get much better paid jobs than they otherwise would. It's a modern advance on having to migrate to where the jobs pay better. Far from being a problem, it's part of the solution to how to help some of the poorest people.

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Stephanie » Sun Jun 05, 2022 9:01 am

If someone says "I typed more in anger" and admits that they haven't thought it through, you can probably ease off being arses about every single point tbh. Especially when others had already picked over bits of it.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by lpm » Sun Jun 05, 2022 9:38 am

Alternatively, don't care in the slightest if people pick apart stuff you know you didn't think through.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Martin Y » Sun Jun 05, 2022 10:47 am

Outsourcing is not a medieval village having a baker. Outsourcing is a company continuing to have staff perform the jobs as before but instead of employing them it hires an outside company to employ them.

This can be more efficient. If people were good little robots and had no motivations except a desire to work and be paid there might be no downside.

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Stephanie » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:20 am

lpm wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 9:38 am
Alternatively, don't care in the slightest if people pick apart stuff you know you didn't think through.
I said "ease off" you'll note. Not preventing people from discussing, but just suggesting maybe they don't deserve everyone having a pop.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by noggins » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:51 am

The trick with outsourcing something is to ask
Deming’s ghost if its a good idea.

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by jimbob » Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:04 pm

Who was Deming?
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Brightonian » Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:05 pm

jimbob wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:04 pm
Who was Deming?
Maybe this management consultant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by nekomatic » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:21 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 2:56 am
If you have some jam, it's possible you made it yourself, but you quite likely didn;t grow the fruit, and you almost certainly didn't refine your own sugar.
Pace my earlier post on this thread, I think we can agree that the definition of outsourcing we are discussing is not this, which is ‘having a supply chain’, but the late-20th-century definition of the term which means ‘contracting out to a third party things that were hitherto always assumed would be done in-house’. People had already figured out by the beginning of the 21st century that this was not necessarily a great idea :
Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you’re a software company, writing excellent code is how you’re going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, write software for drug research, but don’t write your own accounting package. If you’re a web accounting service, write your own accounting package, but don’t try to create your own magazine ads. If you have customers, never outsource customer service.
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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Millennie Al » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:42 pm

Martin Y wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 10:47 am
Outsourcing is not a medieval village having a baker. Outsourcing is a company continuing to have staff perform the jobs as before but instead of employing them it hires an outside company to employ them.
That's not a useful definition. It means that you could have two companies which are identical but you consider that one is outsourcing and the other isn't because of how they used to operate.

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Jun 06, 2022 6:50 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:42 pm
Martin Y wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 10:47 am
Outsourcing is not a medieval village having a baker. Outsourcing is a company continuing to have staff perform the jobs as before but instead of employing them it hires an outside company to employ them.
That's not a useful definition. It means that you could have two companies which are identical but you consider that one is outsourcing and the other isn't because of how they used to operate.
That’s what outsourcing is. The clue is in the ‘ing’, it’s an activity.

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by Martin Y » Mon Jun 06, 2022 10:15 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:42 pm
Martin Y wrote:
Sun Jun 05, 2022 10:47 am
Outsourcing is not a medieval village having a baker. Outsourcing is a company continuing to have staff perform the jobs as before but instead of employing them it hires an outside company to employ them.
That's not a useful definition. It means that you could have two companies which are identical but you consider that one is outsourcing and the other isn't because of how they used to operate.
How they used to operate is a fundamental part of what forms the work culture of the two companies so unless their employees are indeed good little robots who embrace change and forget all previous working relationships then the fact that one company just outsourced part of its workforce to match the other company will make them different places to work.

I'm not clear what you're arguing. If outsourcing becomes the new normal then at what point does it stop being outsourcing?

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Re: Outsourcing [split]

Post by JQH » Mon Jun 06, 2022 1:30 pm

nekomatic wrote:
Fri Jun 03, 2022 6:50 pm
I do think the line between ‘role really requires a native speaker’ and ‘pander to racist customers’ is tricky to judge sometimes.
TBF the criterion is "Must have a good command of English and technical vocabulary associated with <service>" When I had a problem with my broadband the TalkTalk customer service fell down on both. Also she gabbled so much it was extremely difficult to make out what she was saying. Open reach engineer thought the same. A UK based customer is not being racist to think that the customer service person they speak to should be able to speak English in a manner comprehensible to a native English speaker.
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