w1ld wrote:
] ] The next round of globalization is sending upscale jobs
] ] offshore. They include basic research, chip design,
] ] engineering--even financial analysis. Can America lose
] ] these jobs and still prosper? Who wins? Who loses?
]
] This seems so Office Space

just speaking generally on the subject, what's more interesting is that offshore CSR's are far more clued than domestic. Case in point: I had a tech support call for a customer with Dell recently. The local rep was completely clueless: I had to explain to her what the difference was between a CDR and CDRW were. She could barely work through the 'paint by numbers' expert system they use for screening calls. She quickly escalated my call after that, and I was tranferred to Bangalore, where a guy named Anoop had a service tech scheduled to swap my drive in less than 15 minutes (after we replaced drivers, updated firmware, and checked some BIOS settings).

So there's a reason why jobs are floating across the ponds, and it's not just cost.

flynn23 wrote:

] So there's a reason why jobs are floating across the ponds,
] and it's not just cost.

Hrm... Maybe the reason that tech is so good is that he is really qualified to be an engineer but because of job scarcity he is working as a tech. Of course, different countries have very different attitudes about work and about technology. Americans have really bad attitudes about both: "Work sucks, why should I care." and "Technology is for anti-social people, I don't want to understand, its beyond me."
One of the interesting things about Hong Kong was the fact that everyone seemed to care about their work. I mean you talk to cabbies and they say "Yeah, I just drive a cab, but I want to do it well, because its what I do, and I ought to be able to be proud of having done it well." People who wipe down tables at McDonalds seemed to be proud of what they do. They really cared. Its a totally different perspective.