Insourcing Tech Support

According to many leading most analysts the root of a lot of our problems (economically anyway, there isn’t an explanation as to why in 2000 most of us thought 47.9% was larger than 48.4%) is outsourcing. We outsource everything. But most frustratingly we outsource our “smart jobs.” Well these “smart jobs” really aren’t that hard. Take, for example, tech support.

Now a company I used to work for had a rather large IT department (they had there own floor, not just an office), and ironically, there head office was not in house, but in India. So when you called for help (which we were required to do in order to get insurance money if something was broken) you got routed to India, instead of our in house IT department. From there they would either contact the in house department, or try to help you either via a poorly put together remote connection terminal, or a just over the phone. Now I am not the most tech savvy person, nor am I the best with accounting, but even I can tell that this system was both impractical and the most frustrating 3 hours I ever spent on the phone (even if I was getting paid $32.50 an hour times 2 for overtime for sitting there listening to Apu, conveniently calling himself “Alan” tell me to restart my computer again).

Now my son had walked to my office from school, waiting for a ride home, and was listening to the “pleasant,” “upbeat,” overworked, support staff drone on about restarting my computer again, and quietly whispered in my ear “stop restarting and move over.” He sat down and in 5 minuets fixed my computer. I told the support staff (who was as shocked as I was that his “restart” solution had “worked”) that he had fixed the problem.

I am by no means an accountant, or even remotely good at math, but even I can tell how impractical and costly it is to hire people like “Alan” to spend forever on the phone with me trying to “help” when my high school kid can fix it in no time at all. Instead of hiring a bunch of college geeks, and paying them double what the CEO makes, to solve small problems, and then outsourcing half of “those” to phone centers in India, we could make this much simpler.

Lets hire high school children. I’m not talking about replacing a department of IT guys with a master’s degrees in computer engineering with a high school kids, but why do we need to have a whole department of guys that just sit around until a call center in India determines that a computer down the hall from them has a major problem. Why do we need to pay for all that when a hand full of smart high school adolescents working part time and a couple of college educated IT guys for the more in depth and time intensive projects, like server maintenance, or data migration, would serve the same purpose, at a fraction the cost.

Not to mention that the high school kids in addition to getting some pocket lining, would be learning on the job, would be able to write off time at work as an internship(my youngest school has adopted a policy to requires kids to get 10 hours a year for all 4 years of high school), and would be doing something they love that might result in a full time position.