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Comment by STRiDEX | Hacker News Reader

I hope the jobs stay here. I worked in an IT call center during my time in college in Northern California. I was hourly, but everyone earned around 45-55k which is way cheaper than what they were paying for the same employee in the Bay Area. We were able to drive down for on site training and we all speak English without accents. Really made me believe more companies need to try outsourcing to college towns and rural cities.

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You realize that you can cut those salaries by 75% by outsourcing them, right? It's really a simple equation of how much you stand to lose from customers having to deal with foreign call center employees vs how much you save. How many people ever have to deal with LS support in the first place, and then, over an issue that is not relatively easy to handle? I bet this was a very easy decision to make.

Agree - I worked in a call center for several years and it paid the bills, and improved 'soft skills' while letting me develop more technical knowledge on the side. Since I wasn't standing on my feet all day making sandwiches or waiting tables, I could come home after solving problems for angry people all day (thankfully I worked for a place that gave their support people the ability to actually resolve the problems), I would still have the energy and mindspace to be able to work on side projects and learn on my own time.

As much as companies try to automate things, I really hope that localized support makes a comeback.

Ive had both a call center job and a job making sandwiches all day while teaching myself programming on the side. I progressed way further during the sandwich-making years. It was hard to come home after being on a computer all day dealing with real problems (call center) and sit down to program, whereas after working in a restaurant I was physically exhausted but desperate for a cognitive outlet.

To clarify - the stress of the restaurant job was as much the lack of a distinct schedule combined with minimum wage pay as it was the physical work of the job. The call center gave me a regular 8-6 window, full time work at double the minimum wage at the time.

I agree, but do you realize you were being paid 15x the salary of call center workers in India.

15x the quality too without the language barrier and if OP was trainable.

eh, unless you are hiring your buddy who lives in india, there are usually a lot of other not so obvious costs involved. unless you know someone who is working from home, you usually go through middlemen who take a pretty big cut. And part of that is doing business in other places is weird and different from doing business here in America.

All that aside, wages in India aren't 1/15th of what they are in the less economically developed parts of the USA, at least not for reliable people capable of working remote for American companies.

It depends a lot what you are after as well. Do you want someone who is able to rigidly enact a customer service manual and is hopefully understandable on the phone to your customers? Or do you want someone who is easily understandable and is able to make complex decisions based on individual customers cases?

There is going to be a pretty big difference in cost between the 2.

Also in our limited experience hiring in India you are going to want to pay a bit of a premium if you want low turnover.

but those things are both true in America, too. My point was just that the minimum bar for "can work with Americans remotely" puts your Indian labor way above 1/10th what you'd pay for the same thing in low labor cost parts of the US. From what I've seen, a 2x savings is... optimistic.

I'm just trying to make the point that this myth that you can get someone who speaks English and has enough knowledge of American customs to deal with customer support for under $1/hr is just a myth.

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