A retrospect

Just yesterday, a coworker asked me what my opinion was in terms of the outsourcing and whether I'd recommend it to another company. My own reaction surprised me. I basically said that I would recommend outsourcing the maintenance pieces. Let them do the on call and incident management. Let them do the little tweaking and changing of emails. But as far as service requests and new development go, No, I would NOT recommend it. For the most part, it takes far too long to get work started and they work a lot more slowly than we do, but without the common sense.

In the past few months, I have gotten to know some of the developers. It really is a mixed bag. They come from all kinds of backgrounds and other companies. Some are really sharp. Some have decent English. All of them are truly nice though. I haven't run into anyone who is impolite yet.

And for those (one in particular) whose English is horrible, we enjoy sharing the mistakes with our coworkers and it brightens the day. ("I will act adoringly"???)

"Do the needful"

Every day gets worse. To be fair, some outsourcers are better than others. One guy I chat with a lot is good. He's used a lot of software and comes up with good solutions. Some of the other idiots across the world are clueless. You tell them something and they do the opposite. I think we're not speaking the same language. (probably) One guy in particular is bad. He gets errors via email and then sends them to us like we're supposed to do something with them. Don't even get me started about following the instructions for a GECS install. Today was a doozy. We get an error from a Business Integrator (ETL) job and there's an error. The error (to me) indicates that there's unexpected data in the transformation. So what does he do? He sends the BI error off to the vendor that sent us the data as if they know anything about out BI software. And to top it off, he ends his email with "do the needful". This is going to be my favorite phrase from now on. I'm going to assume the "needful" is the latest dance in his country. Like "do the hustle". I just couldn't stop laughing. Until I thought about how embarrassed I am for our company that our vendors get such illiterate/ignorant service from our outsourcer. Talk about losing face.