[masraum]

Cisco Systems used to have offices around the globe that they used to have 24hr service rather than require people to work the late shift. Another benefit is that language barriers are often fewer when the geographic separation is less.

They've outsourced work in the US for years, they then started outsourcing to those same companies, but overseas (Australia and England). Eventually they started openning outsourced support offices in non English speaking countries, India, Mexico, Costa Rica, Phillipines) They got a lot of grief from customers and actually pulled back from some of those offshore locations, but India, and I believe the Phillipines actually has 24 hour offices. It sucks.

When all of that started I remember reading that Dvorak from ZDNet called to ask about a credit card acct or bank acct and had the support person quote ruppees to him.

I've known lots of friends and colleagues who lost jobs because of the offshore outsourcing. It sucks.

Funny related Story

On the weekends there are fewer support calls to Cisco. One weekend a guy called in with an issue and couldn't understand the tech that he got in Mexico, so he called back and said he wanted to speak to a native English speaker in the US, so they called the Cisco office in San Jose. Funny thing is that no one in the office was a native English speaker, they all had accents, so he ended up calling us in Houston and talking to one of our techs.... our tech's last name was Nguyen and his first name was just as Vietnamese. It's OK, because he has no accent, sounds like a white boy, but I thought it was pretty darn amusing.