Chaos talks about how someone feels about the people working in the BPO industry (call centres from my point of view). Incidentally, there was a similar sentiment raised by some folks in some nameless TV programme many months ago. The nitty-gritty being that the employees of call centres are being exploited or "with how deficiently the BPO folks are paid".
I have a very simple response to it - if you think it doesn't pay enough, don't join it! Nobody is forcing people to work in the BPO industry, if they don't like the work hours or the pay or the people or the nature of the job, then they are free to leave and join elsewhere. I cannot understand why other people must feel pity for them and think that this exploitation must end.
If there is coercion, deceit, dishonesty or illegality involved, then I can understand that some people being up in arms against it. Do call centres not tell their prospective employees what kind of work they will be doing? Or that it involves sitting in shifts and that there is a quota of calls to be fulfilled?
Why don't I see BPO employees staging a protest about the inhuman working conditions? I think these people are sufficiently educated to understand whether they are being taken advantage of.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that they are probably overpaid. It's essentially a low-skill job, the only prerequisite being a decent knowledge of English (and if you were to hear all the Westerners complain, it would seem that most of the call centre employees don't even have that basic skill!).
I have heard people complain that the BPO employees lose their sense of identity, are cyber-coolies, have no social life and are forced to work abnormal hours. Hot damn, why don't I hear these people complain for us software folks as well? I seem to have similar problems as mentioned above!! (Not really, but I wouldn't expect the complainers to know any different.)
If you want lesser number of work hours, no night shifts and a social life then don't expect employers to pay you as much as they pay the guys who are willing to work more and late.
1 comment:
"In fact, I would go so far as to say that they are probably overpaid. It's essentially a low-skill job,the only prerequisite being a decent knowledge of English"
I am not sure why we software engineers think we are inventing some rocket science while the rest of the world is doing some low intellectual jobs. Alok, don't you think, if you put any grad student through couple of weeks of training and ask him to follow the so called six sigma processes, he will do as good as any of us. So all I am saying is we software engineers, who beat our chest and behave as though we solved Fermat's last theorem the moment we were born, sorry guys, but we are not demonstrating any great skill by writing a piece of code. Yes if you architect solutions, architect new chip design or a compiler or a new product, then you are great as that requires ingenuity and skill, but what percentage of software engineer population does that 5% ..max 10% . For rest of them,coding is mere looping through plethora of design documents and translating English to some machine understandable language. So don't you think rest of us are "low-skilled " coolies ourselves as we accuse others to be. So lets be very careful when we speak of other professions...especially it would be very nice if we can refrain from making comments like "they are probably overpaid" ..it probably speaks more about us than them.
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