Responding to a comment

Someone called Prashant left a comment on one of my posts. (Actually I didn't know that people other than Chaos and Veera actually read anything out here. I do get a few hits but they mostly seem to be either misdirected or aimless wanderers...). He specifically took umbrage (is that too strong a word?) at a couple of lines:

"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.


Dude, I'm pretty sure I don't know you. I have been known to wonder on more than one occasion whether software people actually deserve the kind of money we get. I know the kind of people employed by software firms and I can state categorically that a majority of them are overpaid. But if someone is willing to pay them that kind of money, who am I to decide whether they actually deserve less or not? Sigh.

Do I think any grad student put through some training and made to follow 6 sigma process would be as good as me? Um... in a word, no. I may not have solved Fermat's last theorem on my own, but I do think the kind of work I do is pretty decent. Maybe you picked the wrong guy. Do I think ...blah blah blah... as good as an average-to-below-average software guy? Maybe. But most likely, not.

From my point of view, someone who reads through documents and translates English to C would definitely rank as low-skilled, relatively speaking, of course. But I would probably still rate him higher than someone who answers the phone and reads through a prepared script to try to sell credit cards to strangers. Oh yes, there are BPO operations that require some level of technical competency but I certainly wouldn't hire them to write code for me.

You also seem to have a chip on your shoulder, you lashed out without trying to understand what I wrote earlier - perhaps a re-read of my post would help. Perhaps me re-writing my points and opinions clearly would help too.

1. Call centre jobs mostly seem to require a decent command over spoken English (or maybe some other language).
2. Call centre jobs are not something that requires very high levels of technical skills, since I do not consider spoken English to be such a skill.
3. In fact, I wouldn't rate it very high on the list of non-technical skills either.
4. I, personally, consider the salary paid to call centre employees (especially the starting salaries) to be more than what should be considered reasonable.
5. I do not consider BPO employees to be exploited. If they wish to work under those circumstances, for that salary, they should be allowed to, without the rest of the world jumping to their "defense".
6. I think that employers in the BPO sector are not doing anything illegal, immoral or deceitful when they employ people to do that kind of work, for that amount of compensation.

Hope that makes the earlier post clearer. Actually, I'm pretty surprised that someone who sounds as decently educated as you would fail to appreciate the fact that being overpaid is what makes an industry or job lucrative! Do you think investment bankers are overpaid? I certainly do! It may be because I do not appreciate the hard work in reaching that point, their extreme intelligence and the endless hours of gruelling labour that they put in... naaah... they're overpaid :) If you want to know my opinion on software folks, investment bankers and ahem... MBAs, leave a note.