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I’m an IT engineer at a company that uses TCS for application development and Tier II support. It’s been my experience that the support engineers they provide are often no more than script-reading troubleshooters, and when they are outside of their script, they cannot function. There are always exceptions, but we were recently tasked with interviewing a handful of candidates to provide assistance with vulnerability remediation and found that many of them had a hard time articulating what, exactly, they would do to perform simple tasks such as registry editing or even locating specific files in a file system on both Linux and Windows platforms.

I’m not saying they’re useless. Businesses often go this route to get cheap labor without having to pay for healthcare, retirement, etc. My contention on this is that domestic engineers often work longer hours, have better understanding of corporate systems, and put in the time on weekends and holidays to keep the company running which is part of the mentality of “earning one’s keep.” I know I do it without question. It’s part of being an IT professional.

It’s been my experience that the support engineers they provide are often no more than script-reading troubleshooters, and when they are outside of their script, they cannot function. There are always exceptions, but we were recently tasked with interviewing a handful of candidates to provide assistance with vulnerability remediation and found that many of them had a hard time articulating what, exactly, they would do to perform simple tasks such as registry editing or even locating specific files in a file system on both Linux and Windows platforms.

The bean counters are patted on the back for saving a buck, while quality and efficiency suffer.

Yup, I'm in IT support as well, and have a lot of these folks come in with the most rudimentary knowledge of what they are working on. They may be able to speak english (some barely), but many don't seem to be able to read and understand the technical notes in order to do their job.

There is an expectation of technical ability to work with techsuport, and I find that it doesn't exist in these folks. However they are told to call techsupport and scream in order to get us to do their job for them. I have many, many stories about this topic that I won't share here...

It's frustrating enough to make me want to retire early and let them drown...

Often, the H-1B worker is backed by a team of offshore staff back in India. In onshore-offshore support models, they are experts at playing the time zones.

It starts with a help desk ticket for a service request. That ticket waits for 12 hours for the offshore worker to come to work. Invariably, they find some missing charge code or confusing wording and send back a request for clarification. Another 12 hours for you to come to work and reply. Another 12 hours for them to reply to your reply. Three days might go by before they close the ticket and say you sent it to the wrong team. Next week, you reopen the ticket and call a meeting with your experts and their experts to explain to them what the problem is, and what the fix is. Two weeks can go by to resolve a request that your prior staff could have done in half a day.

-PJ