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> There was this idea that support just had to be in the valley because straight up the managers and folks working there didn't know there were technical people

> There was this idea that support just had to be in the valley because straight up the managers and folks working there didn't know there were technical people... anywhere else (this was before we had other islands of tech in the US). I saw a friend from the Midwest was on the board of a non-profit group. The headquarters was in the DC suburbs, but did no lobbying, mostly verifying credentials and conducting training for professional organizations. The work could be done anywhere. The other board members were from big cities and openly wondered if anyone "qualified" to run such an organization could be found in a state like Missouri, Iowa, or Nebraska. The concept that there was any skilled professional labor outside of the coasts and large metropolitan areas had to be explained to them. [Because we're all hicks who just got indoor plumbing at the turn of the century. /s] By relocating to the Midwest, their rent plummeted, they were able to pay people less while providing the same or better quality of life, upgrade their IT infrastructure and business processes to get away from paper documentation, hired an additional person, and still came out ahead financially. They were a small organization with less than 10 employees, so adding an additional person was a big proportional gain in productivity.

true_tuna 8y ago
I saw this happen in reverse. I was buying servers from Rackable in orders of several millions of dollars. They bought SGI. Fired their Bay Area support staff, moved support to Ohio which was a huge short term gain. But support became so bad it was literally worth less than nothing. They would take in a machine with a known fault (raid controller let’s say) fail to replace the card, ship back a machine that didn’t boot. After the fifth failure in a row I had enough. It was easier to learn how to repair my own servers and do the work in-house. I bought parts instead of support, qualified a new server provider and shifted the next six million in orders to them. No offense against the guys in Ohio, but due to unfamiliarity with the tech, structural and leadership shortcomings etc. they were simply unable to do the job so the work shifted back to the Bay Area anyway. I’m sure I was one customer among hundreds if not thousands who experienced this change.
- duxup 8y ago
  One of the downsides of my support example is that there is a lot of outsourcing and cost cutting in that area of work (one of the reasons I left). So there will be tons of stories like yours that I don't doubt are true.... it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...
  - apohn 8y ago
    >it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost... Exactly this. In a previous role at an Enterprise software company I watched customer satisfaction take a dive after cost cutting measures and support and escalations paths and metrics were changed. The same customer support people who had really happy customers started to have unhappy customers. It had very little to do with the people or location and everything to do with what options the customer services people had to help a customer.
- froindt 8y ago
  I guess as with everything - context matters. Their overall goal was to be as effective as they could be. The cost savings went along with operational improvements. It was also a non-profit, which has an entirely different dynamic compared to a for-profit customer relationship. I'm totally on-board with there being region-specific niches where it simply works better to have support in that area. Farmers from the Midwest get pretty annoyed when Congress passes laws which cannot, in any practical/economically feasible way, be followed. The laws may be perfectly reasonable when looking at factories, but make little sense applied to farmers
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    I kind of agree with the people above if you take an experienced team then replace it with another team(with cost cutting added in), it could be a block down the road and your going to run into problems.

true_tuna 8y ago

I saw this happen in reverse. I was buying servers from Rackable in orders of several millions of dollars. They bought SGI. Fired their Bay Area support staff, moved support to Ohio which was a huge short term gain. But support became so bad it was literally worth less than nothing. They would take in a machine with a known fault (raid controller let’s say) fail to replace the card, ship back a machine that didn’t boot. After the fifth failure in a row I had enough. It was easier to learn how to repair my own servers and do the work in-house. I bought parts instead of support, qualified a new server provider and shifted the next six million in orders to them. No offense against the guys in Ohio, but due to unfamiliarity with the tech, structural and leadership shortcomings etc. they were simply unable to do the job so the work shifted back to the Bay Area anyway. I’m sure I was one customer among hundreds if not thousands who experienced this change.

duxup 8y ago
One of the downsides of my support example is that there is a lot of outsourcing and cost cutting in that area of work (one of the reasons I left). So there will be tons of stories like yours that I don't doubt are true.... it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost...
- apohn 8y ago
  >it's just location probabbly had less to do with it as just a general desire to cut costs at any cost... Exactly this. In a previous role at an Enterprise software company I watched customer satisfaction take a dive after cost cutting measures and support and escalations paths and metrics were changed. The same customer support people who had really happy customers started to have unhappy customers. It had very little to do with the people or location and everything to do with what options the customer services people had to help a customer.
froindt 8y ago
I guess as with everything - context matters. Their overall goal was to be as effective as they could be. The cost savings went along with operational improvements. It was also a non-profit, which has an entirely different dynamic compared to a for-profit customer relationship. I'm totally on-board with there being region-specific niches where it simply works better to have support in that area. Farmers from the Midwest get pretty annoyed when Congress passes laws which cannot, in any practical/economically feasible way, be followed. The laws may be perfectly reasonable when looking at factories, but make little sense applied to farmers
- sharemywin 8y ago
  I kind of agree with the people above if you take an experienced team then replace it with another team(with cost cutting added in), it could be a block down the road and your going to run into problems.