9 ms·

With regards to call centers, you might want to first ask those with a job there if they want their job destroyed. Without regard to their current job search pl

by hsmyers 16y ago

With regards to call centers, you might want to first ask those with a job there if they want their job destroyed. Without regard to their current job search plans, they are there for a reason...

danielharan 16y ago
I actually used to work in one. A couple years after I left, the center relocated to another province. It was a shit job. As a society we're not doing a great job of helping workers move on. In any case, it really shouldn't be up to startups to protect jobs, any more than car companies had to compensate carriage manufacturers or nail factories helped blacksmiths.
- tgvcfgtbvcfgh 16y ago
  It all balances out. The industrial revolution removed the need for lots of manual laborers and replaced unskilled jobs with machines. But then TV came along and created even more jobs for the unskilled than the patent crop rotator over destroyed.
- wisty 16y ago
  As a society, we do a terrible job at helping workers move on. You go to school for 12 years, then possibly uni for 3-7, then are unlikely to receive more than a couple of months of formal training throughout the rest of your life, even if you change careers. Virtually nobody does a university course after graduating. I don't think that's because university is useless (though there is room for improvement), or that skills are easy to obtain elsewhere, but a society that tries to load a lifetime of study onto people who don't even know what they are going to be when they grow up.
  - cabalamat 16y ago
    I agree. I'd make more sense for many career paths if people did maybe 1 year university, then work for maybe 5 years, then 6 months uni, work for 5 years, etc. Why do all undergraduate courses last the same length of time? Not because the amount of time it takes to master every subject is the same, but because of administrative convenience.
    - maigret 16y ago
      Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.
sp4rki 16y ago
I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people. In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+ team (excluding this very smart girl that came from a crappy neighborhood with crappy parents) were complete and utter retards. The place was a petri dish of fraud, bad advice, and foul phone manners. In the second call-center I worked in two departments. The first one was sales, basically 300 kids just out of school tricking customers into promotions they did not want and hanging up on clients when they couldn't get a credit card number. I was also great at sales because I developed a system, without bullshitting the customers. I always hit the bonuses... but the rest of the department also hit them, with 500% my performance. Imagine I sold 10 units per day to hit 60 units a week (the bonus being after 50 units sold), they sold 300. Fraud to the extreme (and I know this because a close friend of mine did this... his whole team did). Lastly I did tech support. I was probably one of the few (less than 10) people that actually understood the technology. The rest of the 120 strong department where tech illiterate. Aside, I strongly remember one agent being fired because he brought two machetes into the office building and cut (superficially, no horror story here) some dude's arm, and a 45 year old lady agent that reported 13 cases of sexual assault (the lady was hideous looking and was just looking for an easy payday) which got the 13 men fired and which ended with her resignation which included a severance pay of several thousand dollars. They funniest side, is that at least 60% of all the agents I met, could not speak or even comprehend decent english. I thought that might be a prerequisite to do customer support/sales for english speaking customers. In comparison, I was once reprimanded for speaking french to the french speaking husband of a customer about their tech equipment. So yeah, I say bomb all these call-centers. I don't live in the US, but I think that those sales agent jobs dealing with people in the US should be filled with US sales agents. Those tech support jobs for US customers should be filled with US college kids or recent graduates. Instead companies pay 300~400 dollars a month to a bunch of retards (I can count myself in this group, though give me a break I had been kicked out of my house so I took the first job I was offered), cheats, and thieves, so they can go ahead and make your experience on the phone a living hell.
- 16y ago

by hsmyers 16y ago

With regards to call centers, you might want to first ask those with a job there if they want their job destroyed. Without regard to their current job search plans, they are there for a reason...

danielharan 16y ago

I actually used to work in one. A couple years after I left, the center relocated to another province. It was a shit job. As a society we're not doing a great job of helping workers move on. In any case, it really shouldn't be up to startups to protect jobs, any more than car companies had to compensate carriage manufacturers or nail factories helped blacksmiths.

tgvcfgtbvcfgh 16y ago
It all balances out. The industrial revolution removed the need for lots of manual laborers and replaced unskilled jobs with machines. But then TV came along and created even more jobs for the unskilled than the patent crop rotator over destroyed.
wisty 16y ago
As a society, we do a terrible job at helping workers move on. You go to school for 12 years, then possibly uni for 3-7, then are unlikely to receive more than a couple of months of formal training throughout the rest of your life, even if you change careers. Virtually nobody does a university course after graduating. I don't think that's because university is useless (though there is room for improvement), or that skills are easy to obtain elsewhere, but a society that tries to load a lifetime of study onto people who don't even know what they are going to be when they grow up.
- cabalamat 16y ago
  I agree. I'd make more sense for many career paths if people did maybe 1 year university, then work for maybe 5 years, then 6 months uni, work for 5 years, etc. Why do all undergraduate courses last the same length of time? Not because the amount of time it takes to master every subject is the same, but because of administrative convenience.
  - maigret 16y ago
    Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.

sp4rki 16y ago

I worked in not one but two call-centers during a very dark time of my life. I say freaking bomb all call-centers out of existence. They create crap jobs, with crap pay, and crap benefits that steal work from better qualified people. In the first call-center I worked in, I was doing financial support for customers. I was great at my job because I was studying finance at that time in my life. Everyone else on the 200+ team (excluding this very smart girl that came from a crappy neighborhood with crappy parents) were complete and utter retards. The place was a petri dish of fraud, bad advice, and foul phone manners. In the second call-center I worked in two departments. The first one was sales, basically 300 kids just out of school tricking customers into promotions they did not want and hanging up on clients when they couldn't get a credit card number. I was also great at sales because I developed a system, without bullshitting the customers. I always hit the bonuses... but the rest of the department also hit them, with 500% my performance. Imagine I sold 10 units per day to hit 60 units a week (the bonus being after 50 units sold), they sold 300. Fraud to the extreme (and I know this because a close friend of mine did this... his whole team did). Lastly I did tech support. I was probably one of the few (less than 10) people that actually understood the technology. The rest of the 120 strong department where tech illiterate. Aside, I strongly remember one agent being fired because he brought two machetes into the office building and cut (superficially, no horror story here) some dude's arm, and a 45 year old lady agent that reported 13 cases of sexual assault (the lady was hideous looking and was just looking for an easy payday) which got the 13 men fired and which ended with her resignation which included a severance pay of several thousand dollars. They funniest side, is that at least 60% of all the agents I met, could not speak or even comprehend decent english. I thought that might be a prerequisite to do customer support/sales for english speaking customers. In comparison, I was once reprimanded for speaking french to the french speaking husband of a customer about their tech equipment. So yeah, I say bomb all these call-centers. I don't live in the US, but I think that those sales agent jobs dealing with people in the US should be filled with US sales agents. Those tech support jobs for US customers should be filled with US college kids or recent graduates. Instead companies pay 300~400 dollars a month to a bunch of retards (I can count myself in this group, though give me a break I had been kicked out of my house so I took the first job I was offered), cheats, and thieves, so they can go ahead and make your experience on the phone a living hell.

16y ago