Indian call center workers suffer from heart disease, family discord and depression: CNN

Indian call centers expanded in the late 90s and early 2000s and since then have served as a social laboratory of sorts… a few years ago a stream of articles covered Dell’s outsourcing of their tech support to India. Apparently the accents – despite the neutralization training – were not tolerable to customers in the US, who often adopted a fairly adverserial and rude attitude. And in their defence, they were having trouble with their computers which they needed fixed; they weren’t interested in, nor looking for, a cross cultural experience! Eventually, Dell shutdown the Indian call center after receiving a ton of borderline violent feedback.

But the call center saga continues. CNN reports that a myriad ills affect employees at Indian call centers. From weight gain, heart disease, depression to family discord! I wonder why it happens. Let’s see… you sit in a chair for 8-10 hours a day, speaking with people in a different country who you can never really relate to, supporting products or services that you may never have used or care much for! Often, the call center operators don’t even directly work for the companies whose brands they support. And often its more than a brand at a time. Very hard to see how anyone could stay motivated in an environment like this.

Why VCs aren’t investing in Pakistani companies

While there are a couple of exceptions to the implication in the headline, WebLo and Scrybe for instance, it does appear to be generally true. Pakistani companies are not attracting venture attention in general. Sure, you may have a few founders comfortable with the Bay Area scene making their case effectively and pulling money in. But that would not be due to the VC industry’s interest in Pakistan, or the identification of this country as strategic to their plans. Why is this so? A horrendously written article in the Business Recorder claims that it is because of 1) a lack of innovation and 2) an absence of the “hard work” ethic.

Entrepreneurship vs. Labour Unions

Recently, DPS, an Islamabad based software services company had to layoff about 30-45 people due to a customer walking away. The nature of the services business is such that unless you have been operating for a while and have accumulated a veritable war chest, you can’t really have a significant percentage of your staff on the bench… particularly when you don’t have a pipeline that gives you comfort about being able to gainfully employ your engineers again. So, in order to save the company, and the jobs of the other 50-100 people, you decide to lay people off. Unfortunate, but completely reasonable and logical. In fact, not doing so would be tantamount to gross negligence and irresponsibility.

But how do people react to an event like this in Pakistan? Our tech services industry is relatively new, and employment in the past has mainly been characterized by guaranteed jobs with the government, labour unions and other borderline-socialist instruments that stack up the odds against entrepreneurship. It was amazing to read some of the comments Green&White got when they posted this story: (More after the fold)

Rickshaw Wisdom and HR Policies

Hopefully you can read the message on the back of this rickshaw, but if not, I’ll spill the beans in just a minute. On my way to work this morning, the above is what I saw. A beaten down orange rickshaw with a message that the HR managers in our local IT industry need to adopt as a mantra, “Ag lagay teria’n majbooria’n noo’n”. For those who don’t speak Punjabi (you don’t know what you’re missing out on!!), this loosely means, “Damn your compulsions!”. This significantly raises the bar for the pearls of Rickshaw Wisdom, my primary source of values and inspiration.

Thieves and Scoundrels

I recently heard a rather shocking story involving a local software firm (which we will leave unnamed, for it is barely germane to the rest of the story) and one of its former employees. Apparently, said company was having some payment problems with a foreign customer. By all accounts, the foreign customer was being quite a pain and refusing to pay several months development fees without initially having contested them. The local firm was using undelivered work as leverage to get their money – pay us for our work or you won’t get the deliverable. Fairly normal till here. Happens all the time. Until we add the spicy, local dimension…. The foreign customer, sensing that they would have to pay to get the code, contacted one of the senior developers on the project and essentially asked him what the “alternatives” were to get their hands on the deliverable.