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Comment by ommunist | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather bet that real Dell outsourced tech support to some company in India, where very often business ethics towards customer records is virtually non-existent. But what else can you expect? If you are not paying decent money, be prepared that your data woll be sold, unless you are ReallY able to enforce control over it. I seriously doubt that Dell tech support is ISO 27000 compliant.

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> If you are not paying decent money, be prepared that your data woll be sold, unless you are ReallY able to enforce control over it

From what I can see from a bit of Googling, Dell does pay their tech support people decent money. If Glassdoor is to be believed [1] [2], Dell tech support people in India make about 340k rupees a year, or about 28k per month.

That appears to be a middle class income for an Indian city dweller [3] [4].

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Dell-Technical-Support-Asso...

[2] If the above link does not work without you being logged into a Glassdoor account, try Googling for "how much does dell pay tech support people in india" and clicking the Glassdoor result.

[3] http://qr.ae/RgYML2

[4] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/16/are-you-in-t...

ommunist can correct me but I believe he was referring to having Dell tech support being located in a western country, instead of being based in asia. Yes it's more expensive to keep operations here, but we are more familiar with the business practices as well as the laws. Of course this is a price of "the race to the bottom".

> we are more familiar with business practices

Almost everywhere in the world had been doing business for thousands of years before the US existed. It's pretty careless to say that Asians are not 'familiar with business practices'.

They may not be all about your business practices. If yours get too weird and uptight they'll just return to doing business with the rest of the world and won't miss you too much.

It's fairly well known and accepted that regulations and rules in western countries are FAR stricter than those in Asian and Indian countries. If you care about privacy EU > US > everywhere else (any non western country has literally zero protections or laws about privacy that are enforced), if you care about workers being treated decently EU and US are bastions of fairly mediocre to bad treatment, everywhere else is sweatshops and de facto slavery.

That’s not really true, though. Look at Japan.

Sweatshops and de facto slavery isn’t everywhere, but you’re kinda right, countries which were colonies before – mostly in Africa, Asia and South America – tend to have less wealth and prosperity.

> ...countries which were colonies before – mostly in Africa, Asia and South America – tend to have less wealth and prosperity

The US, Canada, and Australia are rather prominent counterexamples.

They also are countries where there were enough immigrants that the native population was mostly displaced – it’s unfair to put them in the same category as colonies where only a tiny immigrant population ruled over the native population.

And even in some of these countries the wealth and prosperity for the native population has been an issue even in the past decades.

All three of which have systematically exterminated their native populations, to make room for settlers.

The ones that survived have gotten, and are still getting a pretty poor deal, too.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are also good counterexamples.

Japan is maybe the lone exception in Asia, even when you include South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Then again I could be proven wrong.

Either chaostheory edited their post o you missed a "the" before "business practices", presumably referring to the business practices of western countries.

I cut and paste the quote directly.

I'm going to say that you probably didn't.

EDIT: let's say you did, even though I doubt it. Even then I feel that it's pretty obvious that I was referring to familiarity with western business practices (and laws) and not business practices in general.

The salary is an annual salary not a monthly salary. 340 K INR is 5K USD ie: they are paid $5000 a year.

That would put them squarely in the upper middle bracket in India.

What do I expect? I expect the people that I send sensitive data to to be able to protect it. Blaming their overseas offices and partners doesn't make it better or relieve them of responsibility.

And Dell isn't some too-cheap-to-be-true, fly-by-night operation. Saying that their customers were basically asking for it is bollocks as well.

What do I expect? I expect the people that I send sensitive data to to be able to protect it.

Desire, maybe, but expect? That's so far from reality are there any grounds for expecting that these days? Has any company successfully kept /all/ sensitive data from hackers?

At one point in the 1990s, Dell shifted all of its tech support to India, ruining its world-class staff in Round Rock (TX).

Complaints got so bad that they re-established the Round Rock organization for corporate customers; retail buyers were still stuck with the offshore staff.

Funny how the more things change the more they stay the same. In Australia they outsourced all their support to India. They nearly lost numerous big corporate and government accounts, so they brought back support to Ausyralua for corporates pretty quickly.

I can't understand why these overseas call centres are do terrible! I don't want to resort to racial stereotyping, what is it though that cause such dreadful customer service experiences?!?

Who cares where it is? Regardless of the country or the salary, phone support workers can be corrupted by a relatively small chunk of cash. Since when has first line tech support ever been a comfortable, dependable 'job for life'. Go blame India if it makes you happy, but bored and broke workers will sell you out anywhere in the world.

>If you are not paying decent money, be prepared that your data woll be sold,

This is a terrible idea. How do I determine what is decent money enough not to have my information leaked? Do I have to buy Macs for life in order to prove that I don't want my information leaked? that's silly!

> I'd rather bet that real Dell outsourced tech support to some company in India, where very often business ethics towards customer records is virtually non-existent.

Can you provide a citation to support your claim about business ethics in India? That's a rather negative statement about a large number of people. I've downvoted your comment but I'm happy to reverse that if you can back up your claim.

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