Far From Neutral Notions - Philippine politics, culture and stuff

Just thoughts on outsourcing

I once noted in a previous post that the real peril of outsourcing is not the risk of ‘losing seats’ but becoming too reliant on the revenue the industry generates. However, this recent news report is cause for concern:

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 4% [?]

Hi, my name’s insert name, from insert company name, calling on behalf of another company name, and I’m an outsourced employee from the Philippines. Yes sir/ma’am, that often means I get paid less than folks with the same job on the other side of the Pacific, because we sell our labor cheap so we can get the jobs you gave to India and Mexico.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

I was late for work for the first time ever today. I hate coming in late, mostly because it means I’ll be going out late, too. In fact, I’d rather be absent than late, but sadly, that wasn’t an option. My body must have been trying to recapture the energy I lost - I’ve only had six hours of sleep in two days - and was making up for lost time. So anyway, I woke some time up past 7, to the ringing of my cellphone. Somebody at the office was trying to confirm if I was gonna be absent. I groggily opened my eyes and saw sunlight streaming through my windows, a phenomenon I’ve sadly become unfamiliar with. Needless to say, my first few words for the day were “Shit! Oh Shit” and some other choice expletives; the reasons being that I was late, and that I’d be dealing with my client from hell again.
Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 2% [?]

The last week or so I’ve seen my client morph from being a simple know-it-all wannabe to a bonafide client from hell, and he is starting to piss me off. A hundred revisions on the design concept later, he finally decides on a design. So I code the whole thing. Took me hours because he just had to have that diagonal TV-line pattern effect on everything, which by the way is a nightmare to position via CSS because you need to have the lines align “just right”, or there’d be “bumps”.

There’d be the times he’d go color-blind on me and insist that the colors must match precisely - which they do, he just gets sidetracked by simple optical illusions like a drop shadow or a gradient effect on the background. I ended up asking him if he’d just “Print Screen” the whole thing and use the eye-dropper tool in Photoshop to check. And he still insists that since the web palette is restricted to so many colors, the difference won’t show up. And he expects me to what? Give every visitor to his site a brand new 17-inch color monitor?

A recent blunder: he told me to change the graphic on some placeholder images I had. The data is supposed to be dynamically retrieved from a database, and the placeholder images are just there as a reference for me. So I go, “Well they’re just placeholder images… aren’t you going to feed live data from your server anyway? When the site goes live, those dummy images won’t be the ones there.” And he goes: “Well, I just don’t like how they look. Give them some of that TV-line pattern thingy.”

WTF?!?

Popularity: 2% [?]