NatWest/RBS: Daily Mail is now playing the "race" card, I'm appalled!

[PoppyWearer]

I've just had the misfortune to see the Daily Mail online's front page and noticed that they are taking the angle on the NatWest/RBS banking problem that they employ IT staff in India.

I mean, seriously, that's appalling in this day and age.

ALL banks and IT companies employ staff in India because a) they are cheaper than staff in the UK, US and Europe and it's a way to keep costs down for shareholders and b) often the staff are better trained and qualified.

(I'm speaking as someone who used to recruit and manage IT staff in India and who has some knowledge of how banking IT operates.)

All of the quality control and management will still be in the UK.

I'm just at how they can get away with printing this rubbish.

(I know, I know, it's the DM, what should I expect, but I always have a glance so that I know what MIL has been reading and also for the sleb twaddle.)

FWIW, I'm not saying that what happened isn't terrible, but this....has nothing to do with it and is just irresponsible journalism.

'Well you suspect this and you expect the other.'

No, I only expect this.

'Fact is that lots of people seem very happy to point the finger at the staff in India due to their personal prejudices.'

You seem to know a lot about other people's prejudices. You're not prejudiced are you?

The personal prejudices of the finger pointers I mean, not the personal prejudices of the Indian staff.

Don't be silly claig.

I've just read this story and I don't think (unusually for the Daily Mail) that racism is the point. They are saying that lots of jobs have been outsourced at very low wages, and that the IT support teams are often in India (which perhaps makes it more difficult to communicate efficiently?) They continue: "Since being rescued by the taxpayer RBS has shed about 30,000 jobs, including more than 20,000 UK-based roles, and has outsourced work abroad.

Some of its IT support teams are now said to be based in India, even though the under-fire banking group?s headquarters remain in Edinburgh.

The Unite union questioned whether the ?off-shoring? job cuts had left the bank unable to cope after the software failure."

What struck me was why in the first few days it seemed that we kept seeing the customer service employee on our TV screens. Why weren't all the senior management on our TV screens explaining how this happened, what they were doing about it and how they would recompense anyone who had suffered as a result?

It's not racist to point out that 1000's upon 1000's of British workers have been made redundant to make way for people who are cheap only on paper.

I work for a major organisation who has largely out-sourced its IT to Bangalore. Initial figures indicate 1 bum on seat = 10k. Actuality? The Indian data-centres do not have 1 person to 1 computer so it's actually 3 bums to one seat. Lateral thinking is not possible because of the culture, where everything comes top down. Everything takes between 4 and 6 times as long. Development required by an off-shore team often needs to be provided in full pseudo-code by an on-shore person.

People are shipped to Europe with airfares, expensive visas, apartment hotels and bonus'. There is a woman at my account whose apartment costs as much as my net wage - yet on paper she is "cheaper" as this shit is all written off against tax.

I'm amazed quite frankly that it's taken so long for a big fuck up to occur. Batch processing is amongst the easiest IT job (imo). Accidents happen and it got fucked up Tuesday night and it was spotted weds morning. However, some genius somewhere decided to actually REPEAT the KNOWN mistake not just weds night, but thurs night too.

I'm an IT professional undermined by people who buy degrees from a guy with a printer on the corner and who promises the earth for 10k.

The workers in question rarely grasp the functional complexities of the situation, those that do move swiftly on to the next, better paying employer leaving a massive gap of knowledge as the person in question is then left to train their replacement.

In a time when jobs are so desperately needed in the UK, it's outrageous that a bailed out (by the tax-payer!) Company can send work overseas and claim dodge tax benefits for doing so.

A major UK company (oft cited for tax evasion) found themselves on a sticky wicket last spring when its outsourced testing was brought to a halt due to a corrupt government bringing down the internet and rioting in Egypt.

That's a company most of you use daily. Your names, adresses, phone numbers, passwords and credit card numbers are in India where theft of such details is rife.

Welcome to globalisation where the corporate snake is eating itself.

Henry Ford of Ford motors understood that you need to pay your consumer base to retain them as consumers.

It's not racist to wonder Wtf is going on.

Cultural differences are very real and it's not racist to acknowledge these.

I've just linked to the Register article that the Daily Mail is referencing.

Presumably that's also racist because it mentions India.

Presumably Unite has to be equally castigated as racist, for it is highlighting the off-shoring issue?

Any Unite members on this thread?

Op, you will find that most rational intelligent people do not read that comic.

Poppy I am astonished that you feel offshoring has increased quality of work. Almost every major fuck up that I had to deal with at work was caused by offshore IT companies who bid low budget to win business and then couldn't deliver.

IMO it is only a matter of time before the jobs start to swing back the other way, these disasters are expensive, and as AlpinePony says only cheap on paper.

Alpine and AliBaba ok, that's your experience with Indian outsourcing, good to have a balance. But it wasn't my experience of working with colleagues/employees in Bangalore. We saw plenty of unsuitable people during the hiring process who would have been cheap "bums on seats", but....we didn't hire them.

Yes, Indian employees make mistakes. So do British ones. And American ones, and French ones, and Italian ones, etc etc.

For the record, I am talking as someone who ought to be bitter about this kind of thing, as I was made redundant and my job/team moved to a cheaper place (the States, as it happens, but it could equally well have been India).

But EVEN IF the coding mistakes happened in India in this case (which we don't know - personally I'm doubtful of the DM using investigative journalism given the number of mistakes I've spotted in my casual reading of the odd article here and there) the buck stops with the management in the UK. End of story. There is no need for the DM to use this to whip up anti-India sentiments in its readers.

I really need to change my bookmark to the DM to that one with the pictures of kittens. My life would then be so much better!

PoppyWearer

But EVEN IF the coding mistakes happened in India in this case (which we don't know - personally I'm doubtful of the DM using investigative journalism given the number of mistakes I've spotted in my casual reading of the odd article here and there) the buck stops with the management in the UK. End of story.

The investigative journalism comes from The Register and the article I linked to. The DM article even references The Register. The register's sources are people who, until recently, worked at RBS in the very division where the problem has arisen.

^There is no need for the DM to use this to whip up anti-India sentiments in its readers.

I really need to change my bookmark to the DM to that one with the pictures of kittens. My life would then be so much better!^

I read the article. I didn't see it as racist. I think this tells us rather more about your particular prejudices. In your view Mail readers are ignorant proles, with racism seething under the surface of their thick skulls, racism which is just waiting to be triggered off by a newspaper article.

D'you think we're better off not mentioning race at all? Should we, Guardian-like, delete any mention of ethnicity, race or skin colour in case it sets off the ravening working classes? Better keep them under control, eh?

I jus think the DM like to write 'shocking' headlines. Wasnt racist.

The story that annoyed me bout the bank thing was the one bout the person who had to spend the weekend in jail coz culdnt pay bail. Well mayb u shuldnt hav been in jail in the first place.

DM kitten block for firefox

My dp works in IT,he writes software and has a lot of experience in the financial sector. It's no secret in the business that Indian/off shore code/services aren't as good quality as that which is based in the UK.It has nothing to do with race.People have been complaining about this for years and as the wages in India etc rise people are starting to question the wisdom of going off shore.

He firmly believes this wouldn't have happened if they'd been based in the UK.Oh and there is masses of work(currently rising) in what he does over here so he has no axe to grind.

Personally I think it's appalling that banks have caused a major crisis,have been bailed out by tax payers in this instance and have decided to axe British tax payer jobs whilst giving the same people who bank with them a cheaper,riskier service so they get to make even more profit-nice!!!

Do you write code Poppy?Managing people who can actually write code doesn't make you able to make sweeping untrue statements or even understand the industry.Indeed a lot of IT cock ups are often down to managers who just can't cut code and thus can never understand how the whole system really works.

I also take issue with the better qualified and trained bollocks.People go offshore to save money-period.

My dp has the reputation as being an outstanding coder,extremely good at his job and he's 100% British trained(along with most of his colleagues).His company are currently struggling with outsourcing to a Eastern European country which is proving to be a total nightmare as they're not up to the standard,can hardly speak any English and on top of his work dp and his colleagues are having to mop up the mistakes. Said company are regretting going down the offshore route as it has been more hassle than it's worth.

Jobs get out sourced to save money if the people doing the job are not really up to it who cares we are saving money, makes me so cross.

Having had to deal with an over seas call centre whose staff clearly had the collective IQ of a dead fish in the area they were meant to be dealing with is enough to make you want to bang your head off the wall, they just kept reverting to the script they are given, useless totally useless

poppy I too have interviewed staff, as I previously mentioned. I'm a technical and functional expert and to put it in to perspective my expertise is in largely Oracle and teradata with emphasis on CC&B.

You might talk to someone who has a PhD. I talk to someone who talks "employee" and "salary" - Oracle OCP's will know who risible this is when the person you're interviewing claims to be better on paper.

My opening line (after introductions) is always "tell me something about yourself that isn't on your CV". In scores of interviews not one has understood this question.

There are not enough laptops per employee.

After fucking up multiple times I had one young chap thrown off the account. A few weeks later he emailed me to thank me for my guidance, he now had a new qualification and a promotion to the UK. A man who couldn't perform a basic select statement.

There are some brilliant Indian IT staff. The majority of the Poles I work with are exceptionally talented - and getting paid western European wages... + hotels + flights. When I questioned where the hotels & flights were being billed to the information was buried and I was removed...

Egyptian CV's are usually good for a laugh. Each and every one reads as a cross between the brilliance of Alan Turing combined with the business "nous" of Richard Branson. In reality button-pressers.

I don't blame the individuals involved, why the fuck would it have been their life ambition to be lorded over by a US giant? They're just trying to pay their bills like the rest of us.

Autonomy is a filthy word.

It's not racist at all to be anti-offshoring, is it? Surely this is one case where lefties and the Daily Mail should be in accordance?

JosephineCD - I agree. Off-shoring has cost 1000s of UK jobs in the IT industry alone. I have twice faced redundancy as a result of it and DH once went out of business and had to make staff redundant because his main customer went to an off-shore company.. I don't see that it is at all racist to say that you would prefer those jobs and those skill sets to stay within the UK.

Name changed for reasons which will become obvious...

My job is being offshored by the very organisation this thread is about. I've spent many weeks training a (very nice) Indian person to do my job and am about to leave a place I've spent my life working for.

Whilst the Offshore team (and I'm hearing this from every area of our organisation that this is happening in) are intelligent and hard-working, they are used to a deeply hierarchical, rigid structure and nobody will ever admit they don't know how to do something in front of their bosses. They work from a script/process document and when it goes wrong, they do not have the skills, experience or background knowledge to fix things. The people they have taken over from have 20+ years of systems experience - some of the new guys don't even know what banking does.

As Niceguy and Alpine have pointed out and the events of the last week and a half have proven (both in the IT area where it took so long to recover, and in the knock-on where it affected our ability to produce data for customers, there was absolute 'computer says no' syndrome going on), there is no idea of how to spot something's gone wrong, or where to begin looking for a work-around or a fix to it when it does. They seem unable to think outside the box but to be fair that is largely because they have been given between 4 and 7 weeks to learn a process and a whole industry, not to understand why and how it is done. It was a disaster waiting to happen, quite frankly.

That's nothing to do with them being Indian, it IS to do with the whole ill-thought out process of off-shoring. And, tbh, it is gutting to see your organisation advertising all-UK call centres as a major selling point when you know damn well that the person in that UK call centre will be picking up the phone to Delhi to find out the answer to the customer's question...

I love your name!

What will you do? When the development was taken away from us in 2008, most of us moved in to a sort of grey-area middle-management type thing - ITIL mgt, process mgt, PM, etc., etc.

I remember when training rather than saying "did you follow that?" I'd have to word everything so carefully, "which bits of that did you follow?".

I'm a logical git - being a developer by trade. I'd end up wanting to bash heads when someone ever-so-earnest would present me with data representing a customer base of 60 million with a country population of 16 million!

The "all UK call centres" thing has infuriated me too - all across social media (mn included) I've read things like "well I chose my bank because it's got a UK call centre" - an overwhelming majority seem to think that IT staff pick up the phone and help you with your bill. And there's no concept of what goes on behind the scenes at all.

There are also (imo) massive security holes. E.g., our production db is local, as are our staff. However, our DWH is administrated in India as is our copy of production - the amount of sensitive data on those two systems is just incredible. You've got people shredding every single item which pops through their letterbox and yet "we" are sending all these details off shore to multiple locations and to staff who've not been security-vetted.

I worked at RBS and was outsourced to India. I was paying tens of thousands per year in taxes. Now I don't pay any (well not direct ones anyway), because I no longer work. That's cost other tax payers a six figure sum already.

Outsourcing by a publicly owned business such as RBS is bad news. Obviously some lefties are conflicted in that they are outraged that a 'minority' is being criticised, except of course there are literally millions of Indians trained in IT and they could replace every UK worker ten times over, but on the other hand people are being sacked, but on the other hand those people are (were) high paid, working for banks, so they deserved to lose their jobs, the bastards.

Anyway, my experience was that the users at RBS hated dealing with India (thick accents, not recognising place names, locations, businesses, common English words). The UK-based IT staff also hated them, mostly because they were going to put most of us out of a job, and for that reason it is obviously damaging to have the two together on one team, because the UK staff are willing the Indians to fail and look stupid, because the more they fuck up, the more likely you are to keep your own job. So a smooth working relationship is not really in prospect.

I don't think outsourcing to India is especially relevant to RBS's problems.
I do think that outsourcing the development and maintenance of a set of critical, elderly, much patched, largely undocumented and mysterious core systems to anybody other than the staff who have cared for them for years (and have some small inkling of what they do, why they do it and how to get them back on track when it goes tits up) is short-sighted.

I am not implying that the staff in India aren't very professional and well-qualified. I've worked with them and they do a great job. But looking after these systems can be a bit of a Dark Art and getting rid of the people who know the systems leaves RBS vulnerable, as has been proven in recent days.