First this $15 an hour Outsource price is a myth. The Company that provides the service has overhead and still charges at least $50 and hour for their services. Please check what the Geek Squad charges to get files off a drive: $250 for a good drive $500 for a failed drive and $50 to plop in RAM. I earned my keep last month.
Now as far as your district goes, it is a shame thier level of expertise is so low. We have some MSCEs, Net+s, and college people. Your situation is primarily due to several reasons.
1. You hired your buddies instead of performing proper interviews
2. Goverment Law for you to fill shortfall catagories regardless of skill
3. But the big reason is managements failure to provide proper training, because good training can overcome the other two reasons.
Your people are as only good as you are, and if your people suck, guess what...
UPS drills and constantly trains thier 8.50 an hour loaders and their 28.00 an hour drivers on company time until they are robots. However Techs get bogus SMS tests an CBTs which are almost worthless. They are expected to be all things to all people with no training. You want a network person, pay for some CISCO training. The only ones that achive without training are the aggressive ones.
Guess what, other companies pay for proper training, its called a return on investment. Most managment are ex-center and IE which only know how to say "Crack! Pop! Ha! Ya! Mule! Faster!....
You are offended, I see. The $15 dollar Myth is no Myth. You are comparing my apples to your oranges. There are a lot of IT folks who earn $15 an hour. And yes, the total cost is often two or three times higher because the outsource wage is not the outsource contracted hourly amount paid to the contracting firm. Even at $45 an hour, this is as cheap or cheaper than a UPS employee who can get a 3% 401k match, superior health benefits as a result of the kick-in that UPS provides, and UPS must plan monies to comply with their promise to offer a retirement fund to these employees.
Outsourcing allows the company to make a phone call to the contracting firm to remove an employee without challenge -- no HR nightmares that are incurred with a UPS-owned employee. The outsource staff can be increased or decreased according to project or the whim of the company. Only in cases of contracted long-term agreements is this affected. The company can also choose from a pool of trained and skilled employees -- something it doesn't have to worry about developing with internal staff.
To the assertion of MCE's, Network + and college education. This, too, existed in my district. Most of the certified folks were decent but not great. A college education is always a plus, I cannot argue this. What I can say is that 4 years of college a computer genius does not make. My father-in-law told me once that if you take a fool and give him the money for a college degree, what you get at the end of 4 years is a fool with a college degree.
As far as the certifications, I would argue with you until the end of time that the UPS tech with a certification is less adept at the given technology for which he certified than the same certified folks at other companies. Why? Because UPS does not allow a technician with a major certification to ever work on the technology at the level where the certification is needed. I know ImpactedTSG. This is a smart guy. He probably agrees with me on this. If I am wrong, he can correct me and I will not argue the point further -- I trust his opinion.
Oh, on the Geek Squad thing, Apples and Oranges again. The Geek Squad tech might do $250 worth of work on your system, but he gets a straight low wage ( I think they earn about $12.50 an hour -- I asked once.). This speaks to a dastardly company paying low wages for big returns on the work the employee returns. This sucks for the employee, but is smart financially for the business.
As for your 3 points;
1) No buddies were hired. I wouldn't hire a person to do something that I know they couldn't. Perhaps my thinking is foreign, but I believe UPS deserves better. This point you made is just an angry statement meant to hurt my feelings -- I am weeping as I type.
2) You may, in fact, have a really good point. I don't think I understand what it is though.
3)Training... This is one area that I have remained peaved about for a decade. On one hand I have never ever gotten over the utter lack of useful training for TSG Techs. On the other, I don't see a point to most industry standard training. What I would argue is that UPS could develop classroom-driven or 1-on-1 training for the proprietary software and hardware that it has deployed.
This topic (#3), goes to my point about having 2 really good techs per hub. These are the "Trained" folks who can direct the outsourced staff.
I also agree with you on the SMS tests and other meager and insulting forms of training.
UPS is a great company. UPS is a horrible company for a motivated and interested IT Tech. It can be both things at the same time. It is hard to accept this sometimes.
I recently left UPS. I still have stock, a full 401k plan, a future retirement and a lot of friends that are still there -- still pissed about the lack of respect they get and still mad at themselves for not having done something about it.
In the time that I have left, I have come to realize that every criticism that I had was mostly true. Sometimes I had mean-spirited or misguided notions for why I believed the criticisms, however, regardless of their genesis, they were mostly all correct.
I truly believe that TSG Techs are a decent group of people who want to do more and have a better say in their company. The problem is that you have always been considered second-class employees and probably always will. This is not my opinion, it is true. I sat on meetings during the inception of the TSG Tech position in the early 90's. It was a through-away job that never got thrown away. It was a stop-gap until the company got the "technology age" up and installed. The problem is that UPS, like most other companies, didn't have the wisdom to see that technology was ever changing and increasing. UPS didn't see a Diad 6. It saw, back then, a Diad 1.x -- ocassional updates to a single generation technology -- not an iteration.
You don't have to agree with me. I probably won't post again for a while. As my grandma would say, "I take spells."
