Barry is exactly right about Bank of America here.

BAC, after all, is a combination of dozens of companies merged over the last 30 years that were never actually integrated. The mergers “worked” because the old NCNB HR department ruthlessly squeezed down personnel costs. These are “process” people, after all, who believe that you can identify tasks that can be done by one person, then train that person and pay him/her well below average.

I worked for them for a year, and I saw this in action.

The team I worked on was who you went to when no one else could figure out your problem. We concentrated on Exchange and Outlook, but covered other technologies as well.

We were like the special forces of Bank of America tech teams — when no one else could solve a problem, including often the vendors of the software/hardware involved (who should know the absolute most about it), we came in and usually kicked the shit out of the problem.*

Bank of America, after I left, replaced my very, very good team with a team mostly offshored to India. Of course, like many (perhaps most) offshored work, it was terrible. They had 1/10 the knowledge my team had possessed, poor English skills and a complete cultural disconnect from the Americans they were working with. My former team went from being one of the highest-rated and best-known tech teams in BofA (where the IT department alone is 12,000 strong), to one of the worst.

*The best example of this I had is where I figured out that the network card in the laptop of some high-powered exec was slightly flaky, so that any small number of packets was fine, but any large number didn’t work correctly.

The problem was, the only time she sent or received a large number of packets was when she was dealing with email, so it flaked out only here. Other Bank of America tech teams (including another Exchange team) was convinced it was an Exchange server problem. Dell didn’t want to hear that it was a laptop problem, as it meant in this one replacing the whole laptop (integrated NIC) or motherboard, at least.

Finally, after running hours of packet sniffers, making packet loss graphs, and a bunch of other technical wizardry as well as arguing with Dell for basically a day straight, arguing with the exec herself (“This laptop is brand new! It should work right! I AM NOT sending it back!”) and other BofA tech teams for two days more, Dell agreed to replace the laptop.

And all was solved, just as I knew it would be. Try that from India.

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