Mime-Version: 1.0
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 18:24:25 -0700
To: Michael Pearce 
Subject: All this Stream crap...

Okay, Michael -- enough's enough. While I sympathized with your initial 
comments about Stream International, and felt that ripping the lid off 
of their ridiculous "non-disclosure" policies would at least give the 
pot enough of a stir to make a difference, I am now of the considered 
opinion that you have carried the entire matter way too far. You seem 
to have taken what was initially a relatively good idea and elevated it 
into a personal vendetta against Stream International, publishing 
innuendo, rumor, exaggeration and outright falsehoods as the truth, in 
a manner which neither I nor the employees of Stream appreciate. I 
don't write these words lightly, nor should they be construed as 
reflecting upon my personal feelings toward you, which are now and 
have always been ones of gratitude and considerable respect. In this 
case, however, Michael, you are so full of shit it is coming out your 
ears.

For the record: yes, Stream does do outsource technical support for a 
number of major companies, and has strict non-disclosure policies 
that require employees to lie about the work they do. And yes, Stream 
does not train new employees adequately. These are both substantial 
problems, and areas where I disagree with Stream and believe they can 
do better. That's about as far as my agreement with you goes, however.

Your intial article caused a great deal of consternation among 
Stream's management, which is probably what you intended. What you 
probably didn't intend, however, was the anger and frustration you 
caused Stream's employees, whom you seemed to portray as a bunch of 
clueless newbies shoved in front of the phones with a sheet full of 
"standard" responses that neither they nor their supervisors really 
understood. In attempting to make Stream's managers look like idiots, 
you managed to tar us all with the same brush.

While training for new techs is in many cases inadequate, all new 
techs spend their first week taking calls with a senior tech on line, 
and are free to consult them whenever needed. Within a month, the 
average tech has attained a level of expertise easily higher than ninety 
percent of his callers. 

I'm not entirely sure where your arbitrary figure of three minutes for 
the average call came from. My average call length on my first team 
varied from ten to fifteen minutes, and I was repeatedly told that I 
was doing an excellent job. Currently, my average is under five, since 
the job is a bit more straightforward and less demanding. I know of no 
team where you are required to explain every call that runs over three 
minutes. If a tech continually takes 15-20 minutes per call, it is 
likely he will be asked to explain why, since most calls should take 
considerably less than that. The notion that a supervisor is constantly 
standing over each tech with a stopwatch is, however, idiotic and 
completely false. 

As if your first article wasn't enough, you have managed to compound 
the initial distortions and exaggerations with this month's opus. 
Having looked at the full article, reproduced on your web page, I am 
glad that your editor chose to remove so much of it. Your comments 
about Stream's policies regarding attendance, tardiness, personal 
phone calls, and the role of the Aspect system would be so wrong as to 
be laughable, were they not so bloody sad. 

And, again for the record, I am not, as you state, "defending Stream 
because I feel my job is in jeopardy." I'm doing this on my own, 
because I'm annoyed and slightly insulted. You state that among all the 
Stream employees who have contacted you, "none have denied the 
charges." Aside from agreeing with you regarding the inanity of the 
non-disclosure policy, and a few beefs with Stream's training 
procedures, I am writing this message to you to do just that -- I am 
denying your "charges." Your comments and conclusions about Stream 
are just plain wrong, and I'm pretty goddamned sick of hearing them. 
You have transformed Stream from a mildly annoying corporate 
environment into some kind of weird marriage of Orwell and Kafka, and 
described a company which bears almost no resemblance to the place 
where I have worked for the last 12 months.

First, the Aspect system. Yes, it logs sign-in and sign-out time. So 
does a time clock. However, there is no policy penalizing, docking or 
terminating employees who are "even the merest handful of seconds" 
tardy. Anyone who told you this is, frankly, full of crap. In my first 
team assignment, I was chronically late, up to 15 minutes, two to 
three times a day, due to family necessities. In the six months I served 
on the team, I was NEVER "docked," "punished," "berated," or otherwise 
harassed. My tardiness was only mentioned once, when my supervisor 
asked me whether a later schedule would be more convenient for my 
family commitments. This is scarcely the sort of conduct one would 
expect from the Hitlerian nightmare world you have invented at 
Stream.

You cannot be "docked" for being "a handful of seconds" late. Stream 
time cards are generated as Excel spreadsheets every two weeks by 
individual employees. In other words, I write my own time card, and 
enter the hours I have worked. I then print it out, give it to my 
supervisor for signature, and he gives it to payroll. Nowhere in the 
process does ANYONE match my claimed hours against the record on 
the Aspect system. How the hell can you "dock" someone for 30 
seconds, anyway?

I have worked on two different Stream teams. I have worked alongside 
individuals from four others. None have ever experienced what you 
described. One individual told me that he knew of only a single 
termination for excessive tardiness, and this was of an employee who 
was chronically 30 or more minutes late for work every day, and only 
after repeated warnings. To this day, I am sometimes late by as much 
as 15 minutes, and no one has yet so much as mentioned it.

You state that "late sign-ins with legitimate reason and advance 
notice" are held against the empoloyee and can result in termination. 
Wrong again. In the past three weeks, I have had to log in late three 
times, and left work several hours early on two other occasions. So 
long as I have sufficient Paid Time Off to cover the time, no one seems 
concerned. My supervisor went so far as to inform me that if I had 
family problems that required more time (and I do), he could authorize 
extra paid leave beyond my allotted time in order to take care of it. 
Again, this is not the kind of behavior that your vision of Stream 
would lead one to expect. 

"Want to make a local phone call for personal or business reasons 
during your break on the company phone? Forget it. Verboten. Someone 
is monitoring the system at all times, or at least the logs later in the 
day. You could get fired for that."

This comes as an enormous shock to me, since today I made no fewer 
than four (count 'em, four) personal phone calls and the storm troopers 
didn't show up to escort me off the site. I have made as many as ten 
personal phone calls from the site in a single day and have not been 
reprimanded in any way. Personal calls need to be coded by pressing 
the number "2" upon completion, however, so they are not logged in as 
business-related. This is understandable, since Stream's customers 
are billed based upon the number of business-related calls made and 
received, and they do not want to be billed for me calling my wife to 
find out when I should pick her up. Everyone at Stream makes personal 
phone calls on the Aspect, Michael. If any of your informants claim to 
have been fired for calling their families, then once more they are full 
of... Well, you get the idea. 

No one is "monitoring the system at all times," and no one goes over 
the logs "later in the day." Even if they wanted to, Stream simply 
doesn't have the manpower to do so. Supervisors sometimes listen in 
on tech's calls to make sure that they are following proper procedures 
and are being courteous. These calls are always discussed with the 
techs later. There is simply no way that each and every call can be 
monitored, since the average ratio of consultant to tech ranges from 
1:30 to 1:60. 

Your story about walking to a payphone to make personal calls may 
have come from my initial complaints that the phone system was out 
of order and could not make outgoing calls beginning with "9." This 
problem was remedied within two days of my joining the company, as 
a result of my specific request. It's no longer a problem, and was a 
purely technical error in the first place. 

Here's the truth of the matter, Michael. Stream is a corporation, just 
like any other. It is an employer, just like any other. It has its 
frustrations and boneheaded policies, just like any other company. In 
the main, however, its supervisors are extremely skilled and pleasant, 
its employees professional, and its policies at worst tolerable. Calling 
it "this most awful of companies, possibly the worst high-tech place 
to work in Oregon" is ridiculous, and leads me to suspect that you've 
never spoken to anyone who has the misfortune to work for Intel. The 
work is hard and demanding, but the pay is decent and the benefits 
relatively generous. It's worse than few and better than many. If it 
were "a kind of company written about in cyberpunk nightmare novels 
of the '80s, where machines watch your every move, and you can be 
fired for the slightest misdeed, if not mere capricious and arbitrary 
whim" I sure as hell wouldn't be working there anymore, and neither 
would anyone else.

You admit that you have never worked at Stream, and that your 
information comes exclusively from disgruntled ex-employees or 
unhappy current ones. You imply that those employees who defend 
Stream are doing so solely to protect their jobs. Goddam it, Michael -- 
how much well poisoning is enough? The horrors you describe do not 
exist, neither on my team, nor on any other team I am aware of. Your 
attempt to expose the hypocrisy and shortsightedness of Stream 
management has turned into an ugly, unpleasant mess, and I think it's 
about time you moved on to more productive topics before you alienate 
any more Stream employees.

BTW, your advice to potential customers, while basically sound, 
includes several items which will make individual techs' lives harder, 
and do nothing more than generate ill will. Asking a tech how long he 
has been on a given team is not an accurate gauge of his technical 
expertise, and it will invariably be seen by the tech in question as a 
challenge to his abilities. Asking whether a tech works for Stream is 
not "the only circumstance under which they may admit the truth 
without risk of termination," and most of them are so bloody pissed 
off at you and your advice that they would probably lie anyway just to 
spite you. I know of at least three who intend to do just that. You 
haven't managed to win any friends at Stream, at least not among 
those I work with. Most of them simply feel insulted. Nice job. 

Please understand, Michael, that while I'm rather angry about your 
articles, and still can't entirely understand what possessed you to 
take things so far, it does not in any way affect my friendship toward 
you, nor that of my wife. You're still welcome at my parties and I 
certainly look forward to seeing you in future.

Somewhat puzzled and hurt,
(Name withheld by request)

"I hold the line. The line of strength that pulls me through the fear." 
*San Jacinto* -- Peter Gabriel
_______________

>Thanks for the detailed response. Would you mind if I attached it to my web
>page as a response, so people reading the two articles can go and read
>yours? This is exactly what I wanted to see from the "other side." Oh, and
>let me know too if you want your name attached to the response.

Yup. Not a problem. Best not to use my name, however... I didn't reveal any
proprietary information, but I'd rather keep my name out of the current
brouhaha all the same.

>But every negative example I cited in the two were sent to me or told to me
>directly. I had never heard this much negativaty about a single company
>since talking to a few former Quark employees a couple of years ago.

I'm still completely baffled as to who could have come up with the
information you cited. Certainly none of the policies you discussed are
site-wide, if they exist at all. As I said, there is no way on earth that
Stream can possibly dock people for being 30 seconds late, nor do they have
the manpower to listen in on or review every call made during the day. As
for personal phone calls, everyone makes them, and there is a specific
policy for logging them so they won't be charged to the client.

I can't vouch for every team -- each has its own policies and procedures.
The fact is that if Stream were the nightmare you've been led to believe it
is, I would not have remained employed there for a year (and the only thing
that will make me leave at this point is an offer of more money). I have to
reiterate that I have never had a truly bad experience with any of Stream's
management. At worst they have been indifferent, at best they have been both
equitable and concerned for the welfare of those under them. I can only
think that there are some REAL screwey paranoids working there if anyone has
tried to imply that the Murray sight is such a horror. All I can say is that
I have never, never experienced any of the things you write about. If it
ever happened, it was on a different team, or took place before I started
working there.

>And I
>will rewrite the 2nd web page article so it looks less like I am attacking
>the actual workers than the management policies. You are right about that
>point.

My thanks. Yes, new techs are not always trained as well as they should be,
nor do they always get the equipment they need to do their jobs, but within
a couple of weeks I will match Stream techs against anyone.

Have fun with it,
Xxxxxxxx