Slashdot Mirror
MIT Students Get an Education in Software Development
John Valenti writes "Philip Greenspun's Blog had an interesting entry for December 1: 'It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India...'"
when Indian developers are even cheaper than grad students!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The interesting thing is that it's not that it was crap, but rather that it was done in India. Had they had some firm in the US do it, it wouldn't make the headlines...
There are equally good and equally bad firms all over the word that do development... India is no exception.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I see even the biggest of schools aren't immune to Microsoft's grasp, and PHBs aren't excluded by acedemia.
:D
Heh, the University I attended wouldn't hire any of their graduates either. For the few positions I saw open up while I was graduating, most of them were filled with people whom had no degree or a 2-year degree with varying experience (some had decent experience, some had little more than the average student.) Nothing wrong with either type of person, of course, but it shows the faith the Uni had in its own undergrads.
I guess I should have seen the warning signs, but I was told I would make lots of money and be able to pick and choose my job with a bachelor's degree
Juliard students get a lesson in music.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I guess that it's hard for the school administrators to soak money off a project unless it's got a big budget. Perhaps a conversation to a close friend goes like this: "Yea, we're outsourcing the project to an Indian company which is paying me to consult"
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
...is right here.
Lots of familiar points are made - timezone differences impede voice communications, geography impedes physical communications, "fire and forget" projects are not very common, etc. Seems like it can be made to work, though, if folks on the project take the time to keep the communication lines open.
The Army reading list
Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT... .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system. In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.
Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India. But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort: OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given). During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static
The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."
Students began to wake up.
A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi". It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.
Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.
# Posted by Philip Greenspun on 12/1/03; 10:57:50 AM - Comments [20] Trackback [2]
Yeah, the first thing i did when i looked at this great effort of MIT was, where is the software!
So i poked arround and its on the faq (and i seem to remember i got email from them when i asked). They made it with a microsoft CMS piece of shit software and some other stuff.
The good part about it is that teachers just do their stuff in HTML and most of the infrastructure is basicaly static with some MSCMS stuff arround it.
I guess there are many good things about it, but tech infrastructure is not one of them.
NO SIG
However, this (in addition to a weakening dollar) will eventually lead to equilibrium and a return of jobs as manufacturing is able to afford more workers locally. Additionally, it's somewhat symbolic that India has worked on a project that will ultimately allow other disadvantaged countries to develop their own technology resources off of information, hopefully returning to the pool of public knowledge rather then proprietary.
And MIT students get a lesson in economics as well.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Here I was, unemployed, using all my contacts to try to get in on the programming for OpenCourseware, and they outsourced it to India while I struggled to pay the rent.
I think it's time for me to contact my state elected representatives and let them know how MIT is harming the local economy by sending work out of the country when there are top notch people unemployed here, and suggest that I'd be unhappy if the state were to give MIT any particular financial breaks or other incentives.
"MIT Graduates Can't Find Jobs to Pay Back Student Loans"
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT...
.html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system. In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.
Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India. But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort: OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given). During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static
The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."
Students began to wake up.
A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi". It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.
Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I appreciate the point you are making, but I don't think it was posted with ill intent. I think the point that is being made is that MIT should have a large pool of talented, cheap programmers to draw on. So why outsource?
Where abouts in India did you find these programmers?
Yours Truly,
Lumberg
Manager,
Intertech
Don't start batting the "racist" word about like it's a ping pong ball. "Regionalist" would be more appropriate, but of course you wanted mod points, and what better way than by calling the slashdot editors racist.
US should think twice before preaching other countries on Free Market Economy!
/. either!
India wasn't very pleased when Coca Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and other took over the local fast food chains...but they didn't complain in
It is news for mediocre CS graduates who saw IT was paying well 4 years ago and hoped to jump on the high wage bandwagon despite their mediocrity, instead of picking and choosing their profession and going at it with excellence.
Intelligent, creative, hardworking people need not worry as they create work rather than follow it.
The case of University of Waterloo, Canada. One of the most famous university for computer studies They have a large co-op student population, many of them without a work for credit. And they bought (Yes, buy, not even getting someone to write one) software for student registration system and their web-based e-mail server, instead of getting students to write one. Good thing is that I am nt in computer science.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
because it looks like MIT chose a) the vendor and technology and b) the contractor to do with work with little investigation.
a) Speaks to their inability to even attempt to investigate various options WRT technology. Not encouraging from a place of learning.
b) Speaks to their inability to even attempt to use a neccessary IT project as something that could benefit their students and serve as a learning experience for the school and it's customers (the students).
I expect brainless, off-the-cuff, short-sighted decisions like this from PHB's, not from a center of learning.
Yes, I would like fries with that.
Yeah, that sounds pretty consistent with most companies. Take a silly task, have a outside company take care of it, and it just so happens that they do everything in India. A friend of mine works for Sapient, and he says all he does is have conference calls with the other side of world! I guess if he got hired tho, the MIT grads have a good chance too!
Another interesting spin was what a fella Rahul was saying about the demon of capitalism. Those that can do it cheaper and better will always get the money. Whether it is trully better or not is up for debate, but for those that are in industry know that most of the time, it is in the very least a very viable option. The thing that i want to put up to the flame is what people think of the "capitalistic" approach to the forum posting. I have heard all kinds of politicians speak on this: encouraging companies to stay here, global diversity increases the welfare for everyone, and i was curious what kind of experience or sources people might have to support either idea.
Graduate students at MIT are not hired to do production programming work, but rather to do research that pushes the boundaries of current knowledge.
Riiiiiight. That would explain why 90% of the world's steel production is overseas. Because weakening dollar prompted manufacturers to bring it back to the U.S. since we already had existing infrastructure.
That would also explain why it took actual Federal legislation to keep 50% of the semiconductor founderies in the U.S. when we started with 90% of them.
This isn't about hating Indians because they're a different culture. This is about watching high tech U.S. jobs vanish overseas to some $2 a day worker so some corporate boardroom bozo can buy his 5th Rolls. My question is this: When all the people in the U.S. are unemployed or under employed because all the formerly high paying - high tech jobs are overseas, who's going to buy the $50 widgits (that cost $1 to make overseas)?
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
well.. usually such things are done in-house(in university), and act as practice work along as being real useful work. it surprises me that they outsourced such a thing(that is so closely related to studies afterall) instead of using it to educate their students(are they a moneymaker/publicity/grant_magnet or education institution?). after that it doesn't really matter where it went.. india, canada, mexico, new york, does it matter? no.
..well.. actually i'm just going to see if there's something related to my current studies there.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This is not "some company outsourced a project to India." This is "MIT outsourced a project to India." MIT is different from "" both because of their presumed easy access to relatively inexpensive but highly technically-competent labor and because for many of the people in the core audience of Slashdot (geeks), MIT stands as something of the Shining City On the Hill. It's an overstatement to compare MIT->geeks to Mecca->Muslims, but there's definitely an element of reverence and respect we have for the institution and its students.
So having MIT decide to outsource a project like this to India (ignoring for the moment the Microsoft component) is significant and newsworthy to many of us.
There are at least a few people on this site who are unemployed due to work being outsourced to...wherever. For years there has been strong pushback in the industrial sector to keep jobs local and not ship them overseas. It says nothing about the quality of the product (at least not so much anymore), or the intelligence of the people making the product (clearly India's educational system is doing its job).
So what's wrong with a Nationalist trend? There's lots of precedence for it having nothing to do with race.
I've been following this "outsourcing to India" thing for a while. I have come to several conclusions. The bigger picture here is NOT the fact that developers in North America are losing development contracts, this is just the continuation of a ball that is already rolling.... [read on for more drivel!]
Conclusion 1) US companies (among others, I'm canadian, it is no exception up here) are going to have to start doing a better job of giving customers and clients value for their budget. Call me a chump, I wanna make a ton of cash just as much as the next guy, but billing someone $100-$200 US/Hour and milking them for all they're worth is not (in my opinion) a good way to do business.
Conclusion 2) Lots of Indian guys are really smart. I hope this doesn't come as a surprise, but so are a lot of people from a lot of other ethnicities. I myself am white trash, but I know a lot of stupid canadian people too, as well as a ton of programmers in Canada who really otta be flipping burgers.
Conclusion 3) Corporations (in general) don't care about their employees, economics, or anything else, but rather, their bottom dollar. They don't care who they have to screw out of money, so long as it ends up in their own account.
Software development just seems to be the latest trend in an already downward spiral. It is the continuation of that which has already started as some slave child has made my Nike runners, and all the people that I try to talk to about why my phone bill is not being directly put onto my Visa bill have been fired in replacement of a computerizes lady who really can't tell me jack-all.
Perhaps unrelated, perhaps not. This is going to get worse, not beter, while capitalists run the world. What's going to be next? Perhaps more importantly, what can we do to change it?
java guy, tech blog...
Please do not whore karma, do as this poster did and post AC.
Mods, please down moderate back to 1 (but not below for fairness). Copying text is an easy way to gain karma and is often used by trolls who set up trolling accounts which gain points to make their trolling appear sooner and offend more people. Please do not reward them.
You are aware, are you not, that MIT has more than a few undergraduates? And that among said undergraduates you may find some competent programmers?
An interesting comment: 'What about workers who lack the job skills to fit into the higher and higher levels of sophisticated production in which the US is specializing? Because of the existence of scarcity, there will never be a shortage of jobs to do, so long as we live in time and not eternal bliss. The phrase "shortage of jobs" can only be colloquial; there is never a shortage of things to do. It is only a question of price, and the best way to raise the wages is to make sure that people do what they are most suited to do--which can only be known by letting markets work.'
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Which is training Americans to be software developers...
A bastion of American software development is acting in a way that furthers neither America nor software development. No further criticism or comment is needed. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, res ipsa loquitur.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
What better way than calling them racist? It's easy: calling them racist when it's a valid complaint.
Nobody complained about the outsourcing of IT jobs to Ireland in the 80's and early 90's, when it was cheap. Nobody complains about the outsourcing of IT jobs to Russia and Israel now. But people complain about the outsourcing of jobs to India.
Can you give me a reasonable explanation beyond "they've got dark skins"?
s/MIT/India/gg
s/large/larger/g
s/cheap/cheaper/
s/why/why not/g
any ?s
...
A PowerPoint slide contained the magic word "Delhi". It turns out that most of the content editing and all of the programming work for OpenCourseware was done in India"
If we pay exhorbitant license fees for second-rate crapware with first-rate marketing, we don't have any money left to pay American programmers. Or apparently, even to hire American grad students.
Closed source == money migrates to the vendors
Open Source == money can be used to pay programmers.
Which way do you want it?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why did they have to go to creepy Microsoft, if NCompass Resolution is the best CMS server out there, and has been industry leader for a while?
Actually, you too missed the point.
The point was that the approach that MIT took would not have put food on the table of any CS grad in the US. So MIT is turning out these wonderful CS grads and then simultaneously demonstrating in a very visible, successful project that they have very little use for them - that they can rely on Gartner to tell them what software to buy and India to implement it.
What exactly are the prospects for the MIT grad when even MIT themselves employ this decision making process.
MIT students might have been able to do this more inexpensively/efficiently/quickly, but that wasn't really even considered. If the organization that has their best educational interests in mind doesn't consider them to be effective resources, how will they be received by an industry that doesn't give a damn about their best interests?
That must have been one hell of a depressing lecture to attend.
Contrary to popular belief, grad students dont just sit around all day waiting to be given big programming assignments like this. They are chasing after their theses.
"Hey! You got your peanut butter on my thesis!"
"You got your thesis in my peanut butter!"
Theses Pieces: There's no wrong way to write a thesis!
considerign that RMS is very close by and several OpenSource Content Managment system proejct leaders within 75 miles of MIT ..I find that it shard to believe that MIT did not even look in its own freaking backyard!
so how big was the MS payoff?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
well, we know they can afford outsourcing...
Unfortunately, equilibrium will only be acheived when the average American is as well off as the average Calcutta street urchin... Average the salaries of 200 million Americans with the salaries of 1 billion Indians... that's what your "equilibrium" wage will be!
that people all over the world can learn from it, not just MIT students. So it seems resonable to have it be in part developed by people from another location. Perhaps it is time to examine the government policies in states like California that have cause the cost of living to get out of hand and thus the need for unreasonable salaries for any worker. The US itself may need to look at radical reform of the tax code and radical limits of government spending to compete one day, but for today just a handful of states reforming themselves will turn the tide...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
is the fact that instead of using cheap grad student labor, they outsourced to India. I can only imagine how many talented grad students MIT has at their disposal.
Plus, I'd assume that most grad students (at least all the ones I know) would apreciate the flexability of open source software, thus saving even more money.
I am more shocked at the waste of money!
However, if you want to talk about India, the fact that a US univeristy outsourced it's code does not bode well for it's graduating student. CS jobs are getting harder and harder to find here in the US. Why? Well that would be because it's cheaper to outsource it to places like India. The only drawback is that you tend to get what you pay for.
The reason this is on slashdot is because slashdot has a large population of tech readers of whom this outsourcing effects.
MIT guys get are expected to get 160 grand right out of college? i could understand that an experienced phd would be shooting for that but your average graduate or MS grad?
wtf? did i miss the economic rebound? i know of positions paying less than 30 grand attracting 60 applicants.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
MIT undergraduates are notoriously flakey about completing any kind of project that is not class-related, since their course work takes up 200% of any free time they might have.
And having a class whose goal would be to complete this programming task would probably not be a good idea: classes at MIT usually concentrate on the fundamentals -- not the specifics of particular hairy development tools that will be here today and gone tomorrow.
As an economy (such as that of the US) grows, the quality of life and jobs of the population increases/improves.
The quality of jobs necessarily means the type of work that the population is willing to do. Jobs which were considered white-collar, and high quality slowly sink, and are no longer considered so as people get wealthier (I am talking about the entire population here--the average).
The country then looks to exporting those jobs, so that it's population can work on something better...maybe higher level jobs.
That is what happened to manufacturing...it was considered a menial process, and shipped out to China, while the higher quality jobs (management, etc) were retained in the US of A.
That is what is happening to software/IT now. I thought it was an interesting take on the issue, in which case, it is just one of the pitfalls in the process of economic evolution of the industry.
And yes, I am not an economist.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Except India == Aryan (by definition, see Vedas and swastika, holiest symbol in India) and Israel/Arab == Semite (by definition). So how can this by racist ?
I'm confused...
They complain about outsourcing when OUR economy is slumping and computer programmers are bagging groceries... yeah, if you try hard enough, you can always relate something to problems with race...
Just like our school just got sued because they didn't hire a woman for the football coach... she said it was sexual discrimination, the school said that regardless of her qualifications, a team of testosterone pumped college guys would have an extremely hard time adjusting to a female coach. Add onto that that she had never coached football, and it seems pretty clear cut...
I'm sick and tired of EVERYBODY blaming racism and discrimination for why they aren't doing well in this world, when I'd choose to believe its because they spend too much time bitching
> However, this (in addition to a weakening dollar) will eventually lead to equilibrium and a return of jobs as ...as Americans become more and more willing to work for less and less money, and more and more people end up below the poverty line, as 'working poor'.
> manufacturing is able to afford more workers locally.
That's the answer, all right. As long as you aren't one of the 'more and more people'.
> And MIT students get a lesson in economics as well.
Indeedy.
> If we were faultless we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. -- Shakespear
Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Check out general MIT news site conerning dire financial straits they are in: *Closing school for x-mas break to save money, *will layoff 250 people early next year, *hiring and salary increase freezes *they have lost $1 billion dollars in their endowment the last 2-3 years..... *anyone note F2003 they combined LCS and AI labs? Cost savings are on their mind for everything unfortunately....off-the-shelf software makes sense...companies hang around to maintain and students leave(ie graduate)
I'll buy 'em. Are they pretty widgets?
Do companies like Sapient give discounts when they're going to use programmers in India? Somehow, I doubt it.
The comments about Indian talent being cheaper would only apply here if MIT paid less than they would have had they used a company that employed American programmers. If they didn't get a discount, then Sapient simply improved their profit margin by using offshore programmers and MIT gained nothing from it, while indirectly hurting the US economy.
Not all students who attend MIT are Americans; many are from India.
Many Indians might think this outsourcing is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Some MIT graduates return to India to work for Sapient and Microsoft.
Sapient and Microsoft are global organizations. MIT is an American institution which educates global students and works with global corporations.
Phil Greenspun might be outraged (and then again he might not be, his blog doesn't lean either way). I am not.
Just want to quit exporting our jobs anywhere outside of our borders...
No racism there...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Except India == Indo-Aryan (by definition, see Vedas and
the hindi words swastika/shubhtika/laltika, holiest symbol in India).
So how can this by racist ? I'm confused...
Can you give me a reasonable explanation beyond "they've got dark skins"?
Sure! Because there were a lot fewer unemployed in the IT (and other) industry in the 80's and early 90's. And who has heard of any outsourcing to Russia or Israel? I haven't . . .
See, when we have plenty of work, we don't mind sharing some of it. On the other hand, when work is scarce, people get upset when it is sent out of the country without really good reasons.
How's that? Or would you just prefer to think everything is racially motivated? It is all the rage these days . . .
everything in moderation
Outsourcing is okay, people. It just drives up the quality of living in India, which will eventually drive up prices, which will eventually make it more cost-effective to do the work here.
So, we help other countries increase their standard of living with just a bit of headache on our side.
Anyway, the U.S. can't survive by being stagnant in technology. Our purpose is to innovate and create new technologies. Once something becomes standard and "script" it can be sent off to other countries with cheaper labor (Creating web pages is not innovative anymore, people!).
Because of this fact, as U.S. citizens, we have to be prepared to switch careers throughout our lifetime, depending on how new technologies are evolving. For instance, the movie, computer gaming and biotech industries here are light years ahead of most other countries and good places to find tech jobs. These things are on the cutting edge of technology and not something that can be easily exported to other countries (yet). Also, small businesses (established and entrepreneurial) also need local talent as they don't have the time or money to deal with managing offshore development. Another reason why small businesses and innovation are the lifebloods of our economy.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I believe you meant to say "nationalist." I'm not saying that's any better or worse, but by using the word "racist" you are furthering the stereotype that India is some small town where everyone is the same race. India is one of the most diverse nations on Earth.
;)
We should be joining with our Indian brothers and sisters and pooling our bigoty against Microsoft.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Yes, in fact, I think I can. It's probably in large part due to the tight job situation in the IT market today. That wasn't the case in the 80s and early 90s...
The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show
Maybe they should called it SharedCourseware instead.
How many MIT students would want to work on a freakin' static content delivery system when there is way cooler stuff just around the corner?
If MIT had to repair a wall on its campus, would it make more sense to hire an outside contractor or get the students from the civil engineering department to do the work?
Hmm. I think you're imbuing the "market" with a bit too much benevolence here. The way I see it, people in the management circle outsource as much as is practical/possible (excluding their own cadre) to lower wage countries, thereby slowly tightening the noose around their own necks. Eventually, as all the core skills are outsourced elsewhere, those "elsewhere" companies aren't going to need or want to get middled, and it won't be Microsoft selling you software, but Delhisoft. The corporations are slowly pulling their guts out through their rectums. I think the final stages of it will be messy.
I bet a whole assload of people complained about it - everyone who lost a job because of it, for starters. And while I see very few Russian or Israeli H1-Bs, and very little outsourcing to that company, I see a very great deal of Indian H1-Bs and a very great deal of outsourcing to India. If you see more outsourcing to Europe, then you have my blessing to complain about that.
I think people forget in this whole argument how communities, neighborhoods, cities, and states are affected when jobs are moved overseas. There is a demoralizing effect that we've seen in this country for the last 30 years. American companies have an obligation to be socially conscious about their country and to keep jobs here. Its all the circle of life and by going overseas just to say to Wall Street that earnings are up 50% is criminal. The bottom line is killing us.
some years ago MIT needed an enterprise authentication system, and developed Kerberos. today would it read some reports, and implement MS passport?
If you play by the rules of capitalists and capitalism, the way to make it better is to make a corporation that makes good money with a good business model by not outsourcing and raping their customers; if you can do that, according to theory, there will be competitors who will spring up to steal your market and money by being more effective (at making money and satisfying customers), more efficient, or by offering a slightly better product/service/good.
If you frame the problem as capitalism as the problem, then your only solution is to endorse cooperation instead of competition for resources. Economics tells us there are limited resources, and capitalism is the common popular method in which those resources are allocated; you compete for them. The alternative is you share the resources willingly, but no one has figured out an efficient and effective way of doing it. Invariably people in power will manage to distribute the resources inequitably, in their favor... But even capitalism does that, with the side benefit that in the process, the person with the most power happens to do something good while simultaneously becoming the biggest target for other capitalists to take down!
GPL Deconstructed
Of course the story does have merit if "India" eq "Bad", and if that's the racist slant the Slashdot is pushing on its front page then the editors should reconsider.
Why is being opposed to shipping jobs off to India automatically the equivilent of being racist? That's really an unfair way to attempt to color the debate about where this work should be done and by whom.
In fact it can be argued that shipping jobs overseas is *more* racist than keeping them here. By increasing the demand for IT work in the US, you draw more workers to the field, either from the pool of the unemployed or from other fields. Since more are likely to be drawn from other fields, you actually create openings for jobs, and these new openings could actually be filled by minorities and others who have a longer history of underemployment.
By shipping formerly high-paying jobs to India, you increase pressure on "good" jobs here in the US and decrease the opportunity for minorities here in the US.
I was actually hopeful in the late 90s that perhaps we were at the point where employment demand would reach a point where we could get the unemployment levels down for minorities to levels consistant with whites now. I guess not, I guess we care more about Indians than Americans of all colors.
The rich people in China and Japan of course...
What's happening in India is great, and I'm happy to see such a poor country starting to pick itself up. However, I'm amazed that American companies are getting in line to setup shop there. Sure, the savings is a huge incentive, but at the same time you are allowing them to soak up all your IP, all your American business methods, essentially training them how to run a successful company.
That's great until the day that Indians realize that there's nothing stopping them from setting up their own companies to compete direct against the American ones. I'm actually surprised it hasn't started happening already.
Reminds me of that old saying "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and you feed him for life." That system works great -- unless you too are a fisherman.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
It might, if it wasn't for the fact they used Microsoft's closed proprietary CMS, based on properietary (mis?)information from bunch of clueless con(sultant)men.
Had they built it using some Open Source project (or started one), it would have been different kettle of fish.
Depends, but I'd say if the wall is going to have any large scale visibility to the community and be a symbol of how great MIT is, they'd probably do well to involve some of their grad students in the process, if not the actual work.
creation science book
The only thing I can say is that humans migrated for years and years either following their food or finding another. Your food is moving, either follow it, or find another. Pick up a language (read: not computer language) and move to another country. You'd be surprised what value a native english programmer has in another country. No you won't make the same amount of money as in the US, based on currency exchanges, but you'll never wonder where your next meal is going to come from and you'll probably even be happy. If you really mess it up, you may even pick up some culture because we are not all that is to be in the world. Those of you that don't want to move, you are doomed to an inevitable fate. Start taking those management courses because your job is on its way out the door. If you want to code for a living you'll do what it takes to do so but whining about it will get you nothing.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
That's an interesting theory. I wonder if these Indian software companies are making enough revenue to invest in overhead time to create their own software, and a marketing department to sell it. Or is it more likely that the money they make is just enough to cover normal operations?
Still, very interesting.
If it really is a static content system with a very basic CMS framework....
Where did $11 million go to?
That's a $400 project you just described... assuming students would voulenteer to help set it up (which they would and probably do it well)
Sad example of spending money "because we have it" if you ask me.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
The story isn't about India==Bad, it's about going to your class in making buggy whips and the teacher passes you in an automobile.
It's about MIT ripping these students (and the US tax payer through government loans, grants, etc) to the tune of US$150,000+ while helping to devalue the degree those students earn.
And it is also example of how stupid the 'company M contracts company S who out-sources to country I based on blindly following consultant G' business model is.
Not only does MIT have a stable of cheap labor in house (ie, students), but heck, those students might have actually learned something in the process, enhancing MIT's product. And might have done better then a couple million dollars just to serve up static HTML.
The main idea is not India==Bad, but that everyday we read about PHBs making decisions that sounds like something right out of Dilbert, but we'd expect a little better from what is supposed to be one of the country's leading education and research institutions.
There (unfortunately) isn't anything out of the ordinary here. But I know if I spent the money, and did the work, to get an MIT degree and didn't get anything out of the ordinary, I'd be kinda pissed.
If MIT had to repair a wall on its campus, would it make more sense to hire an outside contractor or get the students from the civil engineering department to do the work?
You're saying that the school doesn't necessarily want to use students for all there work, and that is correct. That's where the India connection comes in.
If they had hired a local (US) software company, they would be providing jobs for graduates of American universities (like MIT). By using Indian labor, they provided little or no work for American graduates. Hence the sting: MIT is in the business of making American graduates, but never considered using them.
The other aspect is that classes at MIT will hopefully go into great detail about how to select the best tool for the job, how to evaluate software, do a cost/benefit analysis, etc. When they actually had to choose software to use, though, they just read a magazine and did what it suggested with no further review.
Heh, the University I attended wouldn't hire any of their graduates either ... but it shows the faith the Uni had in its own undergrads.
Perhaps they had faith in their undergrads, but were trying to prevent a university monoculture from forming. A lot of times Universities prefer people from the "outside world" simply because a more diverse work environment is often a more dynamic work environment.
It may work out that people of the same education, from the same University can get the job done, but they might also overlook alternate/better methodologies.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Dell just announced it was moving some of its customer support stationed in India back to the US because of constant customer complaints.
http://news.com.com/2100-7342-5110933.html
Sometimes you DO get what you pay for...
Primate Programmers? Taking code monkeys to the next level. :)
Contracting things out is the mode of the moment at MIT. OCW got a nice temporary pile of cash and contracting it out made sense, rather than hiring a bunch of people they'd have to support ad infinitum. And yes, they've got nice bunch of talented student programmers. The problem is the project might never get finished that way.
I believe it's hosted at/by Akamai, too. I couldn't believe they went for a cheesy MS solution either.
The unrelated news is that there's a new VP for I/S. Between that and MIT's endowment shortfall the brunt of the layoffs are falling on I/S. Fear and loathing time at the 'Tute.
You never see a company outsourcing its senior management functions to save money. I wonder how much a company like Disney would save if it laid off Eisner and gave his job to an MBA in India.
No. 1. Races are not biological categories, they are artificial categories applied based upon phenotype (not genotype). 2. "Aryan" refers to three different things: a. the Aryans, a "people" mentioned in the Vedas, b. the Indo-Aryan or Indo-European language group, and c. the "Aryan" race, about which see point #1. Likewise with Semite: a. a category from the Bible, b. a language group, part of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages, b. a "race", and thus a false category. 3. A good chunk of India is Dravidian in language group; a lot of Indians are dark skinned.
why dont we hear bout all the far-eastern electronics and hardware that come into this country?
wasn't buying a japanese car sometime in the 60's and 70's also frowned upon? maybe it is not explicitly said that it is, but just by reporting it, you knowwww what is implied by the speaker.
maybe everytime someone buys a sony discman or a toshiba laptop, we should write it in our blogs, and raise our eyebrows and smirk a bit.
Forget outsourcing - I'm more surprised that MIT actually had to look and spend outside its own doors for setting up a CMS. any decent grad student woulda done it - not really a big deal. Ironic that a programming job for the EE/CE/CS department had to be given to an outside firm.
Being a student, who's always lookin for jobs related in my field to put in my resume, I would be pissed to learn my department spends money on any firm while I apply for a loan, and look around for a job.
On the contrary, I find this attitude disgusting. A bastion of American software development may be acting in America's long term interests. Or it may be acting to serve a more deserving goal than America's interests (There are more deserving goal s than that - environmentalism is one).
The situation is completely and totally nonobvious and the attitude that no further comment is needed is narrowminded.
You been living in a cave? Microsoft bought NCompass quite a while ago.
The $2 a day worker who's purchasing parity is much higher in his country because of the weakening dollar...
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
That's even though Microsoft has been trying to get into MIT.
actually, U.S. corporations are starting to have second thoughts about all the outsourced jobs:
1. Much greater overhead to manage an oversees project, such that the savings is really 2. Huge assumed risks - confidentiality of data, true abilities and qualifications of remote people questionable, political instability & nearness & greater accessibility by terrorists in region, lack of legal venue when things go wrong
3. faking of true status/costs/issues of projects by those who strongly reccommended outsourcing, to save face
4. Communication problems, lack of cultural context & "common sense [by whatever definition]" knowledge
I imagine that some of them are ready to compete. The only impediment to marketing your products overseas is the cultural specificity of persuading buyers to buy. But surely that work can be outsourced, no?
...that they would outsource my job to someone that wouldn't be reading slashdot right now and would actually be working.
Darn! Gotta go, the boss is walking this way!
that it could just be an easy answer (aside from cost)? They're outsourcing the work to people who *actually* work, instead of just get paid and act as if they do. Real workers instead of drones. Maybe some of the kids whose jobs are being outsourced could learn something about a work ethic, which IS sorely lacking in today's business world.
"But I can't get an ocean that's deep enough for my day..." ~The Frames, "Fitzcarraldo"
Do you remember the Cheers episodes where Norm had to start laying people off? He ran out of people to lay off, and he was in turn.... laid off.
Greedy corporations have had to start focusing on short term earnings because that's what the market and shareholders see. Most of them seem to not care anymore about longterm effects... not only to our economy but to their own well being as well. As fewer people here can afford their products, programming is slowly becoming more expensive to outsource to the current countries. Unfortunately, there are other countries down the road, but there are only 290MM of us... I think we're getting the short end of the stick on this one.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
I think the point is that its a sad state of affairs when MIT won't even use their own students to do the job. Also, the fact that a place like MIT bases their platform of choice on simply what some gartner report says is also saddening.
It may be the case that most colleges teach UNIX platforms (mine does) and not Microsoft platforms for their CGI/etc courses, resulting in the shift to India.
I know that when I was a graduate student at MIT, my job was to do research and learn. OpenCourseware, while interesting in a societal dimension, is not exactly compelling research work.
I suppose you could have undergraduates do the work, but would YOU want to have such a large system designed and written by inexperienced undergrads?
Outsourcing seems to make some sense in this instance. Whether they did a good job picking who they outsourced to is an entirely different matter.
Really ? So phenotype has nothing to do with
genotype ?
Offspring of Africans are white then, I take it ?
Their genes don't cause them to be black ? Wow !
I learnt something new today !
Yes, but Shakespeare himself wouldn't have spelled it consistently, either. Spelling hadn't really solidified in the Elizabethan era.
There wasn't "plenty of work" in the late eighties and earliy nineties. That was the period of the Bush I recession: IBM imploded and there was a huge tech shake-out. The Cold War ended, so a lot of defense contractors lost their contracts and the US armed forces shrank(immediately after Iraq I).
I have some buddies who do CivE, and i don't think they specialize in "wall repair." Maybe if there was a carpentry school....but then, i'd think the school would hire them. Dude...this is the second time you've posted this analogy. It doesn't work.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
You hit the nail on the head. *sigh*
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
How come no one cried when all manufacturing jobs went out of the US and concentrated on one country - China?
Today no one can even dream of opening a factory that makes say safety pins. Heck any manufacturing job for that matter.
So is it ok that all engineering jobs go to China but not ok if Software jobs move to India?
C'mon man! Double standards?
Since when do you need a college degree to hammer a nail. So let's be more to the point. If MIT were building a fine arts center that is highly visible, would they take submissions for the design of the building from there architecure major, and research construction companies owned by alumni to build it? Or should they have migrant workers build it from a picture highly rated in a magazine about modern architecture, using building supplies that were advertised in the magazine? As a point, most of the newer buildings at Christopher Newport University in Newport News Virginia were built by a local contractor with ties to the university and much of the work was donated.
MIT is a research institution. Is it any wonder that vendors have tainted their "education"?
What is folks take on the accuracy of the Gartner Group's claim that open source content management systems aren't worth considering? (I've known Gartner group to be wrong before-so were they wrong here?) Did MIT actually make a sound business decision here or did they get taken? Somehow, this whole thing seems a little fishy to me-I suspect that someone wasted a bunch of MIT's money here. If in fact the MIT decision was a sound business decision, what would it take to create a solid, open source alternative solution to problems like those that were present in the MIT site?
... I have a couple observations:
#1. Odds are the reason that the development work got outsourced was simple comparative advantage. I'd rather have an undergrad or grad student working on something original and interesting rather than grunt level coding. As many people have noted, low-level jobs are being outsourced rather rapidly. I consider it a very GOOD thing the MIT isn't wasting its student's time with what would appear to be a dead end skill set.
#2. If you want to bitch about MIT and ties to Microsoft there are much better areas to criticize. For example, the business school is a lock-down Microsoft shop. If you don't have a Microsoft OS, you can't get a digital certificate. If you can't get a digital certificate, you can't get access to anything from your home PC. I've heard a wide number of speculations about why this is so [the rest of the University has a much more liberal policies]. I've heard lots of talk that Sloan needs to maintain its own IT department to roll out like 802.11b quicker than the rest of the University. Of course those who like conspiracy theories do note that the Dean made a fair amount of money as a hired witness for MS during the anti-trust trials.
Perhaps it's just a regional thing (I live out West), but I always thought CalTech had the best and the brightest. Definitely not trying to start a flame war. Both schools are tip top.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Having spent nearly 10 years working on my Comp Sci degree (while working at a 8-5 job, house, etc) I've realized something.
Universities are a bit like ancient japan.
All departments are like little islands in a sea. Each has a ruler that does their own thing with no consideration to the other islands.
Firstly, nobody talks to anybody. If a process can be duplicated and screwed up at the same time, it will be.
Secondly, All processes will be documented in such a way that people from other departments will have no idea how to interpret or use them.
Thirdly, when purchasing software licenses and/or hardware, instead of pooling all the resources to drive down costs, each department will just do their own thing.
So, it doesn't suprise me that MIT pissed all over their own shoes.
MIT's got students who put together a grant and bought 3000 CD's, then setup a system where students could listen to any of them over the cable network for free.
Somehow I don't think the courseware stuff would have been that over their head.
I took a class in management of software engineering projects and we had to build a web interface that would allow students to access their grades, add/drop for classes, give them billing information, etc. We managed to crank out that system in one 15 week semester. We all got A's and the system worked great for over 5 years and it cost them zero. Even the server it ran on was a retired desktop (350mhz pentium 2)
It didn't get retired until the university moved away from their aging db system.( Digital unix based collegate DB system)
Tragically, the expensive commerical system they replaced it is horrible and disliked by everybody.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
rest in peace, american software development.
long live global software development.
i can give you for a $1.00 what you pay someone else $10.00 for.
what would you do?
fighting globalization is like fighting the tides or the rising and setting of the sun, it is inevitable.
i see the regular stream of stories like this one here on slashdot and i see the fear and horror implicit in them.
yes, my friend, you will make less, you will be fired, it really, really is the end of the golden age of american software development- and that is good! for now it is a global thing, you will sacrifice so that the world may benefit. only if you are stridently inward and protectionist and reactionary do you not see how this is a good thing overall.
you can't do anything about it, nor should you try: don't waste your energy fighting inevitable change.
"God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed;
Give me courage to change things which must be changed;
And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other. "
so what would you do if you weren't working in software?
ask yourself that seriously now, american software developer.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
it's apples and oranges. i would bet that there is less overhead in india. no over time, no osha, less/no legal liabilities, etc.
eric
I saw an article the other day in BW (it's only useful for seeing what trend occured 6 months ago) that profiled several Chinese companies who were beginning to brand their products under their own name, rather than just doing the manufacturing for someone else's brand. It's not software development yet, but in all industries they will begin to want to climb the value chain. They all currently want to emulate Samsung.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
It's easy to be philosophical about stuff like this if you are not impacted by it. A lot of us are. The only way to convince people with money to help us out is to make them help us out -- that is the way this economy works. Technical pros have extreme power if we bargain collectively, these days just as much as the teamsters do. It's time to wake up, folks.
I'd say that I think of MIT, CalTech, and Harvey Mudd as being at the top of that game. CalTech gets the close association with NASA going for it. MIT is at the top not because it's better, necessarily (though I'm not saying it's not), but because of name recognition.
It sounds like they just went with what Gartner spoonfed them. If I ran MIT's IT department I would sack the planning department and hire a work study student to make decisions by reading gartner reports. Instant $2 million savings...
Derek
Don't Panic...
I used to be somewhat aggravated about the perceived flood of jobs leaving our country.
I still am. And you are probably right about it finally reaching an equillibrium.
However, I'm thinking that it will happen sooner rather than later. The reason being trustworthiness and security.
I work for a newspaper. We wouldn't dream of outsourcing our programming to another country. The integrity of our content is too important.
Most Americans don't trust our own government, why should we trust the Indian government? We wouldn't want the Indian government having any control over our content or our software (since the software can manipulate the content).
The Indian government may claim to be a democracy, but many people disagree.
In most places in the world you'll get a degree for a tenth or so of that figure. The mindset fostered by these expensive degrees and expensive salaries is that they must be better (well that is the justification one hears anyway). I doubt it. I doubt an American degree or an American programmer are inherently better than the rest of the world.
During the dot.com boom any arsewipe could get a job in the Valley for a stupid figure. Now the same person is complaining that their job went away. Face it dude, most likely you were not cut out for this industry.
If short-term thinking is truly the problem with today's corporate culture, I sometimes think we should get rid of the stock market. It's all a big pyramid scheme anyways. If companies and their owners didn't have stock options (or profit sharing), I wonder how that would change their management style?
cpeterso
Nobody thinks about social justice when they get their 401(k) (or other investment account) statements. All they see is the return.
If it's negative, they say, "Where's my money?!"
If it's positive, they don't ask any questions at all.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
For a non-US citizen to get the necessary visa to work in the software industry, one has to show that that person possesses unique skills and is therefore not taking jobs from Americans. At most of the software companies at which I worked, we had non-US citizens, and they were always jumping through hoops to get here and then stay here. It seems that companies have found a cheaper way around sponsoring someone: outsourcing. So, now, a US company can get that same foreign workers without the high cost of bringing them here to do the work, as well as the savings on their salaries by paying them local wages. Giving this high cost of entry, it is a logical way for companies to skirt the old problems, even though it bypasses the reason for the laws.
The question is, is this the way we want it to be? If we want to keep the spirit of the laws, we would need to impose the same restriction on outsourcing (show that the work has to be sent somewhere else because it can not be done here). If we decide that protecting jobs is no longer a valid long term strategy, then we should lower the barrier for non-US citizens to actually come here and work. Either way, one of the two means for non-US citizens to work for US-based companies will have to change in order to balance the current disparity.
When was the last time that American colleges actually furthered American development? You'd have to go back to the 60's, before college faculty started to swing to left...
He did more than hit this particular nail on the head. There's still the same spectre lurking in other schools. Plus it casts a shadow overall on the whole "train 'em with new skills" argument that's brought up in these difficult times. I don't think that most people fully grasp how high the barriers really are, until they've actually ran into them. And there are plenty of barriers.
Such a shallow view. MIT produces computer scientists not software developers. There is a big difference.
MIT presents the ``You Don't Even Really Know You're Totally Wrong'' lecture, to kick off the ``You'll
Never Do Everything (or Anything) Right'' lecture series.
Speakers:
RICHARD STALLMAN, formerly of the AI Lab, founder of FSF.
NOAM CHOMSKY, Professor of Linguistics.
The specific topics have not been decided at time of writing, but are being selected by the requirement that they be topics of which everyone is aware, but over which many may not yet be tortured in their sleep.
Just to clarify things here ---
A) MIT is a large university. Of the undergraduates, about 17% major in computer science (or the combined EECS degree program).
B) OCW is a *campus-wide* intitiative to make course material available to everyone with internet access at no cost. Why on earth should it's own computer science department faculty and graduate students carry the burden of putting the site together? They're all trying to do "research" and to get "tenure" and to write "theses", etc. I don't think writing static HTML is really going to help them in this regard.
C) Contract work goes to the lowest bidder who can get the work done right. If it's in India, so be it.
Since when do you need a college degree to hammer a nail.
Since when do you need a college degree to write code?
People need to get away from the delusion that anything that requires writing code should be done by somebody with a four year computer science degree. A website is a equivalent of a wall, not a fine arts center.
"Quite simply, you're not as important and good as you thought you were."
Please keep that in mind, while you're at the unemployment office, you good for nothing bum.
I had to email it around last night. But why isn't anyone commenting on what I thought was the main point of the blog entry. That to do most computer programming you don't need to no jacksquat about genetic algorithms or anything about NP-completeness in order to code a friggen HTML form. Or to code an Excel spreadsheet. Or to accomplish 90% of the things we do with computers. Hiring a computer science grad to do web work is like shooting a single soldier with the biggest gun in the arsenal. The bottom line: software is overvalued.
That's a lesson in Classical Economics. Keynes and other sane people noticed that with the possibility of long term and severe unemployment, waiting for equilibrium would spell the demise of our way of life, and probably our system of government as well.
If we can avoid it, we should avoid coming into equilibrium with the third world.
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
You havent heard of outsourcing to Russia and Israel? You must be sound asleep. Maybe they dont quite call it "outsourcing" but a lot of R&D is done in Russia and Israel with a US marketing face.
So let me get this straigth...
1) They picked an MS-based solution, becuase it was "easiest" - i.e. turnkey in the sense of "Put your wallet in the floppy drive and press any key to empty."
2) They chose the largely unproffesional and alien help of a foreign third world country. Instead of employing fellow Americans, and making sure America doesn't become a third-world country itself (the Dollar still slides), they decided to boost India's economy.
What kind of message is this sending to fellow Americans in the engineering, comp. sci and EE fields? No one needs you - no one cares for you, your kids, your families, your lives or your culture. Instead we would rather pay Naeenanajah, and his sweatshop buddies, below minimum wage (or not) for crummy work. How thoughtfully patriotic. I say - let MIT move itself to India - and take with itself its retarded "Oooh! I saved a shekel! Who cares about those stupid starving Appalachians - I'm reeeeeech!" mentality.
If there is any changes to to occur - we must boycott those corrupt corporations and institutions who put their interests over the welfare of the American people. If the only way you contribute to the American society - is by creating unemployment as you give your jobs away to foreign nationals - then you don't deserve to operate on American soil.
You know USA is in very very bad health, when it puts the interests of foreign nationals over those of its citizens.
Parasites. You know where I won't be going for my CS degree.
Please note that I am not inferring that students feel that way, but rather that management may have considered this possibility in their decision making.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
3 words:- Disgraceful
Puhleez. CMU does significantly better than all of those schools.
I posted this to the linked blog...
Hi Folks,
Who here wants to be part of the race to the bottom? EVERY tech worker worldwide needs to confront this. Do we want software development to continue to be a worthy profession? Or will we allow the corps to try and pit us against each other as we fight for work?
Wake up! The service economy is just following the manufacturing playbook from the 80s. Capital will fly towards the least-regulated, cheapest places. Look at NAFTA and what happened to Mexico. Jobs went there for a while, but then all those jobs went over to China because the cost was lower. You folks in India should enjoy your investment -- just don't expect that your job is safe either...
The one thing you can do is GET INVOLVED and ORGANIZE. ACM and IEEE are doing squat about this. There are a number of other organizations working toward global tech worker rights. Start by checking out www.techsunite.org. There is a listing of organizations that represent tech workers there.
One of the things that we try to teach in the class (textbook is online at http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-w orkbook/ if you're curious to see what the students suffer through) is that being a good code monkey/CS nerd isn't sufficient to function well as an engineer. We try to give the students some experience with taking vague client specs and turning them into precise requirements, with presenting their work clearly, with constructively criticizing others' work in meetings, with conducting and learning from user testing, etc. The rationale for this is laid out in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/one-term-web
So it was actually very gratifying that our guest speakers came in and demonstrated that state-of-the-art American IT development projects no longer involve plain-old-programmers in America. Our students need to learn this early so that they can plan their careers and further education accordingly.
You can blame India for all this, but have you ever thought why the CEO gets multi million dollars in "incentives" to make decisions to fatten the corporate greed? In times of belt tightning, why dont they cut the CEOs benefits instead of laying off hundreds of others that dosent even add up to the cost of the CEO. All this blame should be directed at the corporate greed, and we should really question if paying millions of $ for a CEO is woth it in the first place... fter all, they only play golf and go suck ass with other CEOs that try keep the bisness running in the "old boys club." This is as a good time as any to really question the compensation of CEOs and the value they add to a company.
The outsourcing always seemed pretty simple to me. In the US market there wasn't that much real differentiation between code monkeys and software engineers. Basic programming isn't that hard, yet in the US market people demanded a fair amount of money for it. Then along came India. They have a lot of very competent basic programmers who are willing to work for a rate that's quite resonable given the fairly low/basic level of work they're doing, so naturally all those overcharging US code monkeys suddenly find their jobs being outsourced.
The catch is that outsourcing became fairly trendy, and the whole thing is still in flux. That is to say, management still doesn't really understand the difference between code monkeys and engineers. That means engineering jobs are getting shipped to code monekys at present. That's somewhat problematic, but it won't last, because the results won't stack up - eventually (this is management we're talking about, so it'll take a few years) this will dawn on the management and things will swing back closer to balance.
The fact remains that this outsourcing began because there are a lot of US code monkeys charging far too much for their shoddy work - just think of all those VBA "I'll make you a frontend app for your database for $10,000" 'hackers', and their ilk.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Stock options are supposed to align the goals of a company with the goals of management. Thus they have incentive to do what is best for shareholders, not just to pad their own salaries. What would you prefer to base the salary of the CEO types on?
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Nope, no racism, just lots and lots of 'patriotism'..... which (particularly as is demonstrated here) can sometimes be better named parochialism or nationalism.
And remember kids.... never play leapfrog with your unicorn.
Interesting thought. However, it would also do away with nice perks like 401k/403b, defined benefit plans, etc... If there were a way to make up for that shortage in retirement planning, "it's just so crazy it might work!"
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
who's going to buy the $50 widgits (that cost $1 to make overseas)?
Interesting question. My answers, in no particular order:
* They will be $10 widgets, not $50 ones. God bless the market.
* The Japanese, Singaporeans, Malaysians and a few of the up and coming Chinese.
* Do you really need it?
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
> to some $2 a day worker
Come over to India and have a look, you might finally understand:
(1) Why people outsource there.
(2) What a nice, free, non-violent democracy looks like.
(3) What you are missing in your life.
(4) Why you are filled with so much hatered and anger.
Exactly, and when people start to realize this is happening we will get to start lynching all of the rich people, they will start hiring private militias and living in walled compounds, etc. This has already happened in other countries.
Cost of living in India is vastly lower than it is in the U.S. There is no possible way that I can compete with an Indian programmer on the basis of pay, unless I emigrate.
Being forced to compete with others on a completely unequal scale is a downside. That's why the U.S. is being threatened with sanctions over its steel tariffs. It makes it really hard for foreign nations to compete. Ya dig?
That's the fundamental problem. We have an unequal playing field, and in an environment where cost is valued over all else it isn't a competition, it's a blowout.
I really, really hope that globalization can help India and other countries boost their economies and develop themselves into the "1st World" nations they can be*. I just wonder what damage it will do to our economy in the meantime.
* Since outsourcing is only one half of the coin, the other half being U.S. companies sucking money out of developing nations, I don't think this is certain at all.
The enemies of Democracy are
1) If they want to argue that we're too pricey, and that the Indians are cheaper, fine. You wanna play laissez-faire capitalism? So can we. I hear that Longhorn is selling in Thailand or whatever for $1. We'll just go directly to the Indians ourselves and cease paying your bloated CEO and marketing premiums.
2) These people live in fear that people will revolt and stop buying their sweatshop made goods. Make that a reality. Trust me, they'll bring the jobs back.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
> rest in peace, american software development.
> long live global software development.
> i can give you for a $1.00 what you pay someone
> else $10.00 for.
>
>what would you do?
Change the system.
I just can't take MIT's answer at face-value. Just suppose that Microsoft influenced the choice of software, perhaps through connections, kickbacks, etc.. MIT could hardly say it was because Microsoft bribed them. Instead, they would cite an outside authority like Gartner. This sounds a lot more likely than their doing a >$10M project without researching which software to use.
trust? um, these indian software houses get business based on reputation alone. You give them the specs, they deliver the source code. The very first time a given software house is caught putting a backdoor in a program is the very last time they'll get US business. That US business will just go to another indian company with a better reputation.
Actually, the indians do very good work and the good news is that they make software engineering a lot more like other forms of engineering. I'm a programmer and my boss thinks nothing of making me implement last-minute changes. If you ask for a change from a real software engineering firm, they tell you how much its going to cost just like a construction company would. With me, and I'm guessing a lot of US programmers, the boss says "hey, I thought some more about this and I'd really like to do it this way instead" and what am I supposed to say? no? ha, yeah right.
However, this (in addition to a weakening dollar) will eventually lead to equilibrium and a return of jobs... And MIT students get a lesson in economics as well.
It's you who needs a lot of lessons in economics. Instead of raising their living standards, some cultures (like the Indians) raise their population. Their standard will never go up, besides it CAN'T because they are toooo many. What is going to happen is the US standard is going to FALL DOWN to equalize the difference. Economics genius your aren't.
Capitalism & free markets have done a great job in raising living standards in the US.
Quality products are made cheaply, and efficiently distributed with plentiful supply, which in turn strengthens the buying power and quality of life for average americans.
Why this doesn't work in many other societies is a big & tough question, that I won't dare address yet.
However, will free market principles, as applied to (non-manufacturing) jobs, raise living standards in the U.S. also? After all, that should be the end intent and goal for U.S. policy makers (democrats & repubs) right?
There are already bugs in this free market as applied to jobs.
Maybe some of those CS undergrads should consider switching majors to nanoscale science & engineering so that no matter what the market realities are in the future they can eventually just manufacture their own "free" food and material objects (for only the energy costs).
Disruptive self-sufficiency is a worthy goal.
--
Power to the Peaceful
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
In MIT's words: For the "proof of concept" pilot...the Web pages of the MIT OCW site were built by..."brute-force HTML." Utilizing Web content editors such as DreamWeaver, a team of programmers from MIT and Sapient...designed and built the first 32 subjects. However, that model was not scalable for 500 courses, so MIT OCW has implemented a Content Management System (CMS) in order to achieve MIT OCW's long-term publishing goals. The CMS we have been using since the beginning of 2003 is a customized implementation of Microsoft Content Management System 2002...there wasn't a viable open source solution...Microsoft made a serious commitment to the MIT OCW project...The hope is that utilization of open-source model CMS products could lead to less expensive implementations...
"genrm" and whomever modded up this ridiculous piece of nonsense should go back to their "alien plane in a sea of Aether", because they're clearly not living on this planet.
Last I checked, the biggest bite in anyone's cost of living was rent or mortgage. And for those completely clueless, there was Prop 13, which *reduced* property taxes significantly for Calfornia. Have property values (and hence cost of living) gone down since then? No -- in fact they've gone up over 10x in several places (SF - Bay Area) in particular. Did the government push up those housing prices? Find me one landlord who said, "based on the current taxation policies of the state of California, I really must push the asking price for this house up $50,000." You won't find one, because property owners raised their prices based soley on individual greed (e.g. what the market will bear).
Speaking of the Bay Area, where were those taxes during the 1849 Gold Rush? Cost of living then was notoriously expensive, way before federal or state income tax.
The fact is, California has a high cost of living because PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. It has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with economic opportunities and percieved quality of life.
It's the market, not the government, stupid.
After reading Philip Greenspun's Dec 1st blog rant, that is pretty much the way I feel about MIT's OpenCourseware. Who could have imagined that the same institution that gave us X, Project Athena, Kerberos, the AI Lab, the Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, and of all people Richard Stallman, would turn their back on all this tradition? Call me naive, but I actually believed that OpenCourseware was built upon open-source philosophy, that MIT had undertaken a plan similar to the Chalk Dust portion of my Open Slate project. How sobering that even at MIT, IT decisions are made the easy way -- read something in a magazine, hear something at a vendorama, buy Microsoft and hire contractors to build it.
Okay, so Philip Greenspun is a Harvard man. Hardly a disinterested party. This may explain the motivation for writing the piece, but I see no reason to discount his facts.
I am sooooo disappointed! Time to reach for a Bud. You know why I drink Bud? Because they still deliver it with those horse-drawn wagons. Sometime you have to brush a little manure off the edge of the can, but hey, that's life!
Visit the Open Slate Project featuring Chalk Dust.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
A bastion of American software development is acting in a way that furthers neither America nor software development. No further criticism or comment is needed. In the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, res ipsa loquitur.
A-freaking-men. What happened to the "rational self-interest" capitalism's supposedly based on? This is neither rational nor self-interested.
Equally what? Equally good watching-your-back ?? So US merchantilists believe. England was the last try at a pure, merchantile culture and now ... what England? And before THAT? Try Carthage. Real success story.
...Falls apart when you realize that there is no free market. Many things are protected. Many areas of the economy experience more than favorable treatment -- I mean, we are fighting for oil in Iraq aren't we?
It's just you and your concerns that are treated unfavorably. And you probably voted these assholes into power thinking that they would cut your taxes. As if such a thing could possibly matter to them.
What you have is the wealthy and powerful becoming more wealthy and more powerful at the expense of those that simply do not matter.
And unlike you, these people do not wave the flag or care who is going to win the Superbowl. Borders do not matter. Democracy is the prize in an elaborate shell game to amuse the uneducated.
Mammon alone is their God.
So no, the very rich are not like you and I. And if you were given their power on a silver plate, you would not likely be much different than are they. That observation should not keep you from seeking social or economic justice.
Someone mentioned the lower wages earned elsewhere in the world (beyond the "west") -- yeah, it's funny how little people will work for when soldiers dictate their possible earnings, or when union organizers often face immediate violence or rape as a tool of coercion.
"Can I have a raise?"
"Not tonight, first I thought I'd use you and your family as gangrape fucktoys; and then leave you for dead somewhere where you can be seen thereby serving as an example to others that might have similarly impertinent questions."
"Well in that case, can I just have my job back and we just ignore that this issue ever came up?"
"Sorry, you're just going to have trust me on this -- we need to do it my way. And I'm sorry about not offering you some vaseline, but that won't give us the desired effect..."
So yeah, enjoy those Nikes. There's more to it when you buy products "Made in America."
If we can avoid it, we should avoid coming into equilibrium with the third world.
Yes, we must keep the people oppressed if we want to maintain our relative greatness.
Welcome to the New American Century (it's kinda like the old one).
Note: I'm being cynical and sarcastic at the same time, please parse appropriately before responding.
+&x
Corporations that outsource their labor ought to be treated as foreign companies
and should be taxed to make up the difference between outsourcing and remaining here.
The people who hired Sapient were without a clue. Instead of consulting their own faculty or students, the idiots read a Gatner report and bought Microsoft snake oil. It was a typical big dog decision, breathtakingly ignorant and a hopless waste. The whole thing will have to be redone in two years when M$ decides to move the upgrade train along and another $2,000,000 will go to the big dogs while $10,000,000 is shoved into a company that will doll out a few hundred thousand bucks in India where slaves will bang out Microsoft shit. The platorm and contractor were chosen based on a single report that said this was the "easy" way to go. There was no real study, no real consideration of quality or cost.
Our unemployed friend and the people who made the $12,000,000 grant are right to expect more. The project is a great idea, it deserves to be implemented well.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Actually, this is news. What hope is there for programmers, developers, and Software Engineers if even MIT outsources projects that could be done for free by students as a thesis! Even worse is the implication that even a "_supposedly_" great school for Engineering and technology will not give the work to its own students, and worse still is how they decided to use the Microsoft technology--they read an article. That's not what we would come to expect from an institution of higher learning that is supposed to contain best of the best in students and faculty.
Combine this with the previous slashdot story about MIT not taking government contracts because of the US Citizen requirement and you get a suprisingly disturbing trend of MIT not supporting Americas future, but MIT supporting the future of foriegners and the markets of foriegn countries!
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
No, I haven't, yet I feel awake.
Anyway, how much is "a lot"?
everything in moderation
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3256454.stm
The moral is adapt and survive, a job made much easier if you have resisted the "live now, pay later" consumer credit culture...
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Ain't going to happen. All of the people who are either currently or potentially going to lose their jobs overseas like to point out all of the hidden costs of moving your operations, training, etc. I'd say chances are good that the PHBs will learn from their current mistake but never bring the jobs back. They'll think to themselves that they'll be saving on all of these hidden costs they learned about the first time around, and then wonder why no one has the money to buy their crappy software.
Look at it this way, off-shoring is the hot thing right now (as a side note, I saw one magazine refer to it as "best-shoring," which made me sick). If and when bad things arise from it, it'll be taught at all of the business schools, so maybe the flow of jobs will slow, but I have very little faith the jobs will come back, as they fear the short-term costs of moving everything back.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
what part of
"God give me the serenity to accept things which cannot be changed;
Give me courage to change things which must be changed;
And the wisdom to distinguish one from the other."
did you not get?
the wisdom part, apparently
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nobody complained about outsourcing to Ireland in the 80's & 90's because there wasn't enough to notice. If they don't complain about Russia or Israel now, it's 'cause they don't KNOW about it yet.
Tangent: Based on a subcontractor's recomendation, I purchased a copy of NoMagic's UML tool, Magic Draw Pro. Only after the fact did I learn that their Denver office is merely a sales and executive site. All the value added work is in Lithuania and Thailand.
Luke, help me take this mask off
As an MIT freshmen, I don't have to declare a major until my sophmore year. Coming into MIT I planned to major in EECS, and as of yet, that hasn't changed. People often say things along the lines of, "You're still interested in EECS?"
"Yes."
"How will you find a job when all the coders are being hired from overseas?"
"Simple; I'll be a professor."
My point is, being a code monkey is not the only thing one can do with an EECS degree. As far as I know, professors are not being outsourced to India (well, okay, sometimes it seems that way, but that's not the point). And IIRC, EE majors are still doing fine compared to their CS brethren. Maybe it is impossible to be an American code monkey in today's job environment, but that doesn't stop you from teaching, or starting your own business, or using your CS skills to help with some other job. Be creative.
As a side note, I found the dept. category of this article very humourous. I don't know if this was the intention or not, but Simmons Hall at MIT (my dorm) just added a bubble tea cafe on the first floor. One of the most popular items on the menu? Mango Lassi. In fact, for the past month or so, I have gone down to the cafe every night and my roommate has ordered a Mango Lassi nine times out of ten. Too bad he's not majoring in CS, or the coincedence would have been REALLY eerie.
Probably won't be the Japanese. They're on a massive trip to lower SoL just like the rest of us.
The real answer is: Prepare for a lower SoL than you grew up in.
The question isn't do I need it, it's business related. You can make all the $50 widgits you want, but someone's got to buy them or you go bankrupt.
"Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master."~RAH
Dammit Karl, I though you were dead!
The stock market IS a capital market. Without it, and you've got to go with socialism or another economic structure.
I had figured that MIT just asked professors to use a particular web site when they post the usual course syllabus that accompanies almost every tech course at a modern university.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, to wit:
Really ? So phenotype has nothing to do with
genotype ? Offspring of Africans are white then, I take it ? Their genes don't cause them to be black ? Wow ! I learnt something new today !
It's a fact, "race" is a cultural label without scientific basis. As you have so astutely noted, people pass on physical attributes thru their genes. While Celts and Hottentots have superficial differences in appearance, there isn't a test or series of tests you can run to conclusively tell that a DNA sample is from one or the other. There are some familial mitochondrial DNAs, tendencies for sickle cell, dairy intollerance, or Vitimin D deficiencies that can hint at an ancestrial homeland, but nothing you can count on.
After all of that, I'm still pissed off at offshoring to low wage locations. But for consistency, let's have stockholders offshore some high cost executives or board members.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Yep Jedidiah,
I just think of all the hardworking CEO's in the US that charge us only a few millions per year for their "work". If only more programmers had their work ethic!
I'm sure many people don't feel too sorry about engineers and software developers being displaced by workers overseas.
:-)
Why? Well, because so many people have had their jobs displaced by engineers and software developers.
The replacement of workers with robotics, call-center/voice-mail programs, automatic teller machines, etc., etc.
My gosh! It's amazing that unemployment is so low.
Being a software developer myself, I sometimes wonder where all the workers have gone that used to do what my programs now do.
I also wonder whether those whose work replaces jobs should also be responsible for the creation of jobs to replace those they've displaced.
Of course, I own the company and have no plans of firing myself anytime soon.
If globalization hits America, then it is EVIL. Then it is termed as a great job loot by Indians. Then it is the revenge of the El-Cheapo Indians. When the same globalization allows American goods and services to flood developing countries, then it is FREE-TRADE. Welcome to DOUBLE-SPEAK...
it really, really is the end of the golden age of american software development- and that is good!
It is not good. The reason isn't that competition is bad, the reason is that competition isn't present in all jobs. So, while my salary goes from 80k to 50k to 20k, a guy with a service job (like a burger flipper or a barber) keeps making the same amount of money. This means that I make less money with a desirable skill (at least on a global level) simply because it is possible to do my job remotely. Someone doing a fairly unskilled job that requires physical presence is unaffected. That is not fair.
"This means that I make less money with a desirable skill (at least on a global level) simply because it is possible to do my job remotely. Someone doing a fairly unskilled job that requires physical presence is unaffected. That is not fair."
if you need gold, and there is very little gold, gold is desireable
if a wizard produces a machine which makes gold by the ton out of thin air the next day, gold becomes less desireable
get it?
you no longer have a desireable skill
there are no guarantees in life, you are right: it is not fair- as the seven year old would say, but it is entirely fair as the economist would say: supply and demand equalize
meanwhile, no one wants to flip burgers, so they remain in demand and they remain paid
how skilled you are means shit. i can be a super expert on 17th century french poetry. doesn't mean i am going to make as much money as a plumber. people need plumbers. people need house painters. people need consturction workers. they don't NEED, in the economic sense, people who study french poetry.
case in point: nursing jobs in the us are paying more and more every day, more than computer programmers. nurses get wooed with sign up bonuses, flex time, vacations and reassignments whenever they want. why? no one is going to nursing school in the us, it isn't a desireable job to change bedpans. so the us imports it's nursing staff from third world countries, and they move rapidly into the upper middle class. simple fact.
supply and demand my friend, get used to the concept.
no one said it was "fair", in the seven year old throwing a temper tantrum sense.
but it is perfectly fair in the economist's sense.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
wisdom is knowing when you cannot change something
you think you can change the rules of economic supply and demand, go ahead and do something
i have better things to do than fight things like the law of gravity
besides, i think it is a good thing: why must wealth be centralized in the us... let it spread to india, sounds like progress to me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Sad thing is if the roles were reversed the same would not be true of the opposite character."
racist bigoted thinking at work
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not even American and I shudder with rage reading this bullshit. So basically what he is saying that he and his crew were simply too fucking lazy and stupid to do anything else than use Microsoft's software because Gartner, which is known to be the biggest bunch of brainless thieving fucks in the so called consulting industry, said to do so, and then to go and outsource the whole fucking thing to save the extra money that was spent on buying Microsoft software.
Con-fucken-gratulations
But the best and most violently disgusting bit is when he says that this state of the art course at MIt is basically telling those MIT CS students who pay around $29k a year, that they will have no fuckin jobs when they leave.
This must give the word "student" a whole new meaning: Future MacJob applicant!
If it was me I would organise a lynch mob on campus for pricks like this. Then I would leave school at take a course on plumbing.
The answer is easy.
supply and demand. Anyway can flip burgers so McDonalds pay less. However not everyone can be a programmer or I should say a good programmer so wages were up in the 90's.
Microsoft is clever at this when they oversupplied the market with Office and then IE to bring its value down.
After competitors went under they brought the price back up. Wallmart does this illegally as well when they move into a new area to compete agaisnt local small and mom pop shops.
What happened was the H1B1 boom upped the supply and brought down demand. Then corporate america threw in Indians, Russians, and Chinesse to super oversaturate the market!
Now as an IT worker you are competing with so many people, that the specialized skill becomes generic and so does the salary just like the kids who apply at McDonalds. Loads and loads of developers for each position. So why should you pay more?
My answer to this is simple and goes agaisnt the current policies of free trade. CUT SUPPLY.
Put in tarrifs that make Indians almost as much as Americans. After this you will now be able to pitch to a boss easier with less applicants competition which in return raises the salary.
I think this may happen only when CEO's aka campaign contributers begin to look as expensive commidities. After all Indians have MBA's as well as CS degree's right? They only lack experience. As soon as management gets outsourced then cheaper CEO's will be born and bite the greedy bastards in the ass.
Of course that is a few decades away but I think it will ultimately happen unless things change in the current business climate.
Last, what is to not stop American businesses from totally moving to India? Think about? You would make many times over your current salary as a CEO in billions from shareholders!
If that happens you can bet their competitors will do the same to remain in business. Then you will have no jobs left here and tarrifs and protectionism will return.
http://saveie6.com/
Damn right. The Phil Greenspun prick claims that that shit is state of the art IT-development. Bullshit. It's an excuse to pay someone a lot of money for fuck all.
Just that, this is not what's happening with regards to software outsourcing to India.
Remember, most of the software/call-center outsourcing is actually handled by Indian companies; American companies (such as Accenture, IBM Global Services etc) have setup shop in India only recently. That is to say, Indian companies have already reached world standards (or have tried to) in order to compete with international (outsourcing) companies. A fine distinction, but crucial, especially given the rise of China as an IT (as opposed to manufacturing/FDI) challenger; it would mean Indian companies have the skills and resources to compete on their own terms.
That said, you're right; there is a lot of technology leverage in other growth spheres as well. Low cost drug research, for instance, is one market that's looking exceedingly big if you are an Indian policy analyst, and for sure, it will infuse "true" R&D skills into India's generic drugs industry. But for outsourcing per se, I don't think there's any technology leverage here.
More than mere navel gazing.
That said, it's probably a much more interesting ceiling to breach; one of the downsides of this outsourcing/techie explosion is that Indians are apparently being stereo-typed as being too "techie", and hence, not management material.
Personally, I'd like to think Indians have as much chance as any other ethnicity (or may be a wee bit better than, say, the Russians or Chinese, because of a familiarity with English, but again, my experience has been that language skills give you only a temporary advantage)
More than mere navel gazing.
Hmm, I actually think I will do that. It seems like stealing, but its really not!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
We called it in-breeding at my college.
The IT staff were all alumni little to no outside experience - home grown. Therefore traditional ways of doing things was the rule, and inovation withered.
Just like the gene pool in some small towns, IT departments in Academia requires some fresh blood now and then or you end up with a bunch of Bubbas running around all looking at problems from the same viewpoint.
You are ignoring the fact that by outsourcing major sections of the economy, there will be far fewer consumers with the purchasing power to afford the very lifestyle the companies doing the outsourcing depend on. It's called 'eating your children' and is a very stupid thing to do.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
for now it is a global thing, you will sacrifice so that the world may benefit.
No, I am not willing to scarifice for the world. I am, however, willing to make the world sacrifice for me.
If things in America get bad enough, there will be people willing to support the idea of war with India (or wherever), to stop the jobs leaving. The elites in America will realize that if they don't do something, the mob will kill the elites and overthrow the system. A few encouraging words to Pakistan, a need for American troops to be present to "calm the situation", a nuke here or there... and suddenly there are jobs in America again.
Are you willing to die for that job, non-American software developer? Because I'm willing to kill you. Let's both try to make sure it doesn't get to that point, okay?
This isn't about economic theory, or one ideal of a perfect society versus another, this is life and death. Both you and the CEOs of these companies had better wake up and realize what forces YOU are unleashing.
i see the regular stream of stories like this one here on slashdot and i see the fear and horror implicit in them.
You see the fear and horror, but do not understand what true horror can be unleashed by fearful people.
Its not the bottom line but rather quarterly bottom line to the shareholders.
The current climate in business today is cut costs, cut costs with no look into the long term effects of what they do.
That is bad when guys with calculators and not CEO's run the company. VP's and CEO's get heavy and I mean heavy bonus's and salary increases if they exceed expectations quarter to quarter.
In reality you have a conflict of interests between the money made for the top guys personal salary vs money for long term growth for the company.
In an economic downturn you have to and I mean have to cut costs anyway possible or risk being fired. Wall street is very brutal.
That is where outsourcing comes in. Even if it costs more money, the IT managers will get bonuses by the VP when they see a shrank budget.
Yes it costs more money to delivery projects in a timely manner but it does not show on paper. Its lower prioritized as much long term growth factors are. Yes, IT, is a long term factor of growth because its a cost center in the short term. Software does not bring in money but rather costs money to develop and maintain. Not maintaining it of course leads to long term maintance problems and efficiency.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm glad you said something, because you saved me the time :)
I don't know how bigotry and flamebait adds up to "Insightful."
It all goes downhill from first post
it is not because it is viewed as 'menial' that
people dont go into it. its because
its dangerous and dirty because
the managers treat the workers like garbage.
and the reason they moved it to china
was not because they found 'more willing workers',
it was because they found workers who could
not form unions, who have no freedom of speech,
and no environmental laws so the factories
can poison pollute and kill the workers
willy nilly, just like the steel and coal
companies used to do back here.
working implies doing things. in general managers hate that. they either think you are too stupid, or dont have time to talk to you about how to do it properly, or dont want you to get your hands on super secret info, or my favorite, they dont want you to take their jobs by being someone who is more productive than them
Clearly there is too little innovation in IT. When just about anyone with a minimal education can crank out code, IT is really no more creative than work in McDonald's.
I don't want to hear people whining about losing IT jobs. There are no bragging rights for people working at McDonald's.
How do we bring innovation back into IT?
Can we convince businesses to take risks and develop software products rather than software that just supports their business?
Millions of people go to repetitive simple-minded jobs every day. What would the world be like if their tasks were forced to be of the risk-taking decision-making type?
People need information to make the right decisions. IT should be enabling more decision making. IT should be creating more responsibility in work.
Responsibility is not what a lot of people are used to. How can IT give people the means to take advantage of empowering? Should computers help train people in more complex scenarios? Computers can enhance communications that enable responsibility fulfillment. Would computers help people understand fields they have no experience with? The world would definitely be more chaotic. Good software is necessary to help people achieve their objectives, once they are in a position to set more objectives per unit time.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."
You would think they would do a more rigourous investigation before plunking down millions of dollars! While open source solutions might not be best for this application, there are lots of other closed source solutions. Doesn't MIT have a purchasing policy? Don't they have to get quotes from multiple vendors? Are they this diligent with all their funds?
The rest of the article is a standard outsourcing to the lowest bidder story.
Subject says it all.
The highest overhead for any of this type of activity is in maintenance, license fees and security. Apparently they were bought by MS, at least that is what their site says.
Also I wouldn't trust Gartner to take my laundry to the cleaners, much less make judgements on the value of content management systems. Certainly Typo3, Mambo or Plone would have done a fine job. If this is how decisions are made on critical engineering projects at "the best CS program in the world", then I'm glad I didn't spend my money there. Maybe MIT stands for "Mom, I Tried"
As for servers, you can't tell me that a OpenMosix cluster solution wouldn't be several times the power of anything in MS land.
Well in any case, that vast sucking sound you hear is really the air being let out of the US's tires by Adam Smith's invisible hand. I'm mostly a libertarian, and all the crap about "the US dollar decreasing and eventually it will all come back" is true. What they don't tell you is that it will take several decades for that to happen.
Meanwhile? People who thought they would have a job after big $$$ and intense work are screwed. No money to buy houses, start businesses, raise kids, pay medical bills. With Shrubya spending th e US into oblivion (and the tax/inflation consequences thereof) and much of the jobs about to be subbed to India, Russia, China I really don't feel like sticking around for the fireworks. Time to hop in the Motorhome and head for a different country.
(True story: Multiple times within my company middle and upper level managers and execs are cashing in on their bonus's by reducing costs. How? Not by buying less expensive open systems like linux, but by dumping entire programming crews and subbing it out to India. We have a choice. We need to commoditize MS, before MS commoditizes us. Why do you think MS is so enthusiastic about all this? Subbed out Indian contractors don't have any creative opinions about how this could all be done Open Source.
Think about it.)
MIT Students Get an Education in Software Development
Whew, MIT! I guess I should have applied!
For other institutions considering implementing their own "opencourseware" there are several open-source CMS options. At this point, MIT OCW is monitoring six: Zope, Red Hat, Midgard, OpenACS, OpenCMS, and Bricolage. By 2004, most experts agree that one CMS provider will become the clear, open-source leader in this industry sector. MIT OCW will track the progress of key open-source CMS providers during this accelerated maturation. This will contribute to MIT being able to share its experience and understanding of these CMS options with other institutions. The hope is that utilization of open-source model CMS products could lead to less expensive implementations of opencoursewares on other campuses.
In other words, they picked MS because it was the quickest way to go - for now. They haven't given up on open-source.>>What a nice, free, non-violent democracy
Non-violent? Surely, you jest?
Those muslims and hindus get along so well don't they?
And those bride/dowry killings don't really happen do they?
And India gets on so well with its nuclear-armed neighbors north of the border doesn't it?
How can 90% of the world's steel production come from oversees? Does it come from Mars perhaps? What I think you meant to say is 10% of the world's steel is produced in America. Once again America != world.
Get off your high horse. The US has racial/religious struggles. The US is also constantly at war with some nation or other, and as 9/11 has showed is not invulnerable from attack. I'll hand you the dowry killings, they're pretty awful.
OTOH, it might well be more pleasant overall to live in india, or not. I wouldn't make an assumption either way till I had tried actually living there.
They can have stock options, but make it so they can't cash them in for 5 (or maybe 10) years from the date issued. That'll "align their goals with the company"... instead of giving them an incentive to fuck over huge numbers of employees to shove up short-term profits and the share price before cashing in their options and pissing off to another company to do the same.
I agree.
Why are you assuming that I'm an American?
With the amount of BS being spewed hailing outsourcing as .
.
.
...
.
.
.
.
:
.
.
...
....
the new wave of wage savings, I think we will need all the
plumbers we can get to siphon off the sea of $hit that will
be the software development industry in the US, Canada, Europe
I mean, after all if China wanted to force their ENTIRE programming
retinue to work for next to nothing, they could do it and even
undercut the Indians
Give it time, some slime will make it happen soon enough
Mc Job indeed
Look for jobs that cannot be outsourced, that require a person
there face 2 face with GOOD communication skills, you will be
safe for several years I believe
The fact that your not even American and you are upset speaks
to the fact that you prolly see alot of imported labor in your
country, and alot of ppl you know and care about struggling
This is going to get worse, not better
The politicians are bought off and do not vote as representatives
of their voters, they vote their greed
See list
http://www.zazona.com/ShameH1B/H1BMoney.htm
They are STILL having massive layoffs here, not as bad as was
first incurred, but still alot worse than we have seen in a long
while
This is going to happen in every nation that has above 3rd world
wages, and it is going to get MUCH worse
Cest La Vie,
The fall of the US is well underway
Our own damn Corporations and ppl did more damage to the US
than Al-qaeda did, ie. Enron, MCI, AOL, Cisco, Global Crossing,
Adelphia, etc etc etc
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Circle * Sqr,
.
.
...
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I want to propose and idea to you
The idea is that "All things can change" , for now you are
right, and for the near future you are right
But
If enough ppl here in the US get angry enough at their
situation there will be a grass roots effort started
similar to the unions that over pay auto workers to this day
That is the peaceful possibility
The not so peaceful possibility is out of work US workers
sabotaging Visa workers cars that work here, and sabotaging
the companies themselves that send work overseas
The teamsters did this back during the days of hoffa, it is
not going to take a genius to remember a phrase
"If we do not learn from the past, then we are doomed to repeat it."
Ppl have been predicting race riots here in the US for some time,
and fortunately they have not happened
I think a tipping scale factor will be Al-qaeda having an
attack on US soil MUCH larger than the WTC
Think Bio-weapon, think 10's - 100's of thousands dead
Think unbelievably, insanely angry, pissed off ppl
The Corporate whores and political sell outs allowed these
terrorists to come into our country on rubber stamp Visas
that were bought off by the corporations
Bush was embarrassed as hell when he found out that two
of the terrorists that flew the planes into the WTC got
Visas AFTER they hit the towers
Makes ya think doesn't it ???
There are groups forming online here in the US that know this,
and much much more
Like how Barbara Bodine stymied the investigation of the Cole
bombing in Yemen
Some of the Old Guard rural americans who are expert marksmen,
former military, and hardcore mean bastards from families
that helped destroy the germans in WW2 are not happy with
what is being done with our country
Peace by all means is the way we would chose, but given a major
terrorist event, it does not bode well for alot of ppl
For some reason the WTC attack did not build the level of anger
that pearl harbor did, we are more forgiving than before, but
another massive Saudi - Pakistan - Radical Muslim Sponsored
attack happens, all bets are off
For those in those countries, know that the Subs are offshore,
and Nuclear Annihilation is a reality, you just have to
tweak us hard enough and you will be with Allah in a microsecond,
along with your families
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
The man's been dead for centuries. The world has settled on a standard spelling for his name for a very, very long time now. The OP should learn it.
USA (and other rich countries) will have to SIGNIFICANTLY devalue their currencies. I'm talking 70% to 80% drop in the value. Remember, the value of India will rise but the capitalists will then move to a poorer country (say in Latin America).
It remains to be seen what will happen. All I can say is that we are living in a tumultuous time.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Some AC below says why the stock market won't be eliminated. Financial markets (which includes stock markets) are THE most important institutions/entities under capitalism. Capital is the most important thing and financial institutions are the ones that handle it...
;)
Stock markets will be eliminated when capitalism collapses... I personally think this will happen within our lifetimes but that's just me. Either I need to get my head examined or I'm Nostradamus
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Then what chance does anyone have at a community college like the one I teach at. Yesterday I was told that there wasn't enough money to buy the necessary licenses to allow all our students to have an e-mail account. There are 8,000 students. Does anyone really think that the school needs anything more than a castaway PC running Linux to support this population? Microsoft has truly brainwashed otherwise intelligent people. I fear for the future of this country.
Read the subject I just typed .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
...
.
.
.
For the US to outsource every job to anyone who could do it
cheaper would mean 100% unemployment
Yes, our government is horribly wasteful, but if you look around
the world other governments are as corrupt or worse, we just
have more money to be corrupt with
The reason the US is the number one economic powerhouse in the
world for a SHORT while longer, is because we have such a high
standard of living . Cut our standard of living, and we will
fall like a lead anvil from 40,000 feet
That fall is already in progress
the reason it looks like a recovery right now is corporate
bottom lines look better, but they are sending money out of
the US that used to be spent in the US
They are taking money out of the US cycle , and most of it
does not return
I am not pushing for a closed loop economy, but I am pushing for
one that looks at huge unemployment, and bankruptcies and repos
All the huge corporate fraud cost billions of dollars and the
management KNEW what they were doing, yet they get less of a
criminal punishment than someone who smoked a plant that grows
naturally on the side of the road
Who had more victims ??? who hurt more ppl ???
Go figure
Oh and by the way, I do not smoke the herb, I have friends
that do and have gone to jail
My disgust is that laid off ppl paid tax money to put my
friends in jail that do smoke the plant, and pay the salaries
of bloated police forces that do not serve and protect
There are good police, but by and large they are a source of
revenue for most cities
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I never said there weren't plenty of other jobs ripe for outsourcing...
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
And who has heard of any outsourcing to Russia or Israel?
The well-known Linux module "ReiserFS" is a famous example of outsourcing to Russia. Hans Reiser was paid $50,000 or so to develop an advanced filesystem. Instead of feeding himself for one year of work, he turned around and hired 4 Russian PHDs... and had money leftover.
China is the fastest growing mercantile power in the world .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
They came to realize that they can beat us at our own game,
and so they are handily
I think the stock markets may crash, but I think the idea
of the WTO and free trade is going to keep moving forward
Communism as it was is largely over
American and European Engineers helped with the 3 gorges damn,
this was unthinkable just a generation ago
Capitalism is still growing, it is just suffering in the US
All the ppl in all the world want things, and want to sell things
Capitalism and Free trade fit together, they are not Utopian
and do not set a "fair" price, but those styles of government
have not succeeded in the world thus far
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Can you give me a reasonable explanation beyond "they've got dark skins"?
Population. Ireland and Israel are tiny. Their total populations (3mil and 6 mil) are less than a single US city. Russia, Israel, and Ireland combined have half the people of the US (150mil vs 300mil).
But India by itself has more people than those three countries plus all of North America (1000mil vs 580mil).
Fairly small problems just don't get much complaint. I'm sure if China got into software, they'd be even louder.
and you are a paranoid fruitcake
no one is going to war over a bunch of nerds losing their overpaid software jobs, idiot
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
we're talking about a few nerds losing their overpaid cushy jobs
;-P
and you are talking nuclear war in retaliation
you're funny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Solution - Increase inflation in India. Once the cost of living in India is the same as it is here then Indian programmers will be paid the same as they are here. We don't lose any more jobs or suffer any more paycuts and the Indians get thier software industry. Its a win-win for us software types. The only losers are the poor people in India. But if you believe in Reagan-omics then they aren't losers either.
i was born in the us, i am an american citizen, i live in manhattan, i have been programming here for a living for 10 years
who the fuck are you to say who i am or am not?
just because i have more wisdom than you to know when the good old days are over, doesn't mean anything except you are a fool
the skill as a programmer is less desireable and will be less needed and will pay less if a multinational can get the same programming skill somewhere else for one tenth the price
simple as that moron, simple fucking common economic sense: supply and demand, get it?
grow the fuck up, get over it, the golden age of american software development is over, it is a global thing now
simple as that: it's a good thing for the world, only if you are inward and reactionary and protectionist do you not see how it is a good thing for the world
are you an inbred protectionist provincial fool?
get over it, move on, the party is fucking over, capice?
geez, fucking lunatics can't fucking deal with reality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the law of gravity example was just an example, not an invitation to actually fight the laws of gravity! LOL
of course any "law" can be counteracted
doesn't mean a damn thing about what we are talking about here
so now that you have demonstrated the casimir effect, would mind telling us how, and why, we should fight the economic "law" of supply and demand?
you are being too literal about what i am saying, and you are not disproving my point, nor are you illustrating something interesting about the subject matter at hand
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think that's standard whether Universities or Hospitals or companies - they all have their home grown software they think is unique, that does the job, but they are all happily migrating to things like Peoplesoft and SAP in a _big_ way. It's a hassle, it's fraught with problems, but that's the future. Universities are no exception.
It has already been pointed out that American IT functions are too expensive in this country.
I suggest as many have, that the reason for this is because the Information Technology Markets in the US are very ill, or unhealthy.
Primarily due to one company, and that is Microsoft corporate proper and too corporate culture in IT in the US, more on that in a moment.
Why?
When infrastructure and many of the people I talk with say "Oh, but Microsoft is the standard, and besides it costs too much to switch as we are entrenched."
Really? Think of how many jobs have been lost because IT in the US is so expensive.
There is sort of a paradoxical view here, I am not sure if most IT managers are just stupid, or do not understand business or simple cost economics.
If you are entrenched with a technology and it is so expensive you are considering moving operations over seas, which in itself has been show to be incredibly risky, and no panacea for basically, BAD TECHNOLOGY, cutting the cost of human beings to keep the cost of bad technology doesn't make sense in IT.
After all, skilled human beings are required to operate technology, and an important point too remember is CREATE and MAINTAIN technology.
The problem is bigger than most people realize.
Consider this: If you are a Microsoft shop and you buy into the idea of shrink wrap software, the only thing you can do as an IT manager is buy more software to fix existing problems, or wait for manufacturers to fix them...usually at $300 an incident.
Contrast the above with an Open Source shop.
If you are stuck with a high maintance piece of software you can do a design review and change it if required. If there are problems you can fix it.
The typical response I get from IT managers, is "We are not a software development house."
I reply, well, you do not have to be. You can outsource the job to the lowest qualified bidder, at a fixed cost, and have them write the software.
Fixed costs should be a BIG MOUNTAIN on the RADAR screen point in what direction to go in building manageable budgets.
Contrast that with closed source software, where if you lack functions in the software or need a fix, good luck trying to get a company too listen to you who lives and dies by software closed licensing. Secondly, from year to year you cannot plan changes, the vendor does that so you cannot improve the software in any predictable way budget year to budget year!!
This fact Absolutely is a mystery to IT managers. I think, probably due to the fact if you can't make a decision, it is a non decision. (i.e. closed source shops can't even consider this as a possibility in a budget cycle.)
The other reply I get from managers, when I talk to them about entrenchment, is: "We would have to retrain our staff."
My biggest contention about this statement is what I have been telling my colleagues for years now since Linux came onto the scene: "We are a nation based on closed source, with IT managers that can't do anything beyond just push OK or CANCEL."
Quite frankly when I was CIO in my past life, I made sure anyone I hired understood that as an IT person, you have a REPSONSIBILITY to daily learn new things and CREATE YOUR OWN INFRASTRUCTURE around open standards and CONTRIBUTE BACK TO THE COMMUNITY who wrote those standards.
I don't care if it is a new administrative idea about managing Linux machines or a new piece of software you wrote, that you feel is unique.
I made it clear that if you work in my IT department as a Network Administrator for example, you are going to be spending a lot of your time writing software, creating new infrastructure and doing lots of prototyping and reading AND contrinuting to open standards projects.
Why?
Probably because I feel, unlike many IT people I talk to as a consultant, that every day is a JOB to LEARN and CREATE and you better DO IT.
Why is this a big problem? Well, first
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I agree about the disturbing tone of the original post (it's nauseating to see all of the old anti-immigrant/foreigner BS getting new life because white-collar jobs are involved now) but there is one legitimate concern: communications. I've worked with on oversea projects and the latency hit for answering questions can eat a project alive - what you end up with is probably going to be late and not very close to what the customer (who has never talked with the actual development team) really wanted.
Much as we might hate to admit it meetings can actually be better than the alternatives - I ended up spending a month in Taiwan a few years ago simply so they could ask someone from our company questions in person rather than stringing them out over several days (or not asking because it's so slow).
I think this is going to keep most of the outsourcing worst-case scenarios from actually happening, at least until the average business learns how to manage projects effectively - given how poor the current average is this will probably take decades.
From Sunday's NY Times comes this story of a toy plant in China. (reqistration required):
"Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour."
$9.00/hour versus $0.24/hour -- exactly how is "radical reform of the tax code and radical limits of government spending" supposed to even come close to equalizing this discrepancy?
when Indian developers are even cheaper than grad students!
However, some of the brightest Indian code developers are graduate students at MIT.
"Provided by the management for your protection."