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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...'"
...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
and then you will learn the third and final lesson. Your elected representative ain't representing you, dude. Sorry. *cragen
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
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 even though Microsoft has been trying to get into MIT.
You should note that it wasn't MIT that directly outsourced the work to India. It was, in fact, a U.S. company that was hired for the project that in turn used their Indian development resources to do the coding work.
... 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.
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.
"The student may not get paid much, but the overhead charged by MIT is horrendous"
Can you explain this horrendous overhead? Most student jobs on campus are work study, meaning that the wages are subsidized by the Financial Aid office and the employer only pays 1/4. That's not even counting the grad students who'd work for free as research.
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.
When I was at MIT the rules were that overhead was charged at a rate of 2.75 times expenses. So if I hired someone as staff and paid them $1000 I would be charged $3750 from my budget.
The rules for students were somewhat different but still pretty grasping. Basically I would be charged the amount they were actually paid plus overhead and added to that their cost of tuition, I can't remember what overhead would be on that. Tuition at MIT these days is $29K per year. So over a year a student would cost my budget something like $60K, and the student would see less than $10K of that and I would see about 15 weeks worth of work if I was lucky.
There is also overhead on external contractors but nowhere near as much.
And yes, this is a complete stinking racket. The only reason it continues is that the government allows the major research universities to do this type of padding as a means of giving them an under the table subsidy.
I have no clue where the money goes. If you look at the amount of time that the students have contact with the faculty, the amount the faculty are paid and the cost of tuition the sums don't add up. And thats before you consider places like LCS/AI which have always been self funding through government grants. Perhaps the President has a yatch somewhere like the Stanford guy had, he would have to be a lot better hiding the thing round MIT though and if the students found it...
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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...
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.
275% overhead? Maybe this is some special MIT thing, but I sense something wrong in the claim. Because the overhead for private funding, DARPA grants and NSF grants to universities is almost always in the range of 50%. At my university it's 45.8%. At another college I know of it's the highest I've EVER heard of: 65%.
For example, a graduate student who's paid a $15K stipend, plus $10K tuition, costs $35K in a 40% overhead grant.
Overhead's important to a university -- it basically pays for everything the university does to make your work possible. Otherwise that'd have to come out of student hides.
Where overhead goes: typically half of the overhead goes to the University's general fund to pay for buildings and electricity and pencils etc. Of the remainder, typically half goes to your department or your dean's fund to help pay for secretaries and toner and phones. The remainder goes to you (the Principal Investigator) for you to do with as you please -- maybe attend a conference or pay for a replacement laptop.