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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...'"
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.
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/