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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...'"
when Indian developers are even cheaper than grad students!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
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."
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?
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
So you've got one of the premier software development colleges in the country outsourcing it's software development work to India. It'd be like a medical school outsourcing it's health department.
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.
I'm just waiting for the moment when the light bulb suddenly gets switched on, and people realize that being a cheapskate often does not save money. Quite often you get what you pay for. And realizing that should not be mixed with hidden racism or xenophobism.
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
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.
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...
...
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
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.
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!
But MIT is not a premier software development school..it's a primier computer science school..and do it's graduate students really want to develop this content management system..or do something more innovative?
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.
Well, if it's like any other engineering college, odds are that a large number of their students are from India already...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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.
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 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?
I don't see what the big deal is. It would be foolish to get IT students to write business critical software, since they do not have the experience.
Let them graduate, and work under an experienced team lead, and then, IF they can make it cheaper than I can buy it, they can have the job.
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use - Mark Twain
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.
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
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.
This is not to say that Indian developers are mediocre, of course, most of the ones I've worked with are very skilled. It's simply rather depressing that the disparity in economies lets them be so much cheaper compared to US workers.
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.
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 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 respectfully disagree with the basic premise of your statements above.
:)
;)
Specifically, the idea that "The quality of jobs necessarily means the type of work that the population is willing to do...The country then looks to exporting those jobs, so that it's population can work on something better...maybe higher level jobs."
At risk of seeming glib, close your eyes, reach out your arms and spin in a circle. You'll probably smack an unemployed IT professional in the back of the head. That individual, and a lot more like her/him, very much want to do the type of work that is being outsourced. The fact that most of them are not being hired is not due to their lack of desire, or (in most, not all) cases their greed, but to the fact that living in the US is a lot more expensive than living in Delhi, so the minimum that a US citizen will accept for the work is higher than the minimum that someone living in Delhi will accept.
Similarly, when auto plants were closing in Michigan, et al, it wasn't because people didn't want to work, but because they couldn't afford to live on the salaries that Mexican workers would accept.
In short, "the country" didn't look to export those jobs to allow the population to do something better -- the corporations exported the jobs so that they could get more labor for the same amount of money, or the same amount of labor for less money.
Think of it as time travel. If you could send your money back to the 1920s, think of the amount of labor you could afford for a fraction of the price! Now, the health care, safety standards, environmental controls, and general quality of life sucked compared to current US conditions, but hey, you don't have to go back there -- only your money does. The goods and services produced by this labor come back into the year 2003 and are sold at today's marketplace rates. That's fundamentally what we're talking about here, and I suppose that's good capitalism.
Just don't pretend it's for the good of the unemployed, i.e., they don't want to do this kind of work. If you were asked to do your job at a salary that wouldn't pay for your share of rent on a one bedroom apartment shared with three other people, you wouldn't do the work either, no matter how "higher level" they might be.
Sorry if this seems like a rant.
PS: in my original draft, I wrote "If you could send your monkey back to the 1920s..." which is, on it's own, something interesting to think about.
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 $10,000" 'hackers', and their ilk.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
It's hard to imagine that happening. There are things worth doing, and there are lots of Americans, so somebody will pay them something to do those things. People are still the best, most valuable, resource. Unless they're idiots sitting stupefied in front of TVs.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The people who hired Sapient were without a clue. Instead of consulting their own faculty or students, the idiots read a Gatner report and bought Microsoft snake oil. It was a typical big dog decision, breathtakingly ignorant and a hopless waste. The whole thing will have to be redone in two years when M$ 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.
Being forced to compete with others on a completely unequal scale is a downside.
No, equaling out the scale is what globalization is. The idea behind the global market is that comparative advantage will take hold and the places that are better able to produce a given type of product will produce that product. One can argue whether this is the case in the current example, but what you're talking about amounts to bellyaching. What globalization is, is vastly different than what everyone is expecting it to be. Things won't stay the same and new markets will be opened up. This is what you're calling a downside (and the US with its steel tarriffs). That's the way it works. If the Indians are better at programing because of labor costs (which is how things appear), then the American programing industry will wither and die and move to India. Sorry, but tough. Economics isn't called the dismal science for no reason.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
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