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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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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
some years ago MIT needed an enterprise authentication system, and developed Kerberos. today would it read some reports, and implement MS passport?
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.
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
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.
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.
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12 was 12
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