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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?
Where abouts in India did you find these programmers?
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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.
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...
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
...
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.
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
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?
Its already happening. Indians are now viewed as expensive since they think they deserve up to 10k a year. But that nerve!
In Russia, you could hire a Russian to do it for 7k a year. Where does it end?
When it comes to cheap labor, there is no bottom. Only a constantly falling top price.
Oddly when it comes to upper management and CEO's, there is always a bottom and no top in terms of compensation. Hmmm why is that?
That means exploitation. Hey, I would have no problem if CEO's had salary caps and could compete with cheaper foriegn CEO's but this is quite unfair for the rest of us.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
NCompass was bought by Microsoft awhile ago. In fact, NCompass Resolution is basically Microsoft Content Mangement System.
Go to ncompass.com yourself...
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
...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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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