Learning About Outsourcing in College?

nial-in-a-box asks: "I just started my software engineering course today at Loyola University Chicago and I found out that I will be learning hands-on about outsourcing. My classmates and I will be outsourcing parts of projects to students at another university, and then those students will be doing the same for us. This seems like it could be rather interesting. Has anyone out there been in a class like this before? Any other ideas on how to effectively teach about the implications of outsourcing (especially pointing out that outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean no jobs upon graduation)?"

Comments

How to find jobs after outsourcing.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

(especially pointing out that outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean no jobs upon graduation)?"

This is highly counterintuitive. I suggest that if you want to teach this, you need to find a company that outsourced without losing jobs, without laying off even a single individual. If you find such a beast- let me know, because as near as I can tell, outsourcing ALWAYS means lost jobs.

Re:How to find jobs after outsourcing.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

you need to find a company that outsourced without losing jobs

Easy. My first employer. Of course, I can't point you at them because they went out of business, but for completely unrelated reasons.

Outsourcing, when done properly, is a money saver. The specific type of outsourcing I'm talking about was electronics assembly. We used to have someone whose job 8 hours/day, 5 days/week was assembling PC boards. As volumes grew, first we hired someone else, then engineers (like the newly hired me!) had to pitch in. Finally it was costing us too much (having an engineer do a minimum wage job, extra time spent managing the assemblers so they were busy enough, etc), so it was mostly outsourced to a company that specializes in that kind of work.

I went back to my preferred design engineer/customer support role. One of the assemblers spent most of her time doing kitting (putting together the parts kits to be sent to the contract manufacturer) and other inventory duties, and the other assembler's time was spent mostly doing quick-turnaround rush jobs or things we built only in small quantities or that were difficult to automate (e.g., making cables).

And yes, we saved money doing this. Hell, we were profitable enough that a bunch of morons paid top dollar for the company, only to run it into the ground a few years later.
But that's another story.

Another person

[chris_mahan]

Propose to get another person to take the classes for you. When they say you can't do that, you tell them you're outsourcing.

Then ask them what the differenc is, really. This might turn out into an econ/ethics class, so make sure you got your econ 160 stuff down pat.

Is it worth opposing outsourcing in the longterm?

[quantax]

Ever since I've taken several history classes at my college and read about the industrial revolution, I've begun to question whether opposing outsourcing is even worth it in the long run.

Basically, during the industrial revolution, countries like Britain, whom had large colonies overseas such as India, would export that colonies natural resources (in this case tea, silk, textiles, etc) back to Britain where the British public would buy these goods. Then people began realizing, you can hire the colony natives for far cheaper than your country men in Britain, so companies relocated their textile, silk, tea, etc factories in India where they would pay the native workers far less to work in often very poor conditions, and often polluting, etc the environment around the area. In Britain, many factory jobs were lost to the Indians, which naturally angered the workers, but economically made more sense. Figure: instead of carting some natural resource thousands of miles away, you dig/produce/farm/whatever said resource right there and then transport it 100 feet to the factory where it spits out goods, which you then ship to Britain, where people whom have the money can buy it (rarely can natives in these situations afford the products they produce). This generates more service jobs in the host country to sell said goods and more manufacturing jobs in the colony. Low-wage & menial jobs historically get divied out to the lowest bidder.

Now, all of this can be applied to the current 'information revolution' in which we are currently undergoing. Countries that have only recenty industrialized, (India, China) are now becoming computerized and are rapidly attracting foriegn investors who realize these places are the frontlines of this revolution, and the people who will be employed in it. Can we realistically expect to be paid the big bucks for now-menial jobs? Programmers arent such an exclusive job anymore, nor is a lot of things that used to be rare/lucrative skills only 5 - 8 years ago.

I am a computer animator, one of the jobs currently entering embattled grounds of outsourcing. They have these companies in Eastern Europe & Asia where they hire 100 guys who know Maya, 3D studio max, etc and these guys pump out huge blocks of finished animation in a matter of weeks for about $10 - $50/day (which is rich by sweat-shop standards), where the same project would take 8 - 12 months in America or Europe at easily 50 - 1000x the cost. Can I really fight this? Other than making sure that I can offer something none of those 3d-slaves can offer, theres not too much, so what can I really do?

I think this process is inevitable though I do not totally welcome, the best thing to do in the longterm is putting yourself in a position where some guy who codes for 16hrs a day for $10 does not have leg up on you; though this sounds hard, remember, chances are this guy can do nothing except that task even though he does it very well. Also, removing things like tax-cuts for companies that outsource is something I agree with, and I think will result in a healthier transition in the longrun.

Re:First thing is...

[CornerScribe]

This class may be beneficial, but maybe not in the way the prof intended.

I suspect that students on both sides of the project will learn that outsourcing isn't as easy (or as cheap) as they might have suspected. By the time you factor in the communications costs, delays, reworking, and sheer aggravation, these students may just learn that sending work outside the company isn't the quick fix many see it to be.

Well ...

[gstoddart]

Propose to get another person to take the classes for you. When they say you can't do that, you tell them you're outsourcing.

Then ask them what the differenc is, really. This might turn out into an econ/ethics class, so make sure you got your econ 160 stuff down pat.

Because they're not trying to teach the lesson of what it's like to lose your job. They're not trying to teach you to be a smart-ass.

I would think there is a very practical lesson to be learned in telling someone at a remote site exactly what you expect to see, and exactly what it's interface will be, and how you plan on verifying it. This is a practical exercise in writing your spec in advance and handing it off to someone to implement. Which, oddly enough, is arguably applicable to software engineering.

An awful lot of projects never really know what they're looking for until they get a few iterations in. I'm willing to bet if you did that in an outsourcing project it would become extremely inefficient.

I'm betting the prof is counting on several bad specifications going out the door which are either completely useless or way too open-ended. In which case the people who implement it will deliver what they understood the requirements to be -- the coders will be judged by how well they implemented what was asked for, not what was wanted by management.

Cheers

Why not India?

[bskin]

Just something I wanted to toss out here...

Really, if these jobs are going to Indians with CS degrees...why wouldn't they deserve the job? If they're qualified, why not give them work? I mean, if two workers are both qualified, and one will work cheaper, you hire the cheaper one.

And if you think they're not qualified, then one of two things would happen: either companies will see the difference in quality, decide it's not worth the cost savings, and start bringing the jobs back...or they'll decide the quality is good enough, that it offers a better value for their money, and there'll start to be a lot less high pay programming jobs in the US. Companies may just not need as highly skilled programmers as they thought. To them, it'd be like hiring an engineer to be a janitor, when he was still demanding an engineer's salary. Either he's gotta drop his price, or the job's going to someone else.

I guess people just need to realize that programming, as it's done by most large software companies, isn't really skilled work. It requires a lot of training, yes, but so does being an auto mechanic. Sure, there'll always be smaller companies that have a need for highly skilled programmers. Id isn't going to start outsourcing. But a young, technically-minded individual will just have to consider other career paths than programming. Low-level programming jobs aren't going to disappear in the US, but they'll prolly pay a lot less and just generally be a lot less glamorous.