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

Sounds like...

[cs02rm0]

...a lot of documentation... *yawn*

To get that real feeling of outsourcing..

[hookedup]

Make sure the college you're doing the work with doesnt have any english speaking students.

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.

[Asgard]

Outsourcing is bad from a jobs perspective if one is working for the company that is now considering outsourcing, but if one doesn't yet have a job then working for the company that won the outsourcing contract is perfectly feasible.

Re:How to find jobs after outsourcing.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

First, as someone said, a job lost in one place is a job gained elsewhere.

Yep- as long as that elsewhere is anywhere other than America, or at least so it seems in IT.

econd, most outsourcing (in my experience, anyway; as for life in your dorm, YMMV) has nothing to do with losing jobs -- it's companies contracting out work instead of hiring new people.

In my experience, it's usually about asking the IT staff to train their replacements before being fired. This has caused at least one suicide (Kevin Flannagan, in Concord, CA in the parking lot of the Bank Of India^H^H^H^H^HAmerica headquarters) and one big challenge to a US Congress Critter (Michael Emmons running on the American Party Ticket against Rep Mica of Florida). I've yet to see *any* outsourcing project that didn't end in a massive layoff at the parent company.

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.

sure

[pizza_milkshake]

they could outsource the entire class (except for "upper management", i.e. the prof). the students would have a few weeks to prep foreigners on what they would do in various situations, and then the professor could teach the foreigners via conference calls while the students go look for other classes.

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.

First thing is...

[Otter]

No, actually, I'll start with an anecdote, instead. We had a talk last year from one of our foreign colleagues who figured (not unreasonably) that the opposite of "in-house" is "out-house". He went on at some length about "out-housing" certain studies, to the puzzlement of the audience.

Anyway. The first thing that needs to be clarified is that outsourcing doesn't necessarily mean India! It simply refers to having some task done by people outside your company.

(That said -- this guy's class does sound an awful lot like it really is "Outsourcing to India 101", doesn't it?)

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.

It's the new cruelty..er..curriculum

[isaac]

This is part of the new curriculum being phased in at CS programs around the country. The next phase will have you deposit your diploma into a shredder for recycling after you cross the stage. You'll then be loaded onto a container ship and be sent to a reprocessing facility in China, where you'll become something useful, like soylent green.

-Isaac

Not realistic.

[BigChigger]

If you want to make it realistic, you have to have the situation where you are NOT receiving any work from the other college. So you and your collegues get to do no work, and receive an F in the class.

BC

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.

Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though I haven't been in college for many years, one of the young women in CS 101 with me was a master of outsourcing. Jodi Jackson would always outsource her programming assignments to others in the class. These chumps would happily work overtime for a chance to have her smile at them and perhaps even sit with them for lunch one day. When you think about those Indian schmucks happily working themselves to dust for crumbs from American companies, you can see the parallel. Jodi was ahead of her time.

Good lord Jodi was hot...

You've got the intentions wrong.

[DarylBeattie]

Regarding question 1; Yes, the University of Toronto Computer Science classes have been doing this for years, but mainly between groups within the same class or classes.

Question 2; I hate to point out the obvious, but they are not teaching you about "outsourcing"; they are really just using that as a term to describe what you will be doing. They are attempting to teach you how to work with others effectively when face-to-face communication is not always possible. In programming, this means properly internally and externally documenting code, and defining clear interfaces. Since this is a situation will come across very often in the working world, it is important to learn. Also, in this class you are not only held accountable to your professor, but also to the students in the other school.

I believe it is an excellent way to teach important lessons to students. When you have an interview with a company, I would suggest pointing out this class to the interviewers and telling them what you learned from it; it'll probably impress them. Have fun! :)

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

You're doing it wrong. The best way to teach these kids about outsourcing is:

• Make it a mandatory course that you need to graduate. No substitutions or exemptions.
• Make it a really really hard course w/ lots of homework and studying and tests and stuff.
• No matter how well they do in the class, give the guy who did the absolute least work an A and give everyone else an F at the end.

Re:Is it worth opposing outsourcing in the longter

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The real difference can be seen in our current INDUSTRIAL outsourcing. America has a huge supply of natural resources- even today. What we're doing is shipping our natural resources to China and our informational resources to India, then importing the finished product back to America to sell to the consumers- which happen to be the same people we laid off so that we could take advantage of the cheaper labor rates in India and China. If this sounds like it breaks the economic equivalent of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, well, now you know why America has such large inventories of stuff nobody will buy.

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

Even more realistic

[raider_red]

To make it even more realistic, they should get a bunch of clueless business administration students to come in and grade your work.

it's a sham

[Optical Voodoo Man]

It sounds like a ploy to keep students from going into other fields. How else can the keep up the rolls in the computer science department? "No no no, outsourcing won't take the jobs away, here, pay for this course and we'll show you."

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.

You're in the wrong class

[pyrrhonist]

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.

You're in the wrong class. This is actually one of the Management courses. The SE course is down the hall.

I just thought you'd like to know before you get too into it.

On second thought, if you couldn't figure out what room you're supposed to be in, you'd be a good manager. Nevermind.