MIT Students Get an Education in Software Development 595
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...'"
An older thread about outsourcing experiences.... (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of familiar points are made - timezone differences impede voice communications, geography impedes physical communications, "fire and forget" projects are not very common, etc. Seems like it can be made to work, though, if folks on the project take the time to keep the communication lines open.
Body of the article (for the slashdot effect) (Score:0, Informative)
Not all of our students will see this cover story in Business Week on the migration of high-paying jobs to India. But most attended a lecture in 6.171 by the folks who run MIT's latest big IT effort: OpenCourseware (http://ocw.mit.edu), which distributes syllabi, problem sets, and other materials from MIT classes (at least one semester after the class is actually given). During the lecture the students learned that, although ocw.mit.edu is a purely static
The more sophisticated portion of ocw.mit.edu is a 100 percent Microsoft show. A student asks the speakers why they chose Microsoft Content Management Server, expecting to hear a story about careful in-house technical evaluation done by people sort of like them. The answer: "We read a Gartner Group report that said the Microsoft system was the simplest to use among the commercial vendors and that open-source toolkits weren't worth considering."
Students began to wake up.
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, either by Sapient, MIT's main contractor for the project, or by a handful of Microsoft India employees who helped set up the Content Management Server.
Thus did students who are within months of graduating with their $160,000 computer science degrees learn how modern information systems are actually built, even by institutions that earn much of their revenue from educating American software developers.
# Posted by Philip Greenspun on 12/1/03; 10:57:50 AM - Comments [20] Trackback [2]
Re:Harming the local economy... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Story has little merit... (Score:2, Informative)
Just like our school just got sued because they didn't hire a woman for the football coach... she said it was sexual discrimination, the school said that regardless of her qualifications, a team of testosterone pumped college guys would have an extremely hard time adjusting to a female coach. Add onto that that she had never coached football, and it seems pretty clear cut...
I'm sick and tired of EVERYBODY blaming racism and discrimination for why they aren't doing well in this world, when I'd choose to believe its because they spend too much time bitching
Follow your job (Score:2, Informative)
and it's not even funded by Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
That's even though Microsoft has been trying to get into MIT [mit.edu].
Re:Funny (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking as a recent MIT grad ... (Score:5, Informative)
#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.
My experiences in this... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:So that's that, folks... (Score:2, Informative)
Can you explain this horrendous overhead? Most student jobs on campus are work study, meaning that the wages are subsidized by the Financial Aid office and the employer only pays 1/4. That's not even counting the grad students who'd work for free as research.
$160k degree... your *first* problem (Score:1, Informative)
In most places in the world you'll get a degree for a tenth or so of that figure. The mindset fostered by these expensive degrees and expensive salaries is that they must be better (well that is the justification one hears anyway). I doubt it. I doubt an American degree or an American programmer are inherently better than the rest of the world.
During the dot.com boom any arsewipe could get a job in the Valley for a stupid figure. Now the same person is complaining that their job went away. Face it dude, most likely you were not cut out for this industry.
The project was on time and under budget... (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things that we try to teach in the class (textbook is online at http://philip.greenspun.com/internet-application-w orkbook/ [greenspun.com] 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 [greenspun.com]
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.
Re:So that's that, folks... (Score:5, Informative)
When I was at MIT the rules were that overhead was charged at a rate of 2.75 times expenses. So if I hired someone as staff and paid them $1000 I would be charged $3750 from my budget.
The rules for students were somewhat different but still pretty grasping. Basically I would be charged the amount they were actually paid plus overhead and added to that their cost of tuition, I can't remember what overhead would be on that. Tuition at MIT these days is $29K per year. So over a year a student would cost my budget something like $60K, and the student would see less than $10K of that and I would see about 15 weeks worth of work if I was lucky.
There is also overhead on external contractors but nowhere near as much.
And yes, this is a complete stinking racket. The only reason it continues is that the government allows the major research universities to do this type of padding as a means of giving them an under the table subsidy.
I have no clue where the money goes. If you look at the amount of time that the students have contact with the faculty, the amount the faculty are paid and the cost of tuition the sums don't add up. And thats before you consider places like LCS/AI which have always been self funding through government grants. Perhaps the President has a yatch somewhere like the Stanford guy had, he would have to be a lot better hiding the thing round MIT though and if the students found it...
...Thanks to Brute Force + Microsoft Help (Score:3, Informative)
Re:You know you're really in trouble... (Score:1, Informative)
According to the US Census Bureau [census.gov], median income for a family of 4, across the US was 63,278 in 2001. The number quoted for India is also family income [indiatogether.org].
Close enough, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Just that, this is not what's happening with regards to software outsourcing to India.
Remember, most of the software/call-center outsourcing is actually handled by Indian companies; American companies (such as Accenture, IBM Global Services etc) have setup shop in India only recently. That is to say, Indian companies have already reached world standards (or have tried to) in order to compete with international (outsourcing) companies. A fine distinction, but crucial, especially given the rise of China as an IT (as opposed to manufacturing/FDI) challenger; it would mean Indian companies have the skills and resources to compete on their own terms.
That said, you're right; there is a lot of technology leverage in other growth spheres as well. Low cost drug research, for instance, is one market that's looking exceedingly big if you are an Indian policy analyst, and for sure, it will infuse "true" R&D skills into India's generic drugs industry. But for outsourcing per se, I don't think there's any technology leverage here.
Re:So that's that, folks... (Score:2, Informative)
For example, a graduate student who's paid a $15K stipend, plus $10K tuition, costs $35K in a 40% overhead grant.
Overhead's important to a university -- it basically pays for everything the university does to make your work possible. Otherwise that'd have to come out of student hides.
Where overhead goes: typically half of the overhead goes to the University's general fund to pay for buildings and electricity and pencils etc. Of the remainder, typically half goes to your department or your dean's fund to help pay for secretaries and toner and phones. The remainder goes to you (the Principal Investigator) for you to do with as you please -- maybe attend a conference or pay for a replacement laptop.