Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT…

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 .html site, it is produced with a database-backed content management system.  In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service, about $2 million was spent on technology and the salaries of folks at MIT who oversee the technology.


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.

98 thoughts on “Outsourcing to India in Business Week and at MIT…

  1. Some text seems to have been omitted from the end of this sentence: “In fact, of the $11 million donated by foundations to support the service”

  2. It would be nice if there were some sort of open-source information-sharing system already developed by some MIT folks, then it could have been customized for OpenCourseWare. But I’m sure the university conducted a thorough evaluation of existing institutional knowledge before spending $11m.

    ;->

  3. As Ryan Tate correctly writes it, the “w” in OpenCourseWare should be capitalized. Make sure and take care of that. Slovenly is not your style, Philip.

  4. Gartner’s evaluations of the document/content management market have consistently been off course for the past decade.

    The trend is not changing by the looks of it.

    Get used to it.

  5. On a more serious note, the BusinessWeek article and the other pontificating about the offshoring of IT jobs to India may be seriously overblown. Note that the article cites a study of the Gartner sort to support the notion of a job exodus to India, and keep in mind all of the caveats that comes with such “research.”

    The September issue of Business 2.0 carried a well-researched contrarian article arguing there is a job boom coming for IT workers — in America. The article tackled the India issue head on. (If you are a Business 2.0 magazine subscriber you can read it here.) The crux of the argument is that the truly skilled portion of the Indian workforce is realtively small and close to tapped out by eager American companies:

    “Much of the worry seems to have crystallized around an estimate by technology research and consulting firm Forrester Research (FORR) that India and other nations will import some 3.3 million U.S. service jobs during the next 15 years.

    “For the most part, economists say, this is mere hysteria. India, China, the Philippines, and other newly industrialized countries simply haven’t enough capacity to prevent the U.S. labor squeeze, especially in IT. India’s IT industry, after all, produces about $14 billion a year, a gnat on the hide of the U.S. sector’s $813 billion. Likewise, the subcontinent’s 150,000 tech workers represent less than 2 percent of America’s domestic IT labor force, barely enough to make a ripple in the looming job shortage.

    “And what of the 3.3 million jobs that Forrester predicts will move offshore by the end of the next decade? Most experts in the field put little faith in that number; they say there’s not yet enough data to make any credible projection. (Some, in fact, dismiss Forrester’s study as little more than a marketing brochure for Forrester’s own offshore outsourcing consultancy.) Martin Kenney, a professor at the University of California at Davis who has just released a study on outsourcing in India, guesses that the true figure will be only half that many and that most of those will fall into lower-skilled categories like call centers.”

    There is definitely a discrepency in the data here, and I wish both Business 2.0 and BusinessWeek were more rigorous about citing their data. For example, B2 has 150,000 IT workers in all of India, and BW has 150,000 in Bangalore alone.

    I also don’t like the numerous consultancies cited in the BW article, including Meta and Ernst & Young. I much prefer the Harvard economist cited in this earlier BW article, also cited in B2. Here’s an excerpt from the BW article, titled “Too Many Workers?”:

    “Diversity efforts, always slow to bear fruit, could take on new urgency as employers discover they can’t rely so heavily on the native white labor pool, which will shrink by 8 million through 2020, according to demographic projections by David T. Ellwood, an economist at Harvard University. He has analyzed the trends for an upcoming study of the labor-shortage outlook by Colorado’s Aspen Institute, a group of business and political leaders. Immigration, too, could become a less divisive issue as the need for workers becomes more acute.”

    So yes, we’ll see some IT go to India, but I think these MIT grads and other IT workers will be vocationally secure as their boomer parents retire in droves. Of course the social security paycheck deduction won’t be pretty …

    R

  6. Here’s the economist’s view: If certain IT jobs can be done more efficiently in India, why not perform them there?

    The top IT (and related project management) work will remain in the US because it requires detailed knowledge and quick analysis of subtleties that are cultural, company-specific, industry-specific, etc. There is also a significant coordination cost and higher risk of failure of offshore corporate IT projects. What will happen is that the lower-value jobs (coding, detailed design, etc.) will go offshore. The jobs that remain will be more valuable, challenging, and interesting. This has already happened in places like Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where low value manufacturing jobs are being exported to places like China. Expect Silicon Valley to reinvent itself once more along these lines in the next few years.

    Just as there aren’t too many MIT alumni in the IT field who have been unemployed since the crash of ’00, newly minted computer science (CS) degreeholders have little to fear in the five year future.

    Of course, nobody can accurately predict the value of an MIT CS degree 30 years from now, but people smart enough to get such a degree can easily adapt to the changing environment.

  7. Yeah, exactly whats wrong with IT jobs going to India? If they are turning out more creative grads these days, it isnt surprising is the more creative jobs are going there(as opposed to the y2k like jobs which went earlier).

    Something I do wonder about is this: how much of it is related to H1B employees going back after having developed their chops here. Or, is the US loosing jobs paradoxically by curbing immigration? (I’m not sure there are any actual governmental curbs besides the maximum 6 years H1B limit, but a down economy does lead to immigrant workers being shafted, due to their sponsorship driven even greater lack of mobility.

    Either way, I wonder why so many rational software developers and capitalists get their panties in a bunch when jobs move overseas, rather than regarding it as an inevitable results of the globalization of capitalism…

  8. I wonder why so many rational software developers and capitalists get their panties in a bunch when jobs move overseas, rather than regarding it as an inevitable results of the globalization of capitalism…

    Might have something to do with the need in the short and medium term to be able to buy groceries and pay the mortgage.

  9. Haha.

    Thanks for the chuckle, I’m still laughing as I write this.

    Total reliance on Gartner is not relegated solely to decision makers at ocw.mit.edu – for many industry CIO chiefs, Gartner is gospel. Of course a critical analysis of Gartner exposes them as pitiful prognosticators eager to jump on the bandwagon of whatever business trend du jour is in vogue.

    Ryan, you may have some impressive credentials as a writer but you’re out to lunch on this issue. I venture that the numbers offered up on offshoring/outsourcing IT are on the LOW side. A five minute drive from my home exists the IT center of where over 2K programmers worked – over 90% of those jobs moved offshore (or staffed by immigrant visa holders working for offshore vendors). Ditto for the next two largest IT shops in my home city.

    What will happen is that the lower-value jobs (coding, detailed design, etc.) will go offshore. The jobs that remain will be more valuable, challenging, and interesting.

    The flawed architecture model of software development shows it’s fraudulent face again. Those highly skilled at lower level coding and technical wizardry are the future star system designers and developers.

  10. But ya cant have it both ways Ralph, get the benefits of capitalism when it suits you and remove the dangers when it dosent. That way you go back to the colonial globalization of the past, and the demon is too loose for that..

    There is always something that must be risked to have enough leftover after paying the mortgage. Else North Korea might be the right nation to settle down in..

  11. [Disclosure: I’m an Indian living in the USA]

    The reason IT jobs are migrating to India is that IT is becoming commoditized. The US is excellent at being in the forefront of emerging technologies, and relatively poor at cranking out commodity products at low to moderate prices, especially where it involves heavy labor.

    I think too much is made of the IT and Services jobs being exported to India. Rather than waste that many brain cells fretting about it, the right thing to do is to go back and innovate. The US’s strengths lie in innovation and invention. After all, the Internet is almost entirely an American phenomenon (Tim Berners-Lee notwithstanding). So is every single programming language and platform in general use.

    The thing to think about is — what’s the next big thing?

  12. Wow, so if me and a few of my CS buddies get together and build a CMS and put up a website “Database-backed websites starting at $50,000” then we too can be a successful web app developer like Microsoft?

    Oh wait, I think this has already been done before. Many times….

  13. But ya cant have it both ways Ralph, get the benefits of capitalism when it suits you and remove the dangers when it dosent.

    Well, of course you are right. I think that what many people are thinking, though, is: “why are always the same ones who have to take it? Why always the middle classes, and not the Donald Trumps and Kenneth Lays?” After all, you don’t see too many CEO jobs being outsourced, and considering their salaries, doing so would spread much more wealth to the Third World…

  14. I have nothing but questions.

    Is India really twice as productive? Or just half as expensive?

    Is it easier to get a PhD in India? Do they have govt. money for PhD’s?

    Why not move there? Can a whitey get a job there? What’s the average salary there? What’s the cost of living? How does the standard compare to here in the US? Can I get the bare essentials there? (decent housing, clean water, heat, high speed Internet, Christianity without being killed for it?)

    I keep thinking about going back to school. Is it even worth it now? Will my college money be wasted? Should I stay at the salary I am? Will a college degree price me out of the market and send my job to India?

    If we need more science and R&D in schools why can’t we have more of that here? What will it take to supplement the lacking school system? Will open source software and nerds teaching future nerds help? What’s the answer? How can I prevent my kids from growing up in an America without any job opportunities?

    Finally, does MIT know you work there and what you built in the 90’s, and that it was free and reliable, Philip?

  15. You probably already know but your blog is about to get Slashdotted 😉

    As for this article, it’s amazing the amount of hypocritical things like this you find in large corporations and institutions… they always seem to insist that they’re right though.

  16. Philip H: I’ve only spent a couple of weeks in India but it seemed quite possible to have a perfectly pleasant middle class life there. People there are surrounded by friends and family. They’ve got servants to deal with the hassles that come with the crowding and inefficiency. They drink bottled water anytime they’re not at home… just like Americans. You can get a GSM mobile phone and a DSL line for less money than we pay here.

    Does MIT know about the OpenACS toolkit to which I contributed in ancient times? Probably some people do anyway (the largest information system on campus using it is SloanSpace, the system that supports classroom education for Sloan MBA students). But remember that most of that old toolkit was for support of online communities and not content management per se. So I can’t fault their choice of the MSFT tools.

    Naum: Thank you for your observation that “Those highly skilled at lower level coding and technical wizardry are the future star system designers and developers.” The idea that Americans can somehow keep the high-paying IT jobs without having any clue about or experience with actually building anything seems fanciful.

    Jagadeesh: “The reason IT jobs are migrating to India is that IT is becoming commoditized. The US is excellent at being in the forefront of emerging technologies, and relatively poor at cranking out commodity products at low to moderate prices”. Well said. A top-quality American programmer who’d gone to sleep in 1980 and woken up in 2003 wouldn’t have to spend more than a month catching up in order to be productive. Most of that month would be learning syntax of new languages but he or she wouldn’t have to learn any new semantics.

  17. I love hearing things like ‘you can’t have the benefits of capitalism without the drawbacks.’ Meaning, most often, ‘I can’t have the benefits of capitalism without you having the drawbacks.’

    In the US, one of the things we decided a while back was that we wouldn’t let companies force their labor into working 60 hours a week at $2/hour, nor would we let them destroy the environment, nor would we let them expose their employees to major hazards and then fire them when they became injured or disabled, etc. (Of course, the US is pretty much currently in the process of getting rid of most of these safeguards, but that’s another story.)

    So doing things in the US is more expensive than it is in places where they don’t value things like this as much. So our solution is to export all of the jobs from the US to places where labor is dramatically cheaper (and badly abused.)

    So basically what we’re saying here is two things:
    1) We’re fine with badly abused labor, as long as the people being abused aren’t Americans.
    2) We’d rather have Americans starving to death and put out an inferior product than be forced to find cost savings somewhere else.

    A uniquely pragmatic perspective.

  18. I think people forget in this whole argument how communities, neighborhoods, cities, and states are affected when jobs are moved overseas. There is a demoralizing effect that we’ve seen in this country for the last 30 years. American companies have an obligation to be socially conscious about their country and to keep jobs here. Its all the circle of life and by going overseas just to say to Wall Street that earnings are up 50% is criminal. The bottom line is killing us.

  19. Adam Lang: The US may have decided to some of those things at some point, but that sure as hell is not the reality at the moment.

    A lot (most?) skilled workers work without overtime pay for way more than 40 hours / week in the US.

    You might not have to work for next to nothing, but the Mexican illegal immigrant cutting your lawn, washing your car or taking care of your kids sure as hell is, and doesn’t have healthcare or other benefits. There’s been a number of interesting revelations regarding circumventing labor laws in the US lately, including the recent lawsuits against Walmart.

    Not destroying the environment you said!!!??? Geez, where have you been??? The EPA is a joke, basically acting as a rubber stamp for oil companies and others wishing to exploit the natural resources in the US (and all over the world) without the responsibility of environmently safe practices. There was a piece of news last week about an industry (I forgot for which industry) fund that was federally mandated and supposed to cover damages to the environment caused by companies in that industry. Well, the companies decided not to pay the fund, so now the US taxpayers (that’s you) are footing the bill, because the federal government decided they just can’t make the companies pay for their own f***ing littering, that would be bad for economic growth in these hard times. Amazing.

    Back to topic at hand, i.e. how MIT OCW was developed, I gotta say I am flaggerbasted that a system designed to be as Open as it possibly can, is not exploiting the vast amounts of open source products out there and even more seriously did not even take a look at them before choosing the platform for it. That just boggles my mind.

    The off-sourcing of the project was probably a decision made entirely by Sapient and does not surprise or dissapoint me much.

    -TPP

  20. I’m curious- how many classes at MIT are being taught by foreign grad student TAs who’s english skills are poor to the point that they cannot teach effectively? I’ve seen many cases of this at two other large, well respected Universities, and to me it’s another key aspect of the outsourcing of our country’s knowledge base.

  21. Question: Does anyone have an idea how an Open Source based solution might have satisfied the problem addressed by the MIT site? Did MIT make a sound business decision here or did it get taken? Sounds to me like someone wasted a bunch of MIT’s money.

  22. Question: Does anyone have an idea how an Open Source based solution might have satisfied the problem addressed by the MIT site? Did MIT make a sound business decision here or did it get taken? Sounds to me like someone wasted a bunch of MIT’s money.

  23. I’m surprised at Mr. Greenspun’s xenophobic
    overtones in posting this message. This certainly
    does not become a MIT professor (MIT, with many
    Indian students to boot) to go down this road —
    leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

    Wonder if Mr. Greenspun teaches at MIT ? Wonder
    what his students think.

    But enough about Mr. Greenspun. Let’s cue Mr.
    Phillip Harrington here:

    –quote–
    Why not move there? Can a whitey get a job there? –quote

    Using the term ‘whitey’ is quite illuminating.
    Downright offensive in what it leaves out (but
    certainly implies). I guess we are moving
    into a racial discussion here ?

    Of course, what is ironic is that Indians are
    by definition as ‘Aryan’ as you can get(see
    Vedas and the *sanskrit/hindi* words
    swastika/shubhtika/laltika, the holiest
    symbol in India).

  24. With Pres. Bush’s spectacular handling of the economy the past few years, the value of the US dollar has sank to lows it hasn’t seen in years.

    If this continues, you can be assured that outsourcing will look less attractive.

    Of course, many other economies such as China up the ante by keeping their currency artificially low to stay competitive.

  25. In answer to the previous poster’s question:
    India doesn’t have any time of skills based visas similar to the H-1b and L-1 ( http://www.h1b.info/about.php )programs in the United States(which are according to Nobel Prizer Winner Milton Friedman a corporate “subsidy” which offers Indian engineers a chance at US green card if they replace US workers). So, unless a worker can demonstrate they have family connections to India or cash invest there, it is unlikely they will be able to move to India and find work.

    When I was at HP 4 years ago, co-workers were being told that they would only get funding for their projects if they agreed only to hire H-1b workers from India (no Chinese or Russians need apply). You might want to consider this next time you consider purchase of an HP product.

    The situation is clearly a national security disaster for the United States-and a short-sighted move for US companies. I’m planning to caucus this spring for Dennis Kucinich (www.kucinich.us) because he and Braun were the only major party candidates to vote against H-1b and L-1 visa expansion(which have made this problem much worse and have greatly facilitated outsourcing).

  26. response to “some”: I’m sure what Mr. Harrington meant with “can a whitey get a job there?” is “can I, as a whitey, get a job there?” Take your racial comments and stuff them… don’t attribute racism and prejudice to others’ comments just because you are far too sensitive. Try stepping off your political correctness high horse once in a while and perhaps ASK what was meant by the comment before embarassing yourself with your outburst of self-righteous indignance. You never know — you just might be pleasantly surprised at the results.

  27. These comments are funny. Every single one of you whining about the jobs moving overseas buys your electronics equipment which has been made in Asia. You buy clothing manufactured in Asia. You enjoy the benefits of a global economy, as long as it doesn’t affect you.

    The man from India said it best. To put it a lot more bluntly: quit your whining about how grunt work is moving offshore and start working on new things which aren’t yet done by grunts. It’s largely a fallacy that non-Americans have lousy working conditions. The cheap labour is due, in a large part, to a cheaper cost of living. When it costs you $5 a day to eat out at restaurants for every meal, wages don’t need to be that high. In some countries, someone making $20 a day can live like a king and also have good working conditions.

  28. Hi Folks,

    Who here wants to be part of the race to the bottom? EVERY tech worker worldwide needs to confront this. Do we want software development to continue to be a worthy profession? Or will we allow the corps to try and pit us against each other as we fight for work?

    Wake up! The service economy is just following the manufacturing playbook from the 80s. Capital will fly towards the least-regulated, cheapest places. Look at NAFTA and what happened to Mexico. Jobs went there for a while, but then all those jobs went over to China because the cost was lower. You folks in India should enjoy your investment — just don’t expect that your job is safe either…

    The one thing you can do is GET INVOLVED and ORGANIZE. ACM and IEEE are doing squat about this. There are a number of other organizations working toward global tech worker rights. Start by checking out http://www.techsunite.org. There is a listing of organizations that represent tech workers there.

  29. As a developer who has been unemployed for 18 of the last 36 months, I can assure you that the numbers of jobs exported are not overstated or overblown, instead very understated. I have a bachelors in EE, and a masters in Computer Engineering. I am not one of those code monkeys who picked up “learn vb in 24 hours.” Age discrimination is rampant in this business: you are over 30? too old, go lay down and die.

    A lot of the movement to shift jobs overseas is to cut down on expenses so that CEOs can make big bucks. They do not see the exporting of their business as a threat to their own company because they are only worried about the next quarterly bonus.

    A lot of the movement to get rid of “old timers” gets rid of the stored knowledge of why things work and don’t work. Getting some kid out of school means you have to pay their salary while they relearn stuff that every older programmer has learned, as well as unlearn all the counter productive stuff that they learned in school. Like how to find out what the customer really wants, instead of nodding your head when they say they want X and getting sandbagged when they wig out after seeing a program that does X when they really wanted Y (but were unable or unwilling to articulate it).

    CEOs all bent on offshoring work see the situation as “why pay some yank $60k a year when we can pay some injun $10k per year.” I guess MIT sees offshoring as even cheaper than hiring grad students. Time to wake up and smell the napalm.

  30. Randall Burns opines:

    >only to hire H-1b workers from India (no
    >..]
    >consider purchase of an HP product.

    You are a sick traitor to this country.

    You drive a Japanese car, wear chinese
    made shoes, use taiwanese made motherboard,
    chinese made intel pentium drive and
    Japanese or korean monitor/panel and laugh
    all the way to the bank at the “savings”
    and “bargains” you got.

    Now that your offensively high paid,
    low skills job that any 14 year old can
    do, hell even the Indians can do inspite
    of their infrastructure, all of a sudden
    you are “concerned” at the offshoring
    of your job.

    You are truly a sick bastard because
    the HP products you mention in your post
    are MANUFACTURED ABROAD. Of course you
    don’t care about that, do you ?

  31. This is nothing new. What is new is that why the University is using Microsoft software since it is so expensive and riddled with virus. The University could save lots of money by using Open source Software. Remember. The Motto of Open Courseware is to share information to everyone. In this case, the University is not living up to its own mantra.

  32. J Random Gnurd said:

    “The top IT (and related project management) work will remain in the US because it requires detailed knowledge and quick analysis of subtleties that are cultural, company-specific, industry-specific, etc… What will happen is that the lower-value jobs (coding, detailed design, etc.) will go offshore. The jobs that remain will be more valuable, challenging, and interesting.”

    The thing the economists (and you) are missing is that if all of the low-level “grunt work” jobs get shipped off to India, how do our high-level designers of TOMORROW get groomed? A new CS graduate, no matter how good his or her school, is fairly useless to real world high level architecture and design until they’ve spent years in the field learning their craft.. that means doing the low level “uninteresting” things like coding and detailed design.

    If these “learning” jobs are all off-shore, how do you suppose they’ll ever mature to be world-class architects of the future? They won’t; so within a generation we’ll lose not only the low level jobs, but all of the high level ones because only the ‘low level’ developers in India (and other places we have massively offshored jobs to) will be qualified to do these tasks since they now have all the real-world experience.

    Try to think beyond the next fiscal year, people.

  33. Like yeah, man. I’m a software engineer by trade, so like what I am doing to pay the bills? Telemarketing. Yeah great invest of my money to get that 4 year degree.

  34. Let me see now. Jobs go offshore which will cause salaries to go down which will cause less taxes to be collected by local, state, federal gov. which mean less money for subsidies such as supporting research, arm forces, space exploration, assisting other countries and less money for grants that go to colleges such as at MIT. WOW!! that’s great. I can see a bright future here. Too many people are looking at the short term not the long term. May be I will sent my son to a college in India for less money but the equivalent degree.

  35. Actually, I own two US built cars-and I’ve been concerned about this stuff for a while. I voted for Perot(twice) who was the last major figure to speak openly about these issues(flawed though he was)-and bad trade deals like WTO/Nafta. I just think trading with nations that have practices that border on slavery is a bad idea.

    Now, in the case of H-1b/L-1, 82% of the public opposed this move and the senate voted for expansion 96-1. If I made a mistake, it was thinking the US was fundamentally democratic and representative government worked.

    That said, I _am_ most concerned with export of high end skilled jobs from the US(and making the US into a nation of lawyers and accoutants). A trade imbalance can be corrected more easily than worker replacement visa programs. The most valuable asset most US citizens have is their citizenship-watering it down for corporate profit makes it less valuable. The folks that have been the most hurt by these bad immigration policies are folks on the low end of the spectrum-the affect these policies have had on tech workers is much more recent.

    Randall Burns opines:
    >only to hire H-1b workers from India (no >..] >consider purchase of an HP product.

    You are a sick traitor to this country.

    You drive a Japanese car, wear chinese made shoes, use taiwanese made motherboard, chinese made intel pentium drive and Japanese or korean monitor/panel and laugh all the way to the bank at the “savings” and “bargains” you got.

    Now that your offensively high paid, low skills job that any 14 year old can do, hell even the Indians can do inspite of their infrastructure, all of a sudden you are “concerned” at the offshoring of your job.

    You are truly a sick bastard because the HP products you mention in your post are MANUFACTURED ABROAD. Of course you don’t care about that, do you ?

  36. Microsoft CMS isn’t that interesting, it also has a rather buggy indexing system. Our installation is rather high-maintenence if we need to make sure that searches are working well. If we don’t care about searches, it’s about as stable as NT/doze2000. I didn’t find too many features that MS-CMS had that some open-source CMS’s didn’t, but I did find myself writing PERL scripts to spider the content out of it in order to write a replacement system, as we’d really rather not have to get the next version for $$$$ considering the scope of our use of it.

    I inherited a project that was created by consultants and it runs on MS-CMS, (a slightly older version than the one MIT is using) and we found ourselves having to fight it quite a bit to do things that one might think were obviously easy. The political value of using something like MS_CMS is that you can direct all difficult feature requests to /dev/null, and everyone has to work to the same tune.

  37. MIT’s students are now paying their $160,000 to be beta testers for a distance learning program to be marketed to India and elsewhere.

    And, yes, OpenCourseWare may be “free” now, but that’s only because the system is still being implemented and is partly experimental. Once the bugs are out, MIT will start charging. That’s just basic organizational behavior.

  38. One spending (borrowing) $160,000 for a college degree must think of it as an investment in oneself for future generation of capital. No one in their right mind would invest that much simply to quench their thirst for knowledge.

    If the initial investment doesn’t justify the future returns it is considered to be a poor investment. We are competing in a market place where others can produce the same value with less capital investment, thus requiring less to be profitable.

    It is vulgar how bloated IT workers’ salaries are. Majority of the major corporations I have consulted to spend tremendous amounts on IT resources that provide little or no value. Managers are duped into believing that HTTP or TCP/IP or SSL must be extremely complex thus requiring a highly paid resources to be responsible for it. Highly-paid does not equal highly-skilled/highly motivated. The corporate IT resources are only second to the business ‘consultants’ from the major consulting firms–I won’t get started on that. Blame poor leadership at major corporations for this.

    It is therefore unpatriotic for us to receive a forty hour salary for five hours of productive work. It forces prices to be higher than they should be and higher than we bargain hunters are willing to pay for. We ourselves via our consumption requirements force big business to look for alternatives. The same IT resources pride themselves on how cheaply they can build a computer themselves (with all forge in parts). Blame unskilled highly insecure IT resources for this.

    When your monthly student loan payment is as much as your mortgage payment, you’ve made a poor investment and should be extremely insecure. Losing your job to someone overseas is as good as losing it to a new college graduate willing to do it for less. To the college graduate who can’t find a job, you should call up your guidance counselor, you picked the wrong vocation. Plus, it’s never too late to re-invent yourself and perhaps learn a new language 😉

  39. And eventually go there for medical, legal services as well. Why not? The process will continue until costs of living become equal. And taxes collected. Will this equilibrium make everybody happy? This is the question…

  40. And eventually go there for medical, legal services as well. Why not? The process will continue until costs of living become equal. And taxes collected. Will this equilibrium make everybody happy? This is the question…

  41. Brian: “Every single one of you whining about the jobs moving overseas buys your electronics equipment which has been made in Asia. You buy clothing manufactured in Asia. You enjoy the benefits of a global economy, as long as it doesn’t affect you.”

    Brian’s statement is wrong.. i’m won’t claim every last decision i make is fully informed, but i’m among a growing movement of conscious consumers in the USA.. among other things, we aim to look at the place of manufacture, the materials/repairability/recyclability, and the corporate behavior of the seller with every purchase.. and in particular, we often choose alternatives to purchasing — everything from doing without to trashpicking to hiring skilled labor to fix our old stuff.. these simple decisions, practiced widely, can have large effects on the quality of our work, liesure, relationships and environment

    why do there seem to be so few of us? perhaps it’s because of harmful statements like Brian’s, shaming those who begin to question their choices.. it’s hard enough without the derision of sassy free-marketers for people to realize they can be technologically *and* socially literate, active consumers, and still be deep ecologists in the broadest, most positive sense.. there should be no shame in trying to improve the world through personal action

  42. George McBay hit upon something…. ” if all of the low-level “grunt work” jobs get shipped off to India, how do our high-level designers of TOMORROW get groomed?”

    There’s a related topic that hasn’t been discussed. When CEOs decide to move jobs overseas, what happens to all the money they save? Do they plow it back into something (community training programs, R&D, create new jobs, etc.) that will generate more jobs in the US, or do they directly or indirectly pocket the money?

    With all the recent events (Enron, Worldcom, Mutual Fund hearings, etc.) I’m guessing the latter.

    Whatever the case, corporations need to start thinking about job creation. It is not just the job of the government to create jobs.

    koderbhai

  43. So MIT has outsourced the making of this web site to Indian programmers. So, what’s the value of the MIT ‘input’ to this site? If folks using English as a second language and probably not too familar with US culture or customs can write HTML that teaches CS to MIT students, what value is that MIT education?

    Tutorial web sites on almost any subject are a dime a dozen on the internet and many are free. Will MIT diplomas begin appearing on small rolls of perforated tissue?

  44. Posted on /., lifted here, a comment by the host here on the discussion there…

    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.

    You’re killing me Philip.

    Agree totally about the “commoditization” of work too. But the bigger question now is when do the “commoditization” agents become commotodized. The heralded advances of technology that have marginalized programmers will in turn haunt those who flourish in brandishing bodies about.

  45. Some idiot wrote above (about India):

    >Can I get the bare essentials there? (decent housing, clean >water, heat, high speed Internet, Christianity without being >killed for it?)

    No one in their right mind would call Christianity
    or any other semitic religion (Judaism, Islam) as
    being a ‘bare essential’.

    Most in India do not follow the semitic religions
    of Christianity, Judaism or Islam. They follow the
    Aryan religion as defined in the Rig Veda and it’s
    descendent: Hinduism.

    That said, no one really gives a shit about Christianity
    or any other semitic religion: you are welcome to
    start any church you want anywhere whenever you want.
    Christian holidays like Christmas and even Jewish/Islamic
    holidays are nationally recoginized in India. Why, I
    don’t know.

  46. Gartner writes glowing evaluations of products from companies that give them money. That is their business model. As I understand it, it costs money to study product X, and where better to get the money than from the people who manufacture product X and want it reviewed?

    I believe they also collect extra money from the people who read their reports.

    And yes I was Director of Software Development at a company that gave Gartner money to get a glowing review.

  47. MIT most likely used a Microsoft based management system since Microsoft has donated lots of money in the form of grants for projects like iCampus among others. Mr. Gates also finally got a hall/room named after him, even though he didn’t attend the school, in the new Computer Science and Engineering Building.

  48. Actually, the thing that strikes me as obscene isn’t IT salaries but US concentration of wealth and CEO salaries. IT skills are readily available at reasonable prices in places like Washington, Oregon and Utah. If management can’t make good decisions about IT(of which outsourcing and H-1b are other examples), then maybe it is time to get a fundamentally different kind of management.

    High IT salaries are generally compensation for hanging out in companies with poor management in undesirable urban areas.

    Fat Albert wrote:
    It is vulgar how bloated IT workers’ salaries are. Majority of the major corporations I have consulted to spend tremendous amounts on IT resources that provide little or no value. Managers are duped into believing that HTTP or TCP/IP or SSL must be extremely complex thus requiring a highly paid resources to be responsible for it. Highly-paid does not equal highly-skilled/highly motivated. The corporate IT resources are only second to the business ‘consultants’ from the major consulting firms–I won’t get started on that. Blame poor leadership at major corporations for this.

  49. People talk about “sending low-level work overseas and reinventing the new work in America”. But a complex society needs workers at ALL levels for several reasons, a few which come to mind are:

    1) to be as self-sufficient a society as possible,

    2) to provide work for ALL people (that is, not everybody is cut-out to get a PhD and do research work)

    3) most importantly, the USA should strive to make technical work desirable so that students will choose to pursue B.S. M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in science and engineering. It is a far stretch to think that an 18 year old American will decide to major in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering when American companies send much of that technical work to other countries and leave few jobs in America.

    Our society depends upon a strong technology base, and a strong base requires varied skills at different levels.

    Further, as an MIT alumnus I am disappointed at the decisions that MIT administrators have made in their development of this open courseware project. Millions of dollars PER DAY flow from US taxpayers, via the Federal Government, to MIT. Why is this taxpayer money then spent to employ foreign workers when there are student workers and professional IT workers available and presumably eager to do this work in the USA?

  50. I’ve spent most of the last three years working very closely with India-based staff. The first year was a bit rocky – about 50% of the guys in my specialty were canned in favor of offshore workers and my reaction was pretty much what anyone else’s would be. I survived because I knew how to talk to the US clients. Since then, I’ve gotten a bit more balanced perspective. Here are my thoughts, for what it’s worth.

    1. For a particular job description, the Indian staff is often more competent than their US competitors. The educational levels are usually a notch higher – the analysts often have a master’s degree, call center folks are almost always college educated. Plus most of the folks in those jobs ranked higher within their own peer groups than their US counterparts did in theirs – the top 20% of their class vs. the top 50% of their class. IF THEY UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO DO AND COMPREHEND THE RELEVANT CUSTOMER INSTRUCTIONS – they are often significantly more disciplined and motivated that US staff in similar roles. From what I’ve seen, the Indian customer service centers and (better yet) back-office data processing people seriously kick butt.

    2. Training and Communications are the bane of offshoring – any job that involves lot of training, handoffs, and feedback between the US and Indian teams can become amazingly non-productive. My personal definition of technical hell is having ad-hoc reporting done by an offshore programmer who is new to the company – you’ve got to train someone on EVERY ASPECT OF THE PROJECT. They know the coding language just fine – it’s all the other stuff like data structures, data integrity issues, link to real-world business process, and the basic stuff like how to set up the report/analysis so it’s a piece of meaningful analysis which gives them fits. Error rates are high, delays are frequent, the level of rework is insane. All that productivity goes right out the window – unless something is a standard repeatable process, it’s not worth the time to train folks. This isn’t intended as a slam on the Indian staff – I’d have the same problem if you hired me to write the code to do a similar job on the Indian side of things….using different systems, different data, language issues in the technical documentation, different business processes and government regulations, etc.

    3. As a general rule, American customers don’t like to talk to offshore staff. Something to consider. When I’m stressed out because your product just blew up and screwed up my job, I want someone who can talk to me in MY LANGUAGE, without international long distance static, and has a clue about what I’m going through.

    4. We’re slowly killing our talent pipeline – the best senior techies start out as programmers and junior technical staff and learn the business from the ground up. The same goes for analytical talent. If you’re somewhere in the lower levels of management and came up through the technical ranks, you’ve got a decent career ahead of you. Half of your peers have probably changed careers – and there is no one coming up the ranks behind you to compete with you. I suspect we’re going to see a real problem finding truly competant project managers and development team leaders in a couple of years once the recession is over. Due to the staff cuts and lack of talent nipping at my heels, I’m the top person in my field at my company at age 30. Yes, I really am that good – but I’d have a lot more competition if we hadn’t laid of most of our junior analytical pipeline three years ago and dumped half of our senior staff in favor of cheap offshore folks. It’s not a problem until you need someone to talk to the client or senior management – then you’re screwed. You’ve then got the choice between charming airheads or incomprehensible technical folks.

    5. Lack of US cultural and business context frequently hurts the creativity of the offshore folks – while they’ve got some good ideas, they frequently miss nuances and details which can be critical to a problem. Again – this is the distance not the people – I’d probably sound the same way talking about Indian firms. For situations where quality of output matters more than quantity this can really hurt – for stuff like strategy development, one great analyst who knows the customer/culture/situation adds more value than ten analysts with a limited understanding of the cultural context and the industry. Trust me. I’ve seen it.

    6. Huge staff turnover issues in India…and rising wages for English-speaking workers with experience working for a foreign company. So you need wage and currency risk premiums in that cost-benefit analysis.

    All things considered, Indian outsourcing often sacrifices output quality and long term staff development for cost savings. Unfortunately, most American managers are not sophisticated enough to figure this out.

  51. Given that even MIT graduates can’t write a simple SQL query with JDBC, who else should have done it but the Indians?

  52. As an Indian citizen living in the USA, I think I can understand the concerns expressed here. I have seen how badly it can squeeze employees when firms cut back.

    Work visas are not the rage anymore, so I would not sweat it on what I’d consider little more than a relic of the boom years, but in the absence of that strategy, firms end up having to outsource some of the work (some jobs being performed off-shore).

    Local firms can hardly compete against cheaper products and services from international rivals if they neither outsource some of the manufacturing (as they get back the intellectual property of course, and they get it cheap) nor corner key overseas talent in the form of employees.

    And since more than a quarter of a typical multinational firm’s earnings tend to come from the Asia-Pacific anyway, there is little sense in denying them the benefits of an international workforce.

  53. <begin opinion piece>
    If you classify the work required in corporate IT departments (not your CAD design bureaus or statistical forecasting types) it will come down to the following:
    a. Networking/Hardware purchase&installation
    b. Pre-built software purchase&installation & administration (OS(Windows/*nix), Oracle, Checkpoint, MS Office, Cognos/Informatica/etc)
    c. Custom application development & maintenance (mostly crunching data or providing I/O out of an RDBMS to a screen or into another RDBMS).
    d. Fluff: Web-sites/eye-candy.

    a & b are extremely limited job-markets. This does not mean that their share of IT budgets is low: very few people are needed to keep a couple of thousand cloned desktops running and a few dozen *niz servers humming.
    d. Does not pay like it used to in the dot bomb era. How many slick looking websites does a company need on the internet?

    c is where a majority the action is at.

    (If you don’t agree, then your experience of corporate IT is different from mine).

    These folks should be doing /should have re-tooled to do better work like trying to figure out how to colonize Mars.
    And c does NOT require geeky hordes with computer science degrees. IMHO, folks out of high school have sufficient skills to do stuff like this. Why: take a look at the newer development tools for either .NET or J2EE (my ignorance precludes me from mentioning others) and you’ll realize that programming has been simplified. e.g. You no longer have to understand HTTP/CGI to create stateful web applications. Is it good to know? yes. Is it essential (I’d like to believe so, but increasingly, I am finding not: my recent job interviews have been about do you know this tool, not about what is fundamental to programming).

    And oh, please do NOT include the *majority* of call center /tech support as IT. These are folks (ex burger king types) who follow scripts to diagnose/solve your CD problem or fix your cell phone plan. If they can’t solve it, then they call in the remaining 10%.

    Now, you should realize that if you are into c, your pay is at risk: from fresh VB-toting college grads, funny speaking equals from the other side of the world, or worse, some freaky code generating program whipped out by some upstart company. From tool creators, we have become tool-users, who create higher level ‘business tools’ for others.

    Capitalism and complete social consiousness are cognitively dissonant: did Henry Ford care for the horse-carriage drivers? I am sure he did a lot of other good things, but these guys must have lost jobs. Same goes for the guys who invented the harvester/combine: did they care about the farm hands? What happened to these guys? They must have got shafted the first few months/years and their kids would have learnt not to become farm hands.

    You are seeing nature in action: evolution is happening again, as a new breed of Americans takes over from the old guard (the old guard may be just in their late 30s) and do different things. The things the old guard had been doing are either relegated to phone-monkeys or code gen programs.
    </end opinion piece>
    ———————-
    Silver lining:
    If I remember correctly, the telemarketers, barbers etc. will be on the first space-ship to be sent out. H2G2.

  54. MIT is reckless. They, like so many educational institutions hire poorly qualified people to make their decisions and carry out policy. This is so absurd considering that the students of MIT are the most qualified to do the work, and could benefit most from the experience of building inhouse products. Its also disgusting that money donated that should go to equipment and content is going to hire people that are taking valuable experience away from MIT’s own students.

  55. The issue of outsourcing jobs off shore is one which seems to be getting more and more press as nearly daily revelations of job cuts here in the States comes to light.

    A lot of talk is out there about passing legislation to curb foreign outsourcing, and frankly I find the thought of it to be disturbing. Starting a couple of decades ago, we started doing the same with blue-collar jobs. At the time, blue-collar workers were up in arms but the middle-class seemed to sit by and not take much notice.

    But now, when jobs from tech to back-office are being shipped to India and America’s middle-class is directly effected, people are starting to get worried. No sympathy for the blue-collar workers, but when it hits home, lets pass legislation to stop it.

    Better yet, legislation should be passed which requires that any US company which outsources a function to India, be forced to offer the same position to the employee made redundant, but based out of India.

    There was also an interesting (cover) story in InformationWeek last week which discussed how a large share of Gatner had recently been acquired by an investment firm with board-members such as MS’s Gates and Oracle’s Ellison. How sure are people that get info from Gartner that the advise they provide is indeed non-biased?

  56. Out-sourcing of IT jobs has been tried before. Microsoft’s initial OLE implementation was developed and coded in India and was so full of bugs they had to start over from scratch. Dell tried to send their phone-monkey jobs to India and it blew up in their face as well. The indian people have a lot of potential (anyone remember the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan?) but lets not forget that India is a 3rd world country. If you think things are bad here in America just try going overseas sometime, you’ll get an appreciation for just how effective and powerful our culture and way of doing things are. India has a ways to go before there will be enough people there with the skills and competence to compete with Americans (and I’m counting as Americans Indians who grew up here and understand how we approach things, my point is cultural not racial). Now the interesting thing about Microsoft is how much money they have been pumping into the universities over there. Microsoft is more than willing to pay millions to Indian universities in the hope that these universities will produce competent graduates so that Microsoft can pay pennies on the dollar for work equivalent to that of an American programmer. Whether this will work or not I don’t know.

  57. Dear Mr Lee,

    BG’s B&W philosophy that any idiot can become
    a Newton, if an apple falls on his head.
    Probably he is suffering from
    AI(ntelligance)DS

    Rail Gates

  58. Whats the point bitching and whining about something over which we have very little control over? Companies are started with the aim of making money, not as a social service. Lets find bigger and better things to do… The world doesint end for me if I cannot write SQL code! Soon we will have smart programs from schools like MIT that will create program for a given spec… All this whining will sound like… “oh! they have trains now… all the horses will be out of work!”

  59. As one who’s job was affected by 9/11 following on the heels of crash of 2000, I relate my colored observations. I now work overseas in a management position, missing the life of a software developer….

    I see much pride in US capabilities to rebound and stay ahead as an innovative leader despite losing jobs overseas. However, in the big picture, the US may be passing it’s peak and will follow the path that Britain, Spain, and Italy have experienced in the life cycle of super power nations.

    It seems that every 200 years os so, a new nation rises to economic power while the former nation continues as a paper pusher of laws, jurisdiction, and intellectual property and uses to use its military power to hold on to any economic straws it has left.

    My lament is that the US life cycle may be shorter than that of prior nations due to the effect of Moore’s Law, internet and globalization.
    The Roman, Spanish and British empires had ample time to react, yet they lost their leadership.

    We had our time. The sun is rising in the East. Maybe it’s China’s turn once more.

    China and Japan are pushing their space exploration programs.
    Japan is a master of robotics, AI may soon follow.
    India will become the master of software.
    Countries like Malaysia, Japan and Tawain are on the cutting edge of metropolis construction. They have figured out how to make the most of small places with dense population. Shopping is 24 hours where every building has a starbucks and mcdonalds, spa, mall, bar, theater. There are literally cities within these buildings (Taipei 101). You could spend your whole life living in just one building. Much like what life would be like living in space.

    Invention in these countries is going on 24 hours. If you play out the numbers, their progressive development will supercede that of the US within relative short order, just as the US once superceded Great Britain.

    I bet that maybe in about 40 years, our children will be trying to get student visas to attend prestiges schools in China.

  60. If the detail jobs go, high-paying “challenging” jobs aren’t too far behind. Eventually, these hotbeds of productivity will throw off the US managers and sell their own IT products. Like Japan supplying parts, then eventually supplying cars.

    I don’t agree that high-level jobs are more fulfilling or challenging, especially in areas where craft is involved. In the entertainment industry, the cartoonist doesn’t necessarily feel any more fulfilled
    because Asians are doing all the detail work.

  61. I do agree it’s the commoditizing of IT. As a project manager, I’m surprised how easily the “separation of content and presentation” arguments went over. At this point, there’s common agreement to pigeonhole everyone’s duties “to stay out of each other’s way”. But it also relegates each person.

    Not that it’s bad for me as a PM. But it certainly sets the stage for unions–International League of Graphic Designers, Front-End Developers No. 137. So be it. It’s about time.

  62. Yeah, as Garth said, we DID investigate Open Source solutions – quite heavily. However given the amount of time we had to implement a solution that met all our business process, metadata, and content management needs we had to go with MS. They lowballed the price and threw in some freebies, if I recall.

    Still, in order for OCW to propagate to institutions around the world, we need an open source solution that has it all. I think we’re looking at putting out a document on how our CMS works so the community can get together and pull some open source solution together.

    That’s the only way we can come up with a quality, reusable solution IMHO.

    As far as India goes, the Sapient India team has been amazing. We’ve had some quirks that come up in working with any consulting group regardless of nationality but Sapient overall has been phenomenal.

    The content is already around in various formats – Word, TeX, PDF, HTML – and all they have to do is get it into the CMS based on our style paramaters.

    Our Production team here as well as our Faculty Liaison group does more complex imports and a three-tier QA process that includes copyediting.

    Most of us are incredibly into Open Source and standards. Its just trying to get up 500 courses and working with 80,000 source documents is quite time consuming. We made up for it in other areas such as working to make sure HTML validated as close to HTML 4.01 Transitional as possible and making sure we at least meet Section 508 accessibility requirements as well as all the Tier 1 & Tier 3, and most of the Tier 2 WCAG 1.0 standards.

    MIT Libraries are using several different types of Metadata standards on all the content to maximize archival and search functions once something is built to utilize them.

    So we’d love to be using an Open Source solution when it comes to a CMS but the time constraints we had to get one up so we could enter those 500 courses made it impossible at the time.

    If someone could point me to some Web sites, user groups, or mailing lists where there may be people willing to tackle such a CMS – please point me to them. I have a lot of ideas on how make a solution that will meet our needs as well as those universities wanting to make their own OpenCourseWare.

  63. B,K,DeLong: May I suggest Zope or its prebuilt offspring Plone? I’m sure that the consulting organizations that create and maintain those two platforms would have gladly taken your money to build a rocking CMS that would garner lots of publicity for their platforms. Did you investigate them? They’re the biggies in the open-source enterprise-level CMS arena.

  64. > You know your in trouble when outsourcing to India is cheaper than grad
    > students (aka slave labor)!

    yeah, try paying back a $160,000 student loan working at WalMart! Y’know
    this really burns my ass! Not because I wasted my time on a CompSci degree
    or have the student loans to pay off as a result. I knew better. Sure,
    tech classes are great but I see scam written all over it! Part of the
    problem is the Proletariat Automotron League. Be a PAL or do not apply –
    that burns my butt! And then, so you jump through those hoops, rack up a
    few thou in debts to be a PAL all to find, your career field left for
    India months ago!!! No wonder so many people out there have a “screw unto
    others before they screw unto you” attitude – they’re walking funny due to
    a wakeup call from reality! And if I ever find myself out on the pavement
    trolling for a new job, I have a feeling it’s not gonna be a bright
    sunshiny day…

    -D

  65. I’d also like to hear why Zope wasn’t an adequate solution here.

    I think the first issue here is to get clearly written up what MIT wants to do moving forward here. I think if this were done it were made publicly available, there would be quite a bit of interest from the Open Source community. I’m still of the opinion that if the money had been directed on an Open Source solution using some type of fair contest to select who had achieved results worthy of the money, an better solution could have been achieved. $10 Million(the money spent outside of MIT) is a lot of money in the Open Source arena–and MIT is the kind of organization can can attract quite a bit of volunteer effort.

    This might even still be possible even though the money has been spent. Just publish MIT owned source/content/documentation to the existing web site and suggest that folks look at duplicating this with an Open Source solution. The trick is of course publishing enough stuff that folks can get a a roughtly equivalent version running on their own computers if they have/purchase MCS (which serves as the spec). If you have some kind of automated test suites of the solutions functionality you could publish that and it would make evalution of proposed solutions quite a bit easier(if not maybe the first order on hand is to specify a test suite for the OCW site-this is something that might be done even if say some of the vendor custom code is proprietary so it can’t be published ).

    If you folks at MIT do this, I suspect that someone might come out of the woodwork with a surprising Open Source solution. If some prize money were attached to the effort, this might become even more likely. Still, I think there are folks out there that just might like the prestige of replacing a $12 Million site with an Open Source web content solution. The problem doesn’t strike me as any more complicated than J2EE-and http://www.jboss.org is better than anything Oracle has come up with even with all their corporate welfare and big $$$.

    Now, I have to warn you, if the folks at MIT do this, they just may find that it becomes obvious that the original $10 Million was largely wasted. Still, isn’t it worth a little bit of embarrassment to enable other academic institutions to produce Open Course Ware sites?

    BK Delong wrote:
    So we’d love to be using an Open Source solution when it comes to a CMS but the time constraints we had to get one up so we could enter those 500 courses made it impossible at the time.

  66. “I bet that maybe in about 40 years …”

    MIT’s core functions will be outsourced
    A biz journal will headline “MIT doesn’t matter” : )

  67. DeLong – Sacrificing control to proprietary software houses is a devil’s bargain. You’ll live to regret it.

  68. Just to clarify a bit: the $10mil that is bandied about is NOT the cost for the software (or even the support and customization). The software and customized probably cost closer to $250k tops… [as in most organizations, staff, intrastructure, pizza dinner during 80hr weeks, content, etc…eats up most of the money]

    MIT OCW is about content collection [core compentancy] and disemination not technology [for better or worse, and despite the fact that it is based at MIT].

    In response to Randall Burn’s request: check back in 2004. Embarrasment or no, it would be great if the OpenSource community could create a comparable [probably even better!] CMS.
    Check http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/technology.htm
    for the basics.

  69. Just FYI, I’m actually managing a web site for a large school district so some of these issues are of professional interest to me.

    Thanks for this link:
    http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/technology.htm

    I still think it would be helpful to understand what in each of the six products you evaluated led you to think it wasn’t appropriate for use on the MIT OCW project. Having this detailed would be very helpful as a guideline to enhancement of these Open Source efforts. What exactly are the features that you would need to make these products viable?

  70. some: Philip is NOT a prof at MIT. He’s a rich guy who has enough spare time to teach a class there. I don’t think he’s ever really done any scholarship. He certainly likes to present himself as if he were an MIT Professor, but he’s not. Isn’t that right, Philip?

  71. The beauty of capitalism in a wealthy country is that when one industry fizzles, others rise to take its place. IT is not the only horse in this race. Take a deep breath — I’ve never seen so many ‘libertarian’ white men turn so liberal/protectionist so quickly in my life 🙂

  72. I’m just a worker bee in a company that splits much of its development work between a site in Pune and the US. (I’d rather it be nameless but the name appears on Harvard websites in the original Latin). I’ve noticed that there are substantial differences between the work done in both places (I’ve visited the Pune site), in particular people in India (at least at the mediocre universities that the Indian employees attended) learn how be be consultants–to find the most complicated possible solution to any simple problem because it implies that you’re smart. The US approach is to write something as simple as possible because it’s more flexible and easier to maintain.

    Guess which I’d rather have in anything I’d buy?

  73. I used to work as an IT auditor and now a developer for a major bank in the city of Dubai in the UAE. Our entire department are run either by contractors hired from several “Top” Indian IT shops (Wipro being one of them), or the majority of our development is out-sourced.
    Here are some of the problems we currently have:
    1) None of our systems work as advertised
    2) Nothing EVER gets done on time. A simple solution that should take 3 days to implement takes almost two weeks.
    3) Software written in languages not appropriate for the task
    4) VERY poor choice of variable names. (Data1, Data2)
    5) Vague and sparse commenting of program code
    6) No development documentation (UML, etc)
    7) Horrendous coding practices, very little chance of module reuse, terrible choice of search algorithms.
    8) Allergic reaction to any mention of Open Source tools
    9) While familiarizing with the source code of some of our software, I found some backdoors.
    10) No training (Why need training when u can just contract hire an Indian or outsource)

    When all is added up, u find that when you pay cheap, you get cheap. It is much more cost effective to employ a handful of decently paid and highly qualified software engineers, than an army of mediocre contract workers with no interest or pride in their work.

  74. some: Philip is NOT a prof at MIT. He’s a rich guy who has enough spare time to teach a class there. I don’t think he’s ever really done any scholarship. He certainly likes to present himself as if he were an MIT Professor, but he’s not. Isn’t that right, Philip?

    Rude Prof: Greenspun has a PhD from MIT. After that he made a fair amount of money. Of course, I know mid-level engineers at places like Cisco and Microsoft who made as much on options, but weren’t in the public eye, and so don’t get shit from people in blog comments about their wealth like Greenspun does. Where did you get your PhD?

  75. Thanks, Joey, for the gallant defense. Blog comment sections do tend to attract a high percentage of resentful folks for some reason. Our angry reader is right on one count, which is that I haven’t done too much in the way of traditional scholarship the last few years. Focusing on teaching undergrads and writing textbooks for them is a crushing amount of work and it is incompatible with earning respect from academicians. If my field were Science I’d probably choose to spend less time teaching and more time addressing research questions and writing them up in journals. But for me the most useful results in computer science, i.e., our little corner of ENGINEERING, have typically been complete running systems rather than journal papers. Codd’s RDBMS paper is nice and easy to reference as the precise moment of RDBMS invention but it couldn’t have been done without all the earlier IBM database management systems that were deployed to customers and it wouldn’t have had any impact I don’t think if IBM’s engineers hadn’t built System R. The Xerox PARC ideas ended up having tremendous impact on other research labs because they gave away Altos and then on the world because of the Apple Macintosh.

    I’m not sure where Mr. Angry (could be a woman but usually they’ve got better things to do with their time than flame bloggers) got the idea that I present myself as a full-time employee of MIT, as a professor or otherwise. In actual face-to-face conversations if someone asks what I do I say that I’m retired from a 23-year career in software engineering. If they ask how I spend my time I say that I’m learning to fly, learning to draw, studying atmospheric physics (this term), and volunteering at MIT. If they press further I tell them that my volunteer work is teaching a class. If they press still further I admit that it is in software engineering for Internet applications.

    Why the attempt to deflect the conversation from jobs/titles? First, if I start telling them about my job at MIT they might tell me about their job. Once you retire you sort of lose interest in peoples’ jobs/titles/etc. If they are lion-tamers or performance artists it could be interesting, of course, but if they work for a big company it is tough to feel anything other than amazement that anyone could tolerate 2000+ hours/year at a desk. Second if you take the job/title stuff off the table people can talk about art, literature, music, travel, etc. Third, it is rather embarrassing to be associated with IT circa 2003. Business people associate IT with cost overruns, promises unkept, bugs, downtime, etc. Consumers associate IT with crashed Macs and Win98 machines, glacial AOL modem sessions, and collapsed 401k plans. Young people ask “Isn’t that something that is better done in the Third World?” [back to the subject of the original blog entry]. Nobody ever says “Wow, what a cool job programming SQL must be!” [I still love it though, that’s the sad part!]

    [Oh yes, you might ask Why make the postings commentable if so many people use them to attack others rather than to say something interesting? Because almost invariably a few of the comments are more interesting than the original posting. I wish that Manila (the software that Harvard runs here) had a feature for going in after it was all done and quickly highlighting the best 4 comments, which would be hoisted to the top and marked with big check marks or something.]

  76. What has happened in US IT has little to do with markets or capitalism and everything to do with corporate welfare. Most of the unemployment in US IT is the result of what Milton Friedman calls the “subsidy” of using immigration rights specifically directed at employees of major corporations that replace their US workforces with H-1b and L-1 visa holders. There have been over 800,000 such visas issued the last 5 years–most in IT. The average value of these immigration rights is about $100,000 per person. Both Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan spoke out against this travesty-the only ones that didn’t are those that have taken the bribes from various large corporate interests(www.opensecrets.org). 82% of the public opposed this move. Why is it “protectionist” to say that corporate interests shouldn’t buy congress over the objections of 82% of the public to subsidize companies that can’t compete with smaller US companies?

    Webwench wrote:

    The beauty of capitalism in a wealthy country is that when one industry fizzles, others rise to take its place. IT is not the only horse in this race. Take a deep breath — I’ve never seen so many ‘libertarian’ white men turn so liberal/protectionist so quickly in my life 🙂

  77. In response to a fragment of Phil’s response back on December 2 (about how a Tech Van Winkle who fell asleep in 1980 could be up to speed in a month) – I’d have to agree as far as programming language structure/semantics/etc., but I’d think that working through the jargon (esp. new names for old concepts) and library layering would take somewhat longer. Not that it would be hard, just tedious. Kind of analogous to the disconnect between the old IBM mainframe world and Unix — very different views of how computing was structured.

    (And by the way, why aren’t old CICS developers perfect candidates for web interaction architecture? – seems that the “stateless transaction” issues are nearly identical. Maybe they’re just all retired.)

  78. Any industry in the face of capitalism must worry about growth and cost. If there’s anyone to point the finger to about creating worries, it’s the US companies–THEY (the execs and VPs) are the ones **choosing** to move the jobs overseas as the marketing from offshore companies have presented themselves as a “no brainer” solution (politics included!) to our problems (lack of growth) and no one at that level ever wants to really sit down and come up with a thought-out, creative solution as risk usually rears it’s head. And when does a CEO choose “possbile risk” over a “sure thing”?

    I think all this worry about jobs overseas is getting to the point of useless, outsourcing has already “happened”. The US gov’t, US companies and Universities must think collectively on what the next technology should be exploited and train ahead of time to fulfill that vision. Yep, *exploited* — after all, technology is an exploitation of science, all of us in IT basically exploit the concepts, using hardware and software. If the US innovates by training our $160K CS folks with the *hi-tech* skills and not *tech* skills, then, the CS/EE/techie can be focused on the hi-tech, not worry about outsourcing and the US companies can out-source to a lower cost employee base, get code that maybe 50% bug free, charge enormous consulting fees (to fix them), etc… to main a low cost, high growth [marketing] view to the investor…and to maintain the CEO’s salary in the face of inflation ;).

    This reminds me of the time when there were more lawyers than laws (hmmmm that maybe the case today!).

  79. any comments about Vest stepping down, or his time at MIT? give him an overall grade. (maybe a subject for a future blog entry.)

  80. This is a citation from boston_tech_jobs@yahoogroups.com Digest Number 305:

    “Message: 6
    Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2003 09:20:01 -0500
    From: Jeff Altman <jeffaltman@cisny.com>
    Subject: Oracle DBA–Philadelphia $70000 – $110000 + bonus PAID RELOCATION

    MUST BE CURRENTLY WORKING (client’s rules, not mine)”

    I have no comments… have you?

  81. I have a blog on Outsourcing – An Indian viewpoint at http://blogs.ittoolbox.com.

    Kindly visit it if you have the time.

    I would appreciate your suggestions and feedback.

    Many thanks in advance.

    Mahesh Khatri.
    Kaytek,India.

  82. The U.S. joblessness report for February 2004 stunned
    observers and investors alike – instead of creating
    the forecasted 125,000 new jobs, the entire U.S.
    economy only managed to produce 21,000 additional
    jobs. That left the ‘official’ unemployment rate
    steady at 5.6 per cent – I say ‘official’, because
    those people who’ve simply given up looking for
    jobs are dropped from the ‘official’ count, and in
    many areas no jobs exist once a big plant closes
    and moves overseas [ergo, there are soon ‘no j
    jobseekers’ there!].

    What with downsizing, jobs being sent off-shore,
    a ho-hum economic recovery, plant closings and
    layoffs, I thought some good folks here might
    benefit from the results of my own diligent search,
    and applied research, on this topic:

    ‘What Color Is Your Parachute’ Site, this
    book has got to be the ‘Bible’ for all
    serious job hunters!:
    http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/

    ‘Quintessential Job Hunt’ Site. ‘Search jobs!
    Post a Resume!’ Well, they’re enthusiastic, anyway…
    http://www.quintcareers.com/jobhunt.html

    These guys are good! An executive I know had just
    about given up when they took him on, got him
    a job interview with a large company president
    and a solid job offer – all in two days!
    http://www.johnwhitleystrategicconsulting.com

    Monster of a job site! Great resource:
    http://english.monster.ca/geo/siteselection.asp

    Its Canadian ‘twin’…
    http://www.workopolis.com/index.html

    The Riley Guide: Employment Opportunities and
    Job Resources on the Internet
    http://www.rileyguide.com/

    Job-Hunt.org ‘Online Job Search Guide…your
    objective source of the Web’s Best Job Search
    Resources http://www.job-hunt.org/

    RiteSite Executive Careers Service – looks
    pretty helpful, if you’re searching via the Net…
    http://www.ritesite.com

    And if YOUR job hasn’t gone to India or China
    yet, don’t be surprised to find out that it’s been
    secretly packing its bags – 14 million more U.S.
    technical, professional and managerial jobs are
    now estimated to be at risk of ‘off-shore downsizing’!

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  84. I have actually been outsourced!

    I worked for a well known cheap loans company in the UK, and they shipped the call centre out to India. That was a few years ago. Now I hear that they are moving it back because of the pain and hassle it caused to their customers.

    Serves them right!

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