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.
Cesar
December 2, 2003 @ 8:28 pm
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.
Randall Burns
December 2, 2003 @ 10:05 pm
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.
Marty Cawthon
December 2, 2003 @ 10:20 pm
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?
John Q Public
December 2, 2003 @ 11:22 pm
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.
Hendrik Levsen
December 2, 2003 @ 11:28 pm
Given that even MIT graduates can’t write a simple SQL query with JDBC, who else should have done it but the Indians?
Sujay
December 2, 2003 @ 11:57 pm
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.
Bharath Dhurjati
December 3, 2003 @ 12:00 am
<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.
Kurt Winter
December 3, 2003 @ 12:10 am
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.
Zeb Agha
December 3, 2003 @ 1:47 am
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?
Lee
December 3, 2003 @ 2:34 am
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.
none
December 3, 2003 @ 2:52 am
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
Manjo
December 3, 2003 @ 3:08 am
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!”
Cesar U
December 3, 2003 @ 6:03 am
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.
kj
December 3, 2003 @ 9:33 am
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.
kj
December 3, 2003 @ 9:48 am
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.
The Garth
December 3, 2003 @ 9:51 am
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/AboutOCW/technology.htm
OpenSource options were looked at. Mostly it was out-sourced due to time-constraints [in higher-ed, politics and time trump money].
For OpenCourseWare to really catch on as a movement there will need to be a lower cost [TCO] CMS option. Any hackers out there up to the challenge?
B,K, DeLong
December 3, 2003 @ 10:30 am
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.
Bill Brown
December 3, 2003 @ 11:09 am
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.
Dug Fresh
December 3, 2003 @ 12:25 pm
> 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
Randall Burns
December 3, 2003 @ 12:33 pm
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.
Bloomberg
December 3, 2003 @ 12:35 pm
“I bet that maybe in about 40 years …”
MIT’s core functions will be outsourced
A biz journal will headline “MIT doesn’t matter” : )
Grout
December 3, 2003 @ 12:37 pm
DeLong – Sacrificing control to proprietary software houses is a devil’s bargain. You’ll live to regret it.
The Garth
December 3, 2003 @ 1:18 pm
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.
Randall Burns
December 3, 2003 @ 2:26 pm
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?
Rude Prof
December 3, 2003 @ 3:41 pm
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?
webwench
December 3, 2003 @ 4:11 pm
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 🙂
Bottom Feeder
December 3, 2003 @ 4:27 pm
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?
R Noor
December 3, 2003 @ 6:27 pm
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.
Anonymous
December 3, 2003 @ 6:31 pm
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?
Philip Greenspun
December 3, 2003 @ 10:14 pm
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.]
Randall Burns
December 4, 2003 @ 2:26 pm
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 🙂
Bob Bechtel
December 5, 2003 @ 8:52 am
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.)
aa
December 5, 2003 @ 9:43 am
the reason why they are moving to india is become indians are such good liars.
CW
December 5, 2003 @ 3:52 pm
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!).
Atilla
December 6, 2003 @ 11:44 am
any comments about Vest stepping down, or his time at MIT? give him an overall grade. (maybe a subject for a future blog entry.)
Name
December 10, 2003 @ 9:23 pm
More proof that MIT is overrated: http://salon.com/tech/wire/2003/12/10/prime/index.html
Alex Greysukh
December 12, 2003 @ 10:44 am
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?
Mahesh Khatri
February 14, 2004 @ 9:42 pm
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.
Peter Atkinson
March 14, 2004 @ 1:28 am
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’!
Benita
March 15, 2004 @ 9:31 pm
It’s here to stay … we just need to learn to live with it.
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Stella Parker
January 28, 2005 @ 1:26 am
Hi
i love your article on the outsourcing, i myself also have a outsourcing blog and want to exchange link with your site. I will put your link on my home page. My blog page Rank is 3
and URL:http://www.offshoreoutsourcingworld.com
if intersted you can mail me at sec@a1internetdesign.com
thanks
Miles
January 28, 2005 @ 1:30 am
Hi
i like your article on the outsourcing, i myself also have a outsourcing blog and want to exchange link with your site. I will put your link on my home page. My blog page Rank is 3
and URL:http://a1websitedesign.blogspot.com
if intersted you can mail me at sec@a1internetdesign.com
thanks
Miles
January 28, 2005 @ 1:33 am
Hi
i love your article on the outsourcing, i myself also have a outsourcing blog and want to exchange link with your site. I will put your link on my home page. My blog page Rank is 3
and URL:http://a1websitedesign.blogspot.com
if intersted you can mail me at hemant.kumar@a1internetdesign.com
thanks
Steeve
November 16, 2005 @ 1:35 pm
What music prefer?
Slimt
December 15, 2005 @ 2:59 am
Hi
To write the letter, it is necessary …
Bill
December 20, 2005 @ 10:12 pm
Hi
Whether you play on musical tools?
Adam
April 24, 2007 @ 9:30 am
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!