I Outsourced My Homework To India!
Birmingham (England) - Birmingham City University officials say as many as 1000 students are outsourcing their homework to coders in India. The students attend or have attended universities and A-School (Britain’s equivalent of the last two years of a US high school) and outsourced homework as simple as a minor coding project to full-blown post-graduate dissertations. Birmingham officials say students sometimes paid as little as $10 for homework.
Birmingham City University have been monitoring outsourcing websites since 2004 and say the cheating is almost impossible to detect. This makes sense because programming is much more structured than say writing an essay — really there are only so many ways you can write a function or program.
It’s easier than you might think to get your homework outsourced. A quick search through Google brings up several companies and perhaps the most prominent one — with the most common sense name — is rentacoder.com. Operating on an auction system, students and companies place ads describing the coding project and programmers then bid on the job. The lowest bidder wins. The university claims that students pay from $10 for a small homework project to $200 for a dissertation.
Companies have been outsourcing their coding for years and it was only a matter of time before students started using the same systems. Of course, you can argue that students who outsource their homework overseas are only hurting themselves when they finally get a job. We can only hope that employers give a comprehensive interview that tests coding skills, but unfortunately some organizations are primarily concerned about whether the applicant has a degree from a prestigious college or university.
Outsourcing of IT homework is just a small part of a growing trend to sending services overseas. Recently several U.S. newspapers have outsourced their copyediting to India and the Philippines. In many ways this makes sense, because of the time difference newspaper reporters can send their stories to India where it will be daytime. The stories will then be edited and sent back in time for the printing presses to run.
Lazyness of westerners
Two things are sad about this, first, programming isn't that hard. I went to school for computer engineering with my specialty being VLSI and ULSI design. Couldn't get a job in that so I got a job as a programmer because it was a hobby of mine with only a minimal amount of schooling in it required for my degree. They tested the hell out of my coding skills in my interviews and I got the job with next to no formal schooling. (Granted they did higher me for test, but transfered me to software fairly quickly)
Second, 10 bucks!? I just told one of my indian friends I work with to tell his buddies back in india to charge more!
With a little luck, these cheater won't be able to maintain a job and will quickly realize how stupid they are.
No people like this end becoming PHB's.
Having been a programmer for 19 years, I can't imagine how someone who can't do the work themselves could possibly get a good job anyway and keep it.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Outsourcing and sweatshops are two different things. Outsourcing is absolute genius for the person doing the work. They make a pile of money compared to the rates of pay they have available. $10 might sound like very little, but when you take into account the exchange rate and cost of living it isn't bad at all for a simple assignment. Not to mention it would probably take someone competent very little time to do.
The only group that gets hurt in outsourcing are the people who live in the areas and have the skills that companies are outsourcing. Exchange rates and cost of living work against those people. Which is pretty awesome for someone like me who is a programmer in the US...
A four year degree doesn't just say "hey look how smart I am" it also shows you can stick to something for 4+ years and finish. It's a sign of character and determination to an employer. Only 26% of people who start college finish. There's a reason why it's that low because the drive to finish it must be there and an employer wants to see that.
In the gov't contracting world, where I work, the contracting company can charge the military more for you if you have your 4-year degree so obviously they're going to want that.
You may say some smarter people you know don't have degrees and I probably know some dumber people than you who do however they were able to commit to something rather difficult and finish it. If it was about smarts I'd be making more money than 98% of the people in this world just for being a Mensa member but I don't.
Get a degree or quit putting down the people who have more fortitude than the other shmucks who don't. If you have a scholarship to pay for your school that 4-years can almost ALWAYS guarantee you about 4K-10K extra starting salary.
In the end, EVERYONE is lazy.