Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sumanthvepa | Hacker News Reader

While the article doesn't explicitly make the association, I get the impression that a lot of HN readers make the assumption that India's tech sector is synonymous with its IT services industry. Not so. While it is true that IT services is plateauing, that is not so with the tech sector as a whole. E-commerce, cloud-computing, fintech are exploding in India driven by a massive domestic market demand and an ability to reach global markets easily. There is a new breed of product startups out of Bangalore and other places that are born global (e.g. Zoho). They build products (not services) for the world, and not just India. Inward investment into the Indian tech sector was the highest it ever was (though still dwarfed by investment into the US tech sector and China's tech sector) https://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/2017-saw-... So the doom and gloom are not quite accurate. Yes IT services may have plateaued after two decades of torrid growth, but tech is doing fine thank you.

Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups.

The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.

Its really sad and alarming here. (I am from India). There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.

There are very few schools that actually teach creativity, problem solving skills, etc.

A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers.

Those Indians who are famous or are talented, are that way because they fought against the system or ignored it completely or have had good mentors.

> silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards

You can absolutely say that about the Chinese education system as well, and they seem to be doing OK.

I agree it's a shame that creativity is undervalued, if not outright suppressed, by the education system, but at the same time I don't think entrepreneurial spirit arises from formal education in the first place.

Entrepreneurial spirit generally doesn't emerge from standard formal education, but not much is done to suppress it, and there are often extracurriculars to encourage young entrepreneurs. Rote memorization also only gets you so far, often you get tested on how you arrived at an answer, not just on the answer itself. Understanding the process is just as important as knowing it.

Perhaps this is a bit like the schooling of Bolshevik Engineers versus American Engineers, the former had a much reduced curriculum that helped the USSR catch up in engineering talent on paper, meanwhile those engineers were missing key concepts that you need to understand to build planes, bridges and similar that won't spontaneously degrade.

Fun part is, high school is/was the other way. USSR curriculum was full of stuff that 99% of students wouldn't ever use. There was little incentive to use anything in practice. You had to memorise, pass test and then you can forget it. This practice continues to this day in big parts of ex-Soviet sphere. I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!". Yet Americans I meet remember what they learned and know who to put it to use. Meanwhile I don't remember jack shit :D

You highlighted a very important. Getting degrees for sake of getting degrees.

This is a big thing in India too. People become engineers and then decide what they want to do.

> I had plenty of teachers who took pride in saying that "stupid Americans learn this only in university!"

Can absolutely confirm this saying for Romania of the late '80s and throughout all of the '90s (so, even after the Wall had fallen).

It's still the same logic even today. Worst thing, updates programmes double down on pushing even more facts. While PISA scores are getting worse and worse. I guess it will take few generations to forget about glorious soviet schooling :(

My teachers and peers and even parents used to say this and I would always be mighty proud of it.

We got Shakespeare.

I don't know much about China's IT sector, but at-least in their manufacturing sector, they have built up a sizable manufacturing base, not by being innovative, but by being sweatshops for western countries, and, ahem, borrowing their IP.

Most Chinese companies that are on the radar now, like Xiaomi, have taken this path. They have learnt from western counterparts and built upon it.

As somebody whose career was linked to well being of the Chinese manufacturing sector I can say that manufacturing was on decline for quite a long time, with first symptoms appearing right at around 2009-2011.

The way the new mayor of Shenzhen ordered to bulldoze all factories in city center at around 2009-2010 shows how much esteem Chinese government has for entrepreneurship.

Can anybody imagine a governor of California ordering to bulldoze all silicon valley corporate campuses on a whim just because he wanted to have few hundreds more empty luxury shopping malls and 5 star hotels with blackjack and hookers?

Replacing SV corporate headquarters by skyscrapers would probably help lowering real estate prices a bit. And if Google had to rebuild their HQ it probably wouldn't even change quarterly income by a lot.

I believe this is third world countries problem not only India. In indonesia, my homeland, it also become problem, we focus to much on memorization while doesnt really care about problem solving

> India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups

That may be true, but I've always just assumed the talent leaves. It's a big-ass place, with smart people, and lots of people in IT -- I've always assumed that anyone I speak to at an outsourced firm is someone who wasn't smart enough to get a tech job abroad.

>>Tech is doing fine, but India definitely dosen't have the homegrown talent to cater to the new wave of startups.

The opposite in fact. The whole ecosystem is overflowing engineers. But what start ups want is people who can work for quite literally free, take no equity and work and make great sacrifices to make other people win(See Redbus, Foodpanda etc).

>>The fault is the Indian education system, which silences creativity, encourages rote learning and focuses too much on numbers on report cards.

So just like everywhere in the world?

Also the many start ups won't touch your resume if you don't have IIT education. So much for not caring about 'report cards'. Report cards have value because the same start ups care about these things. You can't flip flop on certain values based on what ever is your urgent need.

>>There are whole generations of students, who, from their early schooling, right up to a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, are taught to memorize and spit out answers.

When you go interview at Google, the white board questions are literally your ability to become a question-answer bank of algorithm question.

If you want to value pure ingenuity you need pay for it. You can't ask for one and complain you wanted the other.

>>A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

That is because there is a level how much of original creativity one can generate.

>>Unless there is a revolution in the education system in India, it would be very difficult to have a large pool of talented problem solvers and creative thinkers.

The revolution has been there for long. But companies interview for one set of skills and expect candidates to demonstrate a totally different set of skills at work.

> A few years back, when complaints were made against rote learning, schools have begun to give 'home projects' to kids, ostensibly to improve their creative skills. However, these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

That's not really unique, many American school children do the same for their homework. It's a time-honored tradition (at least since the internet has existed).

Sometimes I wonder if the whole point of school isn't just to teach children how to game systems, which will be a useful skill in corporate jobs.

Ah even before the internet was widely used you would go to the library and copy stuff out of encyclopedias. It just took longer :)

I was relatively young in the long-long-ago when there was no internet. I rephrased things from encyclopedias and biographies because the original wording was long and I was lazy. I'm unsure if that counts the same as copy-pasting because I still had to read and have a basic understand of what I'd read.

It's possible people who were older at the time just straight-up copied the text though. I wouldn't be surprised.

No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.

The exam and grading workload is unserviceable.

This is the crux of it.

And it’s the crux of MANY MANY other problems human beings face every day!

Recruitment ? How do you prove that this person is actually an expert in his field/as good as he says he is withiut tying up my entire tech team in test checking?

Online communication ? How do I know this information is correct? Who can provide proof of work for this comment?

Testing is onerous- And when incentives and resources are inverted/out of Sync, it’s not possible to test effectively.

This is the hidden factor.

If all Indian/Chinese teachers could turn around tomorrow and complete assessments accurately, rote learning would drop dramatically.

Failing that you must resort to large scale standardized testing. Which humans optimize for by just learning the test.

>>The exam and grading workload is unserviceable.

The standard testing in India, at-least for engineering, medicine, civil services and CA is unforgivingly fierce. Kids sacrifice everything, like everything to qualify for a seat at engineering colleges. Even in so called tier-2/3 colleges seats for Electronics/Electrical/CS go like hot cakes. I remember in my batch all students were the top most Math students in their individual pre-university colleges.

In many ways these exams are a giant filter to select people into STEM careers. The effects last way after. Even the most successful non-STEM desk job guy will tell you the immense difference STEM and non-STEM salaries, overall job perks and career quality in general. And kids watch their uncles and elder cousins in these situations all the time. And are forced to work hard.

Every year these tests get harder, and kids train even more harder.

I have younger cousins in US, and I jokingly tell them they won't last a few months in the fierce competition here in India.

But like everything, continuity is required. Once people arrive at jobs. They sort of lose all the momentum, coast around and eventually to settle to mediocrity. Or worse resort to politics and things like that.

>No - foreigners (ie non Indians / Chinese etc) are missing this fact : there’s 40 students to 1 teacher in india, or more.

Growing up in a poor Seattle suburb in the '80s, that was very close to the (public school) student-teacher ratio we had as well. The school my youngest two attend now is significantly improved in this regard, but I suspect 30+ to one is still not uncommon around the country.

Well, you always had to rephrase it. Being that the number of possible sources were pretty limited it would be easy for the teacher to catch you plagiarizing heh.

You can design homework in a way that it's easier to solve yourself than copy the answer. Unfortunately, that's a lot of work so that few teachers do it. But I had several where copy-pasting never worked.

> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.

In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.)

I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't.

There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying.

I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.

"...these projects devolved into internet searches..."

This is the 3rd millennium. Learning how to ask questions and find answers is a core competency. Along side critical thinking and problem solving, of course.

I now keenly remember a 4th grade teacher who would drill the entire class with random trivia style questions. "Where is the capital of Botswana?" "What is the root word for 'homage'?" And us teams of kids would race to find the answers. Great fun.

If home work assignments are easily fulfilled by quick searches and copypasta, the teacher is being lazy, not the students.

The problem is that we manufacture very little, and a disproportionate part of our GDP is services. If you take away services, there's not a lot of money coming into our economy. The size of our economy is tiny in comparison (smaller than UK's) and per-capita income is one of the lowest - there's not a lot of headroom to grow for companies targeting the domestic market.

The point I'm making is, until manufacturing and industry take off, we won't offset exported IT Services with domestically focused tech of the "software" kind.

Does India actually want to grow manufacturing and industry though? Its notably more environmentally destructive, here in Seattle we're still cleaning up cadmium and other hazardous pollutants in the soil from Boeing's manufacturing partners from decades ago. Overall, considering the amount of remediation we've had to do, there are some industries that cost us more than they ever earned.

Boeing was the backbone of international and local airlines for decades. It seems to have been worth it.

Yes. India is a poor country. Indeed a very poor one. But that does not necessarily constrain the growth of its tech sector.

First, tech growth is not primarily about domestic per capita income or demand for software in the country. It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand. i.e. use domestic demand to find product market fit and then expand globally. So global demand is more relevant than domestic per-capita income.

More importantly manufacturing itself is changing in ways that are lowering capital costs and the barriers to entry into manufacturing. The trend in IoT is an example of that. A lot of new products will primarily be driven by a combination of hardware and software capabilities. Skills that are reasonably widely available in India. (Although China has vastly more talent there.) That positions India in a reasonably good place. So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs. It will mostly come from many small companies that make niche-products serving and possibly dominating a narrow global market, with high margins. That's were the employment will come from. An example of this is a company that makes automation kits to convert traditional backhoes into remotely operated machines. The technology requires a combination of software, electronics and mechanical components. And Indian companies (or for that matter companies anywhere) that integrate well into global supply chains for these will do well.

> Yes. India is a poor country. Indeed a very poor one. But that does not necessarily constrain the growth of its tech sector.

That is simply not true. You could grow anywhere, it's different shades of difficulty though.

> It is about exporting products while also catering to a rising domestic demand.

The revenue from exported domestically made software/tech products, compared to the size of the IT Services industry is miniscule. Almost nothing.

> So I'm optimistic that domestic tech manufacturing will grow well, but not in the traditional way, such as building semiconductor fabs.

As an economy, we should strive for depth - rather than just mate hardware imported from China with some software. Such work is easy to replicate, and is not very different from IT Services in how challenging it can be. Semiconductor fabs however is the kind of thing we should get into.

Basically, an industrial base which manufactures hardware (and other real physical things) is harder to grow than software.

>>The revenue from exported domestically made software/tech products, compared to the size of the IT Services industry is miniscule. Almost nothing.

This is a very interesting point. Only recently I had a discussion about this with a colleague.

The painful fact about big salaries in India is either US pays it or a VC pays it. Or you go the services way where some one does the work over the years and has build a company for you, then they pay you services salary(But that is again from the US.).

So its just US or VCs. If you build a company in India and pay you can't pay much.

But in todays world, is not manufacturing anything an issue? Does UK manufacture even a safety pin, and they seem to be doing ok, by and by, focusing on services, financial businesses, licencing and IP etc..

UK does not have 1.2 billion human population which is not particularly skilled, educated, wealthy.

Concentrating on only one aspect can give answers which we like. Different societies e.g. America, Japan, Russia, UK or China have developed in different ways. I think of 3 basic factors: sophisticated population, lot of land, powerful political system. At least one or combination of more than one is required for rapid development.

India has none of these so it will be painful, long and slow path to development.

The UK has a fair amount of high-tech manufacturing (In terms of value, the manufacturing industry in the UK is bigger than it's ever been). Things like MRI machines, jet engines, etc are all manufactured here.

Yep. I'm 4 years exp software engineer in the Bangalore/Indian startup ecosystem. I don't doubt that the services sector is declining but there's a decent talent pool. At the same time, a good number of American Product companies/High-Valued startups have opened up their Indian counterparts to produce software that's super costly to build in the US.

But, I do hope that we shift our focus inward rather than towards US or somewhere. There must be enough demand as it is in India.

I've tried Zoho and it's the most unreliable, "ghetto" thing I've ever tried (for lack of better words). UX/UI-wise, it looks like it was slapped together by a bunch of amateur programmers.

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