Why there are so many engineers in India
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
There are large number of problems with the engineering system in India (especially about the number of engineers and the quality of engineering education) and the author just sweeps them under the rug.
Poorly written.
Full disclosure: I am an Indian Engineer now studying in UC Berkeley. Almost a perfect fit to the model described (except that I didn't graduate from the IITs).
My aim was not to glorify engineering in India; very far from it, actually. The aim of the article was to provide a really shallow look into the history of engineering culture in India. There's a lot more that I really haven't even talked about - how politicians set-up engineering schools since that was a major way to pick-pocket the middle class, the (alleged) abundance of black money in many "premier" institutes of engineering, and in general, the way engineering in India is taught is plain wrong.
I graduated in 2010 from an "NIT", and I am fully aware of how bad the engineering system in India is.
Slight? I agree with most of what you were saying, I just felt most of those editorials were not only unnecessary, but distracting.
Even when the article makes a minor allowance for less-than-stellar engineering performance -- why did it take longer than expected to develop nuclear power? -- the answer given is not anything to do with engineering, but only that Indians were too peaceful under Ghandi and simply didn't feel like going nuclear.
I'm a big fan of India and Indian innovation and potential. I would just have liked to read a more balanced article that didn't bother with the nationalistic stuff. Viva Indian engineering in the 21st century!
Some of the best coder/hacker types I've met in India were self-taught. I have never met/interviewed a truly outstanding candidate from any of the "top-line" schools ever. Sad, really. What was worse was the arrogance of some these so called grads.
The article is indeed right but it misses few points. Given the fact that India is just 60+ years old, the dreams that Indians see is lot different from the ones being seen in west. People in India still struggle with the basic lifestyle, which includes a car, a house, broadband, smartphones, 3g, air-conditioning (yes I think all of these are part of basic lifestyle). You don't find furnished homes in India very often. Once you are in, you have to manage everything (bed, refrigerator, laundry and what not). When you are asked to survive in one of the hottest part of the world and you cannot afford an AC, doing work is nightmare. So for an Indian guy right out of college, there are a lot of questions unanswered. I don't think this is the case in west, is it? (I stayed in London for an year and everything was there right from the first day). So it's a little unreal to expect everyone to jump into doing a startup or becoming famous.
But yeah, above all the best part is that situation is changing very fast, lots and lots of Indians are taking the unconventional path, trying to make sure that future holds something good.
No, India is the oldest civilization alive.
What became of his former students? If even a couple learned to look at the world a bit more like him, then the ripple effect might have been great. If nothing else, it's hard to imagine that the educational system has been unaware of his critique. Did it spur any sort of reform in the decades since?
When you look at it in a different way. Would you rather have more engineers than less? I would go for more.
As an individual, having an engineering degree is better than having a degree in arts. An engineering degree provides these guys with better employment options even if our notion of quality is shattered.
India is coming of age and the days when 'I studied roman history because I am passionate about it' are not far off. As of now, livelihood trumps passion.
At the expense of quality?? Literacy isn't the same as education. And because of this sort of things its that Indian IT isn't able to take any thing more than IMS projects today. The managers haven't the slightest clue how to run projects, and engineers haven't the slightest clue how code, design and build.
No point in having paper degrees if people can't work! Money comes from work not from degrees! And its not about passion, its about doing one's job properly. And that can be done even without the burning passion. If my job is that of a coder, I should be able to do my job properly even if I don't have the passion to write the next big OS kernel.
And the employment opportunities, how can we sustain getting business when we can't deliver on the current ones?
"Becoming an engineer in India virtually guarantees financial security for life, and this blinds parents into forcing their children to choose engineering."
I see it in a similar vein to how there are so many finance people in the US - that's where the money is - quick riches compared to other jobs you could get. And if the money/financial security disappeared, so would all the interest in working in that field - ie the culture would evaporate.
It's different to say the US innovation culture which is an attitude and culture that has developed over decades due to many drivers, but money hasn't been the only or even major driving force behind it and in many ways is impervious to fluctuations in 'market demand'.
Firstly, anyone who has had experience with off-shoring to India is probably convinced that the whole country is just minutes from falling apart through shoddy engineering.
That makes the first part of the article very relevant, because an important part of realising that there is a problem is to realise that Indian Engineering used to be very good.
Then the article hints at what I think are the two main reasons:
(1) Immigration (2) Cheating in the education system/lack of effort
I actually see this in the west as well, the attitude that the whole point of university is simply to get some piece of paper that is a de facto licence to print money.
Westerners today interacting with the off-shore engineers will usually come away shocked by how lazy the Indian programmers seem. They have no pro-activity, no problem solving ability.
But is that an accurate picture of Indian culture? Could they have modernised their agriculture, fought 3+ major wars, launched satellites into space and developed a nuclear program if they were all like the off-shore programmers? They'd have starved to death and/or been wiped out by their own incompetence if that was the case.
Clearly, the Indian Engineers of 2011 are a 'different breed' than their counter-parts in the 60s and 70s.
Something must have happened.
If you accept that premise, that things have gone downhill in a big way, then it begs the question "why?". Now the author may not have all the answers - but he has some interesting points.
To dismiss him as "plain wrong" is unworthy of hacker news, and disrespectful of the effort it takes to create this kind of big-picture historical overviews that challenge entrenched views.
Do you really want hacker news to become yet another Digg or reddit?
Personally, I find that a brief examination of American history provides some support for the view that brain drain for a country is a bad thing, and immigration of smart and motivated people to your country is a good thing. America got big and strong by two things: (a) enormous mineral wealth, (b) opening its borders to immigrants. Having avoided most of the draining effect of the European wars in the 1800s and 1900s helped, and also served to promote the view of America as a safe haven.
If you forget that immigration isn't just about "dumb people who are browner than me" and also includes "the intellectual elite of countries like Austria fleeing wars and persecution" then you start thinking that immigration is all about "they took aor jaorbs!", and close down your borders, impose quotas... and the stagnation begins.
Untrue, Uncalled for, Unsupported by any facts, and plain wrong.
It all fits together now. That's why so much code that is farmed out to India comes back looking in such sorry shape.
IIT's are not your average university. Digest this: 34% employees at Microsoft, 28% at IBM, 17% at Intel and 13% at Xerox are of Indian origin.
Gates warned US congress on H1B visas, "U.S. companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete," and all those Indian students receiving their education at U.S. universities will have to leave, to the detriment of US high tech companies
I know a lot of IIT'ians who really put the name of the Institute to shame.
Eating on a brand name has been a long used strategy by people in India.
No it doesn't.
If what you claimed was true then why does India still continue to be the top outsource destination?
If cheap labour is the excuse then its the problem of capitalism, not India or Indian engineers.
The same goes to China and Chinese goods.
At any rate, we're talking about outsourcing. If they're not in India anymore, then by definition the US cannot outsource to them.
Therefore, their education is lousy precisely because these engineers are employed.
India may just have conditions of production, whether by providence or design, that are more efficient at producing minimally satisfiable engineers than anywhere else. Of course I'm talking about a hypothetical India that produces engineer shaped widgets - so no offense intended:)
For companies who outsource clearly price is better than quality.
We know the off shore code is crap. After all, 9 times out of 10 we're the ones who have to fix it even though it will still be chalked up as a success for offshoring.
If they were offshoring something real, that they could look at and see the faults, that they could get their hands on, that they had to drive their cars over... they'd be screaming blue murder, and price wouldn't come into it.
> If what you claimed was true then why does India still continue to be the top outsource destination?
Because there are different ways of measuring top. He was talking about quality, you are talking about quantity.
> If cheap labour is the excuse then its the problem of capitalism, not India or Indian engineers.
Again, you two are measuring different things.
> The same goes to China and Chinese goods.
The fact there are so many Chinese goods does in no way imply they are "good".
My take away from working with graduates of Indian universities, both abroad and at home, is that these schools do not impart critical thinking skills as well as they should. This definitely hampers employability for many grads.
Good engineers command good salaries.
Salary, in my experience, really correlates with nothing. It doesn't make sense, but that's my experience.
May be you get what you reward. You reward crappy programmers you get crappy output.
As a product of this system, the reason seems fairly straightforward to me. Its plain simple economics. On average, in India, engineering is the path of least resistance to a quality of life better than your parents. When I graduated about a decade ago, engineering was perceived as a stepping stone. Indeed, most of my classmates are not in engineering anymore (most of them weren't even interested in it), and, by all modern measures, quite successful. A 4-year engineering is seen as a foundation to bigger things, and that doesn't seem like such a bad thing at all. Its the generally accepted way of getting to the top of the pile, if you're not born into money, and so its not surprising its such a popular choice.
There seems to be a small sliver of anecdotal evidence that this may be changing, with people willing to follow their passions more, but the effects of this 'at scale' remains to be seen.
To folks with the bad-programmers-from-India experience, the fault is solely yours. You're looking for engineers from this system to do your job for the least money. You're going to get people who're great at selling themselves, not great hackers.
http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-it-happened-in-southern-in...
Although it focuses on only one region of India it provides more clues to answering "Why there are so many engineers in India?"
How much of credit should be given to Jawaharlal Nehru's reforms?
I'm not Indian, so please excuse my ignorance.
First and foremost, The elite, the civil services, UPSC et al. Next opportunities in the defense services, Next came government jobs(clerks, small time accountants etc). The private sector jobs were limited to factories(Process based jobs) like ITI, BEL, HAL etc. Then small time business men. So depending on them the general qualification were BA, BCom and Industrial training courses(Welding, electrician etc).
Medicine and Engineering were considered elite, the demand and supply was both limited. For a while India had a Gulf boom, many people went to gulf to work. But real turn around happened after Manmohan singh's FDI's reforms in the early 90's. This is when the outsourcing market took off and the IT boom started and demand for both crappy colleges and engineers went high.
During that time, it was easy to get promoted and work in a foreign country. Due to all this every tom,dick and harry got promoted and became a millionaire. Even if he was moron and knew nothing and did nothing. The market was such that all this could go on. Now the entire Indian IT's middle management is rotten. The expectations of the current generation is very high. The college grads think they can easily promoted to be a manager in 3-4 years so they need not have to be technically good.
All this has led to horrible state of affairs that exists today. The scary thing is good people are never rewarded and bad ones some how keep making money through job hopping.
I believe that there are some phenomenally good engineers and a very large number of terrible engineers. So as a foreigner trying to hire, without travelling there it's very difficult. The great people simply don't respond to job ads, and unless you are Google, are not interested in applying. Plus the great people earn $2,000 per month and higher. The large number of very average people earn $300-500 per month. So that's why I haven't found any great people, but I think if you have connections or a good recruiting team in India it's possible to find these people.
There is demand for CHEAP engineers. It happens that many are from India. There is no demand for crap, but sadly, there is no demand for quality (over cost) in the eyes of many.
The thing about good productive programmers is same as that in the US, they tend to stick around for long time in one company, take time out to learn and master the trade. And are not usually on the job lists. On the other hand, due to rapid growth it has become fashionable here for the bad folks to hop a job often. The trick is simple, the performance evaluation happens every year in most companies here. Before their performance is even judged, they fly to some other company.
Hiring is often done by HR's. They are given a template of standard questions flicked from the internet. Most of which are factual and don't test a candidate analytical ability. Questions like 'What is a class', 'Can you define X'. If you memorize the answer you can easily pass the interview.
There are dumps of questions available for clearing common certifications like SCJP et al. They say some jargons in interview, negotiate a good salary and join the company. By the time their performance is evaluated in the company they go to some other company.
This is what is happening in India currently. The good folks are there but they are invisible and often lost in the crowd.
The reason given for removing existing personnel to replace them with outsourced people is twofold. One is cost, and it is the large majority of the sum total of the reasons. The other reason is the erroneous idea that the company can train up a bunch of outsourced people and have a flexible, dynamically sized, workforce.
The justification is that "they're just as good".
In the 10-12 or so years I have seen this tried, it has yet to even COME CLOSE to what was promised. The reason it keeps happening is the person in charge of the decision gets his bonus for cutting the costs, then moves on, long before the actual long-medium terms costs become known. By then that person is long gone and/or up the corporate ladder to where no one dare say "this sucked, he's the guy that caused it".
My view is cynical and jaded, but it is from experience. And I say this not having ever lost my job over it, so that's not a factor.
Middle class could afford it, IT jobs are easier to get, engineering is the new the minimum qualification for getting a good job.
if government liberalizes medical education, we would see a million more doctors soon.
There are a lot of challenges to building a sfba-style startup in India though, more than it makes sense to go into in a comment. That said, there are plenty of very talented, veyr driven engineers there that understand the startup lifestyle - checkout http://resume.akash.im/ for one, I've really enjoyed all the work I've done with him (that's included training over emacs/skype, learning rails, cutting up psd's, to working on applications for me).
Goodcrush.com had the exact same concept two years ago. Isawyou.com had the concept minus the college angle a couple years earlier.