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Comment by ramanujan | Hacker News Reader

India is just an extremely high-variance country. It has produced people like Google's Amit Singhal (Search Quality), Sanjay Ghemawat (MapReduce), Vic Gundotra (Google+), Sundar Pichai (Chrome), and Krishna Bharat (Google News). And it has also produced many people who aren't worthy of the title coder, let alone engineer.

Rather than wringing one's hands, just ask programming questions in interviews and let the code do the talking rather than the nationality.

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I didn't read the article as saying that the nationality is what matters so much as the corporate system and possibly the education system pushing to develop "coders" which industry there wants instead of "programmers".

All of the people you listed above(except possibly Vic Gundotra) moved to US universities to continue their studies.

4 out of the 5 you mentioned are from IITs. The education quality of IITs vs other institutions matters a lot in India.

You are getting it in the reverse order. People who make it to IITs are driven; they do well in every field not just IT. Most Indian coders are in it just for the money, they hardly have concept of basic business or functional concept to do better and the sad part is they don't want to learn. You need to love what you do excel.

As someone who went to IIT, I kind of disagree.

Most of the good things I got out of college there had little to do with the quality of the education and more to do with being surrounded by other smart, hard working people who managed to get in.

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