Comment by pitchups | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pitchups | Hacker News Reader

As I was watching the Google I/O webcast last month, the one thing that struck me was how some of the most important products and services from arguably the most influential tech company of our times, were headed by IIT graduates:

Amit Singhal, a Google fellow, who heads their search team and essentially rewrote the critical ranking algorithm in 2001, and a graduate of IIT Roorkee [1];

Sundar Pichai, who heads Android, Chrome/Chrome OS, and Google Apps [2] - a graduate of IIT Kharagpur;

Vic Gundotra - who heads Google+ and social and is a graduate of IIT Bombay [3];

Nikesh Arora, who is Google's Chief Business Officer, a graduate of IIT Varanasi [4];

Sridhar Ramasway - SVP for Ads & Commerce - a graduate of IIT Madras [5], plus dozens of other key people.

(The latter two are listed on Google's management team page at : http://www.google.com/about/company/facts/management/ )

Not to make too fine a point about it - but IMHO Google is one example of the influence and impact of IITians on the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amit_Singhal

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundar_Pichai

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Gundotra

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikesh_Arora

[5] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sridhar-ramaswamy/2/220/972

Edit: Formatting

Clearly these men are all very capable but would they have been able to have the same impact had they stayed in India?

Given that they all did post-graduate study in the US and currently live in the US and work for an American company, I think their accomplishments say less about the quality of IIT graduates and more about the fact that a huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.

> more about the fact that a huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.

I think your text would make more sense by using "the world" instead of restricting to "India".

I have thought multiple times about the quantity of great people that could be having a great impact in our lives and are "missing". We have examples all over our history (islamic mathematics, old greeks,...) of different civilizations that accomplished huge achievements with smaller populations.

Obviously, I don't think that there is a genetic factor for certain ethnics to be more intelligent, but we still see how jews (13-14 million?) are on top of the Nobel Prizes on science, while arabic contribution is symbolic. The same prizes a few centuries ago would have a completely different destination.

The current distribution of Nobel Prizes surely shocks me more than seeing some Indian IT people on top of great companies (1 billion). Not to remove merit from the individuals, but from the system; I have always thought that there is something more in a person than the results of a "simple" exam.

Fakeer, you've been banned or hell banned for some reason. Nothing in your comment history stands out to me, so you might want to talk to the admins to see what happened.

>huge amount of human potential is being wasted in India.

Just a counterpoint : IITs are state funded, i.e most of the student fees are paid for by the government. Once they complete their education, do they not have a duty to give back to the people ? Remember, brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.

Though my own taxes help fund the IITs, and I never was hard-working enough to get through the JEE, I'm happy that we have the IITs setting at least some kind of an example for the rest of India. I am disappointed by the idiots filling teaching positions in most other colleges.

> do they not have a duty to give back to the people ?

I hate this attitude, not just in India, but anywhere in the world. Like Kennedy's "ask not what your country has done for you...". To start with, their own parents paid taxes to support the IITs too. Do we have a way of making a balance sheet for how my taxes were utilized? How much have I lost to supporting corruption? How much have I lost to supporting undeserving candidates who got in through reservation?

In case of IITs, you are, of course, neglecting all the private funding it gets.

> brain drain is a serious problem for countries like India.

Many Indians who have left have gone on to accomplish great things. Do you think they would have accomplished even 1% of that, had they stayed in India? Brain drain is not India's problem; it is an avenue for opportunity for many Indians. India's problem is corruption and unfettered democracy.

About the brain drain problem, I think yes. They would have accomplished more if they stayed in India. Just have a look at Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys. Just imagine if people like Sundar Pichai, Vic Gundotra etc stayed in India, they might have done something even bigger than what they had done at Google. Android or something similar would have been created in India or India would have a social network like Google Plus! Who knows!

On the other hand, India has a huge population and its inevitable that it will have more than a few geniuses/great persons. Did IIT help make these people, or did IIT just select them via rigid examination and admission standards? If the latter, more worryingly, how many great people were condemned to mediocrity because they weren't selected?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

>On the other hand, India has a huge population and its inevitable that it will have more than a few geniuses/great persons

China 1.3B population

India 1.2B population

Africa 1.0B population

Surely there's a lot more here at work rather than the raw population. The environment, social culture, peers, educational opportunities, cost, language, parental expectations and lastly, great educational institutions all surely increase odds.

China, at least, has the gaokao for identifying talent, the actual Qinghua University experience is mediocre compared to one at American research universities; its just that the gaokao + a huge population allows them to select the best students. It would be an interesting experiment to see if they could take low test performers and "make" them into high quality graduates.

Africa is not one country and doesn't have any easy way of selecting their best or brightest, or even motivating kids to study very hard to win at the test. We might say its "culture" but it has more to do with resources.

I don't think they are condemned to mediocrity just because IIT didn't select them. You will find far more non-IITian indians making impact in the world if you look for them. Just like not all fortune 500 CEOs come from Harvard, not all great engineers and scientists come from IIT.

True enough. But high-stakes testing and the value we place on them does act as a biased filter. I'm pretty sure it would have been very hard for me to personally thrive in such an environment.

Awesome Compilation. I had the suspicion that a lot of the higher-ups were IIT grads, but I never looked into it. (Not that that's a bad thing, but it's interesting). Is there a very pro-google culture in India? Does Google recruit relatively heavily from India?

You didn't include the real big guy of Google(who died in an unfortunate accident later) who was Brin's and Page's professor and mentor.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[3]

He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0-521-47465-8, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).

Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design

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