Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable'
informationweek.com
informationweek.com
If that's his complaint, he's right. I'm not going to waste my time memorizing a series of 'comprehensive checklists' in college. I doubt I know a single CS/Math student who has done more than peruse the Wikipedia article (or maybe read a book in their spare time if they're feeling particularly masochistic) on Six Sigma - and I like to think that I know many great students in the field (several who've worked for Google, Sun, NSA, Microsoft Research, etc).
There have been many times that I've said 'Damn, I wish I knew more about X.' In the last week alone X has included POMDPs, multi-dimensional interval trees, or functors. I have never, not once, wished I knew more about the management fad du jour.
Really this is just a bodyshopper trying to justify why he isn't hiring costly Americans (vs cheap Indians). Of course he can't say "I am looking for cheap bodies to ship offshore and Americans are expensive", and still retian his job. These mumblings aren't worthy of being upset over.
Due Disclosure: I am Indian. I work in India (Bangalore to be precise), but I do work with POMDPs, MultiDimensional Interval Trees and so on ;-) (My latest project is in Robotic Vision and Navigation, for the Indian Defence Dept)
On the other hand there is a mass requirement for people who are expected to fix things. This gives to large percentage of software engineers who do not have a clue what "Engineering" is all about in "Software Engineering"
Only if you're building a linked list using C. </bad CS joke>
Seriously though, how about a link to your profile/resume?
P.S. I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....
I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....
I'm impressed. Name dropping and such usually doesn't work on me... but for some reason this does.
I am just wondering the kid in India who said he wrote an assembler for PDP-11. I want to know did he verify the code? I wrote an x86 code generator in Ada and that is easy to verify with Linux on PC and I can say it worked. But PDP-11 is kind of hard.
http://vak.ru/doku.php/proj/pdp11/211bsd
(AT&T UNIX, RSX/11M, RSTS, RT11 and other images are also widely available)
Plus, I think you're perhaps misunderstanding where his company is coming from. They're not necessarily looking for computer scientists to write code or design new systems in most cases. Instead, they're looking for information systems specialists to be able to quickly and efficiently solve IT issues for their customer, and managers of those specialists to ensure they do it as efficiently as possible.
Over the last 8 years I have worked with dozens of American programmers, and on an average they are better than their Indian counterparts. His own company (HCL) employs some of the people who I thought formed the bottom of the class. Yet another senior programmer in another IT major (TCS) who was a CS grad, thought he was writing code for a new 16 bit computer.
From the article itself, it is easy to see what he considers talent: following Six Sigma, CMM etc. Guess what, CMM itself is so ridiculously outdated that only Indian IT companies seek it. In a CMM review I was part of in 2007, they said 80% were Indian IT companies. Needless to say, there are more failed projects that successful ones.
Our website says "Made in India"; but sadly, thanks to these IT companies it could be mistaken as a 'Process-driven, cheap, intellect-independent way of building software'.
These massive "brick-in-the-wall", "Enterprise" Indian IT Companies compete exclusively on "hourly-billing-rate".
There is hope in sight, but they come from smaller, newer companies.
Yesteryear's process becomes today's joke. It's unfortunate that Indian companies are madly following the buzz words/process without understanding how it is supposed to work.
This sounds like a form of cargo cult software development management.
On a more general level this sounds like a common, if insidious, human trait: merely emulating the outward signs of successful persons or groups in an attempt to recreate or capture that success for oneself.
I may not agree to the guy's agenda. But I see nothing wrong in encouraging more Americans to become programmers. Whether they are code monkeys or PhDs is a personal choice folks make and nothing is stopping current code monkeys to become PhDs.
If he finds that people from an academic background are not willing to submit to his requirements I would assume that they wont submit because they can find more fulfilling work elsewhere.
Furthermore, it's not how methodologies are called at these places, it is how they are used: an excuse for middle management to look at charts and metrics without having to deal with the human aspect of their team.
I would assume that they wont submit
because they can find more fulfilling work elsewhere.
I am not sure how true or untrue that notion is. But it is widely accepted.
I do see your point and think it is valid: the current American compsci grads and engineers usually can find a job. What this guy should be talking about is EXPANDING the total size of the engineering/compsci grads so even folks not necessarily very inclined can come in and do tedious but decent paying jobs. The end result is more money goes to Americans and fewer importation of labor from India etc.
I'm from Germany and we do not really have an equivalent to US college education. Secondary education is partially integrated in our equivalent to a high school and you go to university after that. Alternatively, there is another path of secondary education/apprenticeship where you split your time between working for a company to get hands-on experience in your chosen line of work and attend classes the rest of the time. Such apprenticeships are also available for IT and software development related work.
Nevertheless, a lot of people believe that programming a computer is a sufficiently complex activity which only people that have attended university are capable of. That may be a part of the problem that the guy in the original article was complaining about: although people can acquire the skills needed to be a programmer elsewhere, they still go to universities in order to secure some credentials that will increase their chances of employment.
- College Student
Would you hire a graduate who wasn't inclined to spend their time learning about version control, bug tracking or release management systems (all of which are part of the ITIL standard) ?
A lot of ITIL isn't that much different from what you find in Code Complete or the Pragmatic Programmer books on deployment. Just because you prefer your buzzword to their buzzword, doesn't mean it's any more important.
Indians are fantastic at rote memorization and will listen to directions to the letter - no freelancing there. To India's benefit, it should mean that they'll be spitting out really, really good cars (as long as they're designed elsewhere) and large industrial output in the near future.
Well, the rich countries aren't going to lose their edge in tech innovation in the short term, but that doesn't mean that a lot of jobs won't continue to migrate to poorer countries.
This is an old tune though -- as technologies slip away from the leading edge they tend to relocate to places where they can be produced at a lower cost. It sounds like what the CEO quoted in the article is saying is that Americans don't fit the bill for that kind of development.
I wish they encouraged more of learning by doing here and we could've had better people to boast about.
They may be at those grad schools "around the world" precisely because their native culture does not value creative, innovative work that goes beyond rote memorization and checklists. There are brilliant and creative people everywhere, but the culture you are born into has a lot to say about how brilliance and creativity can be expressed, if at all.
My gut instinct is that the sad state of Indian IT is purely a result of being supported by clueless management in developed countries thinking they can easily save big bucks by outsourcing. India is just filling a demand.
After a decade or two of Indians growing up in this economy and seeing the failures first hand, I predict things will have equalized quite a bit, and the smart Indians will all be saying "Why work for clueless bosses when we can do better and we have huge markets of our own?" Of course that process will be kickstarted by Indian expats witnessing the failures of enterprise IT firsthand in the richest corporations of the world.
I don't think I'd use the word "better" here. As a US senior developer who delegates a lot of work to both Indian contractors and in-house junior developers, it really doesn't help me when the person I'm delegating to can't do the job well, but works real hard at it. That just wastes time and still produces inferior code. I'd much rather have the person tell me "I'm lost and can't do this" right away, so I can either delegate to someone else or provide more detailed directions earlier rather than later.
Also, consider applying that statement to any other professional career. Would you want your less-capable doctor to be allowed to practice medicine because he can memorize really well and follow checklists? No, of course not: the less-capable doctor should be forced to find a career he's good at.
The person who graduates at the bottom of his medical school class still gets to write "Md" after his name.
In my experience, the largest influence of employers on schools has been the pervasiveness of Java in higher education. Since it's now all but obvious how horribly short-sighted "teaching Java in college" turned out to be, I think the burden of proof is on him to explain why teaching everyone "ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like" isn't equally short-sighted.
Hahahaha .. if Six Sigma is more "real world" and rigorous than what they teach in good CS programs in the US, I am Warren Buffett.
God forbid Vineet here gets his wishes about influence with U.S. colleges, because if he does, bank on the number of great engineers graduating from these schools dropping precipitously.
Look at Shaadi.com. A site like that would have fallen flat on its face in America. Conversely, a site like Match.com and eHarmony would be really unsuccessful in India.
You have a unique opportunity in India. There are tons of startups that could only be done in India, and not in America. These startups need to be done by Indians, not by Americans. The track record of American VC's in India isn't very good, they just don't "get it".
Historically, business in India has been dominated by the big family players- the Ambami's, the Birla's, the Tata's. This is because every business in India has a huge government overhead to deal with- it's hard to go above the mom-and-pop level without dealing with the corruption and bureaucracy that plagues India.
The Internet changes all that. More and more people are getting wired. The local politicians, the corrupt officials that want bribes, and all the other authorities can't control you in cyberspace. You instantly eliminate all that overhead!
So go and develop your idea! It's stupid to speak in terms of generalizations and stereotypes. Yes, there's a large culture gap between America and India- this makes it hard for Indians to innovate- it's hard to cross that chasm and understand our needs.
But there's nothing stopping you from developing a site just for Indians. The Indian version of cyberspace is basically like 1997. Everyone is still building these big "portals". Indian newspapers are still coming online. American companies are just using India as a bodyshop and not really serving India's needs.
Stop thinking about how India can cater to the US, and start thinking about how India can cater to India. Once India does this, India can control her own destiny and become the superpower it so badly wants to be.
--an ABCD
[Looks at Shaadi.com...]
Well, no kidding. I couldn't even fill in the form right. What the hell is my caste? No one told me.
It ought to be so: if Americans and Indians were competing for the same jobs, the current difference in salaries couldn't have been sustained for so long. Most people who have worked with outsourcing know the limits, especially in terms of initiative, understanding or even common sense, of what can be done successfully by Indian IT companies.
The whole article only makes sense for people who think that "guys who are paid to do stuff on a computer" are a single, mostly uniform resource. What is very worrying is that this illiterate understanding seems to be held by top executives of international IT companies.
Ireland? A developing country? I don't think so.
On the other hand, this is probably one of the last countries in the world where you still pay more than 50 euro's per month for 1Mbps ADSL.
Actually, I just checked Wikipedia - it has the 6th highest GDP/c in the world.
Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries ... to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.
Many corporations are looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich
Of course, corporations want a cheap labor workforce that they don't have to train.
A good college education should give you a solid foundation for learning new things; not just job training.
I should also mention the monumental levels of competition overseas students like in India have to clear to have a shot at a school like IIT, and I guess this radiates into everything else that follows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...
I have talented Java engineers working for me who I have had to teach regular expressions to. Many American engineers with graduate degrees in CS from a good university would be able to predict that /ab+/ matched the string "abc". It would be unlikely in the extreme for them to have never heard of the word "regular expression" before. I am oh for five on this with my most recent five Indian engineers. Even after teaching them basic regular expressions I have not found them capable of using them to accomplish tasks without specific direction.
(For example, if someVariableName is used in the project, and the customer later informs us that our naming of it does not match their understanding, we might have to rewrite that variable name and associated variables and methods globally. It should be trivial to find all instances of that with a search by regexp, right? But they don't hear that in the instruction "X is now called Y, change all appropriate variables and methods" -- instead, two days later I'm told they're done with a job that I expected to take a few hours, and then I fire a regexp against the source tree and see that 40% of it is still not done.)
I have frequently had to explain bugs to our engineers which resulted not from chance or carelessness but from simple ignorance of core CS101 concepts, such as pass by reference. (Example: In our first code review, I noticed a lot of reuse of HashMaps to carry parameters to DAOs. I told folks to not reuse them, because that introduces the risk of somebody changing the HashMap in the DAO, thus causing later users of the map to have unexpected behavior. I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it. This does not happen, and it is a CS101 misconception. Sure enough, we had bugs caused by reuse. So, after a remedial CS101 lecture to the team, I reiterated that maps were not to be reused, because they would cause bugs. What do I find in Code Review #2? More reuse of HashMaps, with "final" applied to all of them. Final does not magically turn pass-by-reference into pass-by-value. (The fact that this obviously did not fix the bugs and would have been caught by ANY testing of the code is another matter. We get that a lot.)
When I ask our engineers what they wanted to accomplish in terms of professional growth in their time in Japan, the answer was unanimous: study for certs, which they all already had several of. I'm not necessarily hostile to certs in theory, but I'm sure starting to cool to them in practice.
As for teaching "tools": I won't be too harsh on India because American universities fail at it, too, but if they're teaching fundamentals of source control or IDEs I have yet to see any evidence of it. We have been trying to change a corporate culture at our Indian partners away from having one "source control master" per twenty engineers. They're the only ones permitted to commit -- everyone else mails their code to the source control master, who integrates it. This is to "stop people from breaking the build".
Our Indian colleagues have their own requests for us. For example, they would prefer not to use source control, "since it adds overhead to our management processes".
I freely admit that I only have seen about three corporate cultures from over there and may just have terrible, terrible luck.
[Edited to add: Neither my company nor I are blameless for this state of affairs. Believe me, we have many, many areas we could improve upon collectively, and I have many, many individual weakpoints, including a longstanding cavalierness about how much testing needs to be done prior to shipping. I don't want it to sound just like I'm blaming our Indian colleagues.]
With regards to BCC, I have no intention of outsourcing any project which is not small, self-contained, and describable in a page or less. That means coding the program/website stays in-house. Or, hmm, in apartment kitchen as the case may be.
I am an Indian myself, and some time ago I wrote an article that tried to explain why the engineers in Indian outsourcing companies tend to be of low quality: http://www.diovo.com/2008/08/why-outsourcing-sucks/
The only thing I would like to add is that I think that this percieved difference between the US and Indian engineers is because of our view point itself, and not because of the lower quality of CS education in India as such. Outsourcing companies tend to recruit low quality engineers and so you find more of them there.
These outsourcing companies recruit in thousands each year. This means that they don't give a ____ about quality.
The US counterparts recruit good engineers.
If you want to really compare the quality of US and Indian engineers, compare the quality of them in the startups.
grep -o /ab+/ would only show "ab" from "abc"
iirc, /ab(?![^b]+)/ would match "abb" but not "abc"
I find it interesting that this understanding corresponds to the immutable data types used in functional programming languages. In Clojure, for example, a function that appears to alter a map actually creates a new map that shares some of its values with the old one.
There is this notion that the ideas of functional programming are more advanced, or harder to understand than paradigms like OO with mutable data. But in this case the intuition of a naive programmer more closely follows the immutable functional paradigm.
Of course, it is just as likely that this same programmer will expect the same data structure to be mutated in other scenarios, and ascribing a consistent model to his understanding of the code is an invalid assumption.
The funny thing is, I actually found the Indian outsourcing teams I worked with nearly unusable as well. It may have to do with culture.
I gave broad, general guidance about what we needed to do (store the millions of variables in a non-linear program in memory in an efficient data structure), and I got back code that used arrays. It's just one single example, of course, but a result like that is enough to want to dismiss the entire team and start over.
But you know, I doubt Americans are producing all that many programmers who can do this either.
In my opinion, this article and his views do not deserve too much attention. But it scares me how top management of some of these so called 'software development' firms trends to drift away from reality, and just start equating developing software to having an assembly line like process.
I'm sorry my education didn't prepare me to be a dumb ass robot. Oh wait, no, I'm not.
And enjoying my intellectually satisfiying job.
Ok, if it's true that these people lack initiative, but are very good at following directions, then can one game the system to get essentially a parallel processor made out of humans?
This would require the Indian outsourcing firms to be programmable. I.e. what's the overhead in uploading your own custom process / methodology, and training people on it? Do the benefits of scale outweigh the "re-tooling" time?
The BCS (British Computer Society, whose President I met in 2003), sets targets for University CS degrees in the UK. "BCS accredited".
We are a self-selecting group of programmers who put a high degree of emphasis on bettering our skills and learning, and innovating. I would imagine that we all subscribe to the notion that a good developer can provide a value multiples higher than that of the typical "code monkey." I don't know if we'd all agree on the specific factor, but it's clearly greater than two.
I got lucky and managed to find a very competent mentor. It's turned my world upside down, but I've managed to see the light. That's why I'm in this community. I work for a startup, etc.
But how do you create value? What matters? This CEO clearly thinks that the way to create value is to hamper the free-flowing development processes that can truly yield great results given a good team. Instead of that he emphasizes top-down highly controlled development. To him developers are cogs in a machine.
But honestly, if you have a product that isn't meant to be revolutionary, and you work in a well-defined field, then maybe this isn't such a terrible approach? Hypothetically speaking, with a few people on the top who know what needs to be done, and a very rigid lower structure, then it could clearly work. And by "work" I mean create revenue and satisfy customers.
Now think back to your CS education (if you had one). In the US, a CS education attracts a lot of folks who aren't interested in the inventive, exploratory, creative method of programming. They learn Java (and only Java) because that's what's popular. They don't spend much time thinking about bettering their skills and the do what they are told. This is probably the vast majority of programmers, I would imagine.
Now a lot of you guys out there probably attended more of the elite universities where you are exposed to this competitive / creative atmosphere. Or maybe you got that elsewhere, it doesn't really matter. But if you went to a lesser school, you'd see that the majority of the CS grads really aren't that different than code monkeys. They hate the theory classes because they don't expect to use it. And if they don't see the point in theory, then they won't use it. There are a few that will "get it" and they will excel in what they do. Because they are passionate.
So why would you hire an American code monkey who costs five times as much as an Indian? I can't see the value either.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I feel that we also see so many stories of unemployable software engineers in the US. Knowing Java inside and out is a valuable skill, no doubt, but it isn't something all that creative.
Now, back to reality here. The guy's main complaint is that Americans expect to get rich. Now at this point, I can't say that I agree. I don't know if your typical American "code monkey" is after that result. But I think that those of us who love what we do can justify higher pay, because we are more likely to generate much more revenue per body than the average code monkey. It's just that his management structure has no way to take advantage of greater talent.
But that can be difficult.
Yeah, downmod but, I'm performing a service so y'all know; better some anonymous person on the internet than someone to your face or, that you don't know altogether.
India is a factory, nothing more. In this context this clown is right. No US Grad is employable as a mindless drone code monkey. We train our Grads to think on their feet, question the status quo, innovate and create. 1 Billion Indians and you will you will NEVER find one of those.