Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

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HCL (like Infosys, TCS Wipro etc) is a body shopper firm and has nothing much to do with "Computer Science" or the cool things you mention (multidimensional interval trees, POMDP etc). Mr Nayar is just saying that he thinks American Graduates don't have the kind of crap enterprise buzzword "skills" that he can sell to clueless managers at x $/hr. Mr Nayar and his firm wouldn't know what to do with someone who is really good at Computer Science or Math, because those are not the "markets" he addresses. I would imagine an American grad student would be happy to be unemployable (by Mr Nayar).

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)

Very true. Obviously very less opportunity exists in India for the kind of stuff (you mention)that requires engineering bent of mind.

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"

well said plinkplonk ! As an indian techie myself i have to second with you.

techie? what exactly are your skills, may I ask?

I agree. I have worked in Infosys after my graduation for 1.8 years before I quit and started my own firm. All these organisations are big thing in India, but what they do is nothing more than run big sweat-shops. Its unfortunate to see huge number of talented young Indians getting sucked into these firms. After 4 to 5 years working here, and they are useless to work anywhere else.

Indian , about to graduate in july , looking for some interesting engineering work [sorry for the plug, but as you mentioned Indian CS scene is non existent] related to algorithms , computer languages etc , pointers would be helpful...

pointers would be helpful

Only if you're building a linked list using C. </bad CS joke>

Seriously though, how about a link to your profile/resume?

http://www.scribd.com/share/upload/12956598/2l0290iidwvttefi... I hope this is useful , let me know if you require any thing else

I feel amazed that you wrote a PDP-11 assembler. How did you verify your code? Did you have a real PDP-11 machine or you tested it on an emulator?

P.S. I know someone who still has a PDP-11 in his summer house and it is functioning....

I don't mean to distract from the thread and discussion...

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 not an elite hacker. But the guy who told me this also impressed me. I used VAX-11 when I was in college 23 years ago. So I was equally amazed at that he keeps one for himself (employee discount from DEC, I guess) and he has a VT 320 to it.

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.

pdp 11 emulators work extremely well. simh is one, supnik-11 is another. Here's a good guide on getting 2.11 BSD running on SIMH:

http://vak.ru/doku.php/proj/pdp11/211bsd

(AT&T UNIX, RSX/11M, RSTS, RT11 and other images are also widely available)

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