Why IT Happened in Southern India, an Unorthodox Explanation | Hacker News Reader

Why IT Happened in Southern India, an Unorthodox Explanation

blogs.zoho.com

34 pointsraghus16 comments

As an Indian person with the same background as the author, I think this is only "unorthodox" in the sense that most Americans might not be aware of it. In India, this is the commonly accepted explanation. I'm glad someone wrote it up.

"The government getting the hell out of the way" has in fact been responsible for all of the progress that India has made in the last two decades, starting with the economic liberalization of 1991 precipitated by an IMF bailout of the country's economy, marking the end of a sorry period of socialism (1947-91). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Indi...

In the late 90s, the telecommunications sector was deregulated somewhat, and this accelerated in the early 2000s. As you probably know, this led to an explosive growth in cellphone penetration, which benefited the economy greatly and had a very significant effect on alleviating poverty. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_06/b3769124.... http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_39/b4051058....

IMO, India is a textbook example of the ills of regulation, protectionism and resistance to globalization. It is sad that the lessons are not being learnt (by other developing countries).

I share your sentiments. One nasty side effect of this is the drastic decline in the quality of engineers graduating out every year.

Is there any commonly accepted reason for this? I would've thought it would have been the exact opposite, something along the lines of:

As engineering graduates with more money and insider knowledge send their children to engineering schools, this large marketplace of private schools have to provide more value since the parents are now more likely to have the tools to spot value. I'm sure there'll still be lots of mediocre schools but wouldn't the better ones be getting very good very fast?

I diagree with your claim.

If you have a situation where the number of engineers is doubling every few years, it is no surprise that the average quality would decline; it will start going up when the total output of engineers stabilizes again.

On the other hand, note that the state of Tamil Nadu used to produce only 2,000 engineers a year; if you look at the top 2,000 engineers graduating out of Tamil Nadu today, I'm sure you'll find that they kick ass compared to the past. I don't have data; but I think the onus is on you to produce evidence for your claim that the quality is declining every year :-)

er... it depends on what you and me define "quality" as :-). I base my claims of the following chronological series of events: 1. Sam Pitroda heads the Knowledge Commission and advises the govt to increase the number of institutions and universities in the country to increase the % of people pursuing higher education. 2. There is a mad rush and suddenly a lot of deemed universities. In Tamil Nadu, its big business. 3. step #2 implies lot more engineers. The eligibility and criteria for engineering relaxes gradually. It stood at 60 when I passed out of school(2002). Now its 45! 4. Supply exceeds demand(by a huge margin). 5. one fine day, govt wakes up. Yashpal committee submits report to govt on ensuring the quality of deemed universities.(happened last month) 6. govt yet to take action based on the report.

Badri, I have a more radical argument: quality of education is irrelevant for the most part. Ultimately the real task of education (i.e imparting knowledge) is borne by the employer or done as a by-product (sometimes an accidental by-product) of a job. What the system achieved was a little bit of IQ filtering, a whole lot of placebo ("building confidence"), and an employer willing to offer a job to these graduates because they were "qualified". What most employers didn't realize was that most candidates became qualified because they were placed on a job!

If what I say above is true, we could dispense with the college and deliver the placebo faster and cheaper. Based on that premise, we performed the experiment at Zoho: we recruit directly out of high schools, and train people ourselves. I am happy to report that it works - which lends more evidence to the college-as-placebo hypothesis.

but the problem is, majority of the organizations in India evaluate a student only by the degree/institute tag. I hope the Zoho experiment is tried in all other companies as well.

I do agree with you but there may be an unwanted consequence of this. (Please forgive me if what I'm going to say is completely clueless. I know next to nothing about India)

There is this widely reported emphasis of process and quality assurance methods in indian offshoring companies. To my ears this sounds incredibly bureaucratic and unnecessesary when you work with competent people.

Could it be that this overly convoluted QA process is required simply because individual engineers are not educated well enough, or rather because they never had the time to experiment for themselves, deepen their knowledge and develop their own interests and creativity?

Or is this a perception problem created by the big indian IT companies who see that whole QA methodology stuff as a way to appear reliable in the eyes of western executives?

Two main reasons for this, as I see it (having worked in a such a setting for about a year before getting the hell out):

1 (internal reason). Large Indian offshoring companies (TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL et al) have a HUGE workforce, and recruit fresh engineering under-grads in massive numbers. All the bureaucracy becomes somewhat necessary in order to manage undertakings of such magnitude

2 (external reason). Work-quality-wise, there isn't much difference between contracting work out to a TCS vs Infosys vs Wipro vs whatever else - hence this immense pressure on such companies to cultivate and tout such aspects about themselves. And let's face it, when you're farming out grunt work to code-monkeys, you kind of expect a 'monkey see, monkey do' attitude..

"To my ears this sounds incredibly bureaucratic and unnecessary when you work with competent people"

Here is my explanation based on my observations.

- The mass expansion of IT in India, particularly in its second decade (late 90's to the present) was the result of the series of credit bubbles in US. Similar to China's manufacturing export bubble. Without the US bubble, the expansion would have happened, but not in the reckless, pell-mell fashion it happened.

- As a result, Indian IT companies hired fresh-out-of-college people in massive, really massive numbers - 25,000 people a year in each of the big 4 companies. Private colleges expanded massively to meet that demand. The analogy is to the US housing expansion (ultimately both were caused by the credit bubble).

- Competence arises for a good part from experience. To visualize this, do a thought experiment: how would your team look if you substitute every team member with the same person but as they were starting out fresh. A good part of competence is simply knowing the skill & aptitude make-up of every team member. When everyone is fresh, that vital knowledge is absent.

- So the Indian industry came up with a "solution" so fresh recruits don't cause too much damage: create rules and procedures for everything. Bureaucratize. Alas, that "solution" imposes a long term toll on culture of the company.

It is also a testament to the benefits of federalism. The southern states are by far the ones that have exercised any autonomy at all (by instituting very different policies that those endorsed by the central governments). The regionalism of the south has often been made fun of, but it may not be the problem, but in fact, the solution.

Entirely different explanation:

1. India sets up the first few research organizations in Bangalore. - IISc, DRDO, HAL - decision being entirely strategic to keep them away from Pak. nukes.

2. Some engineers think too much on the long lunches afforded by most govt. sector instituitions and see an opportunity in exporting software. One of these guys is narayan murthy.

3. Infosys is born and soon Patni, TCS and Wipro - each drawing from talent pool of DRDO, IISc and HAL. Obviously most start in Bangalore.

4. Engineers from across the country flock to these new high paying jobs. Some again extend their lunches too long.

Sounds like about how Silicon Valley came to be what it is today. Government funded r&d.

You must be joking right? Without private engineering colleges there would not have been enough engineers for all these companies to operate. That is the point of the article. There were always enough people graduating/working who could form a nucleus of a company, but not enough people to grow it

Typically engineers gravitate to the point of work. Its only the initial germination which matters.

There are more engineers in Bangalore from outside, than locals. Probably same is true for silicon valley.

Factually completely incorrect.

1. IISc was setup by Tatas, a private company, not by Indian Govt. Also IISc, then called Tata Institute of Science was established long before (around 50 years) British left India; nobody at that time had any clue that there was going to be Pakistan forked out of India, much less that it's going to have nukes.

2. Narayan Murthy didn't work in any of the organizations (IISc, DRDO, HAL) that you have mentioned. In fact he hadn't worked in Bangalore before Infosys was setup.

3. Patni, and TCS were there long before Infosys was founded. Narayan Murthy was working in Patni when he decided to start Infosys.

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