Posted on 12/31/2022 6:27:03 PM PST by nwrep
In a country like India, we are highly driven by herd mentality. Whenever we see some success in a particular career, we tend to get attracted in masses towards it. Engineering is one such profession. India produces about 150,000 engineers per year, and very few of them eventually get engineering-related jobs.
According to an Employability Survey done in 2019, 80% of Indian engineers are not fit for jobs.
In the early 1990s, India was going through liberalization that lead to a boom in manufacturing. This created a lot of new jobs and engineering as a career became popular. We then saw a sudden rise in engineering institutes all over India. Backed with heavy marketing and PR, engineering became an ideal career in the minds of every Indian parent for their children. During this time there was a sudden spurt of engineering institutes, but many of these institutes struggled to get quality of teaching staff and infrastructure.
Engineers also became an ideal hiring choice for companies like Infosys, TCS, HCL, Satyam (now Tech Mahindra) etc., which started providing training to tens of thousands of engineering graduates and started placing them overseas for contract IT service job opportunities. This was very lucrative for students as they got to travel overseas and earn a fat USD salary compared to their peers, and this helped these IT companies grow exponentially during the mid-1990s. It became a win-win situation for students, engineering institutes and IT service companies.
However, this didn’t last long, as by the mid-2000s engineering institutes were producing engineers in millions, and engineering degree became just an entry ticket for getting into an IT services company. Soon everybody took up engineering for the sake of it, with an IT career in mind as their objective. Engineering fields like mechanical, electrical, civil etc. thus lost their relevance, as a job in one of these fields in India would pay way less compared to an IT job.
Key factors that led to the downfall in producing quality engineers in India, which eventually made them unemployable across all specializations:
Push by Indian parents for their kids to take up an engineering course, without considering their interest towards it.
Due to mass rise of engineering institutes, teaching staff quality suffered. Thus with lack of engaging lessons and updated curriculum, they were not able to awaken the interest of students toward engineering.
Rahul Ahuja, an IT engineer + MBA with over 15 years of experience in Telecom, Content and Telematics discusses why Indian engineers are not employable.
“Engineering no longer remains the best of career choices,” he says. “The problem lies not only with the sheer number of engineers the country has produced over the last 20 years, and that the demand vs supply equation is working against this profession, but also because the curriculum of engineering courses has not changed at the level the industry has changed. Industry today demands techno-functional and technical leaders, who can be flexible to learn new technologies quickly.”
Even in the field of IT Engineering, India struggles to produce good quality engineers. Another one of the reasons pointed out by Rahul Ahuja is that most IT engineers tend to build their skill sets in easy IT skills and tend to shy away from complex technologies and difficult skills. This leads to high competition for IT jobs with simpler skill requirements, thus rendering a lot of IT engineers unemployable for jobs that require higher IT skills and complex technologies.
Main Reasons why Indian Engineers are not Employable Deepak Raj Ahuja, mechanical engineer with 45+ years of experience in the steel & heavy engineering industry, sheds some light on the matter.
Why indian engineers are not innovative
There are too many engineering colleges in India that are failing to produce high-quality engineers. According to him, here are a few main reasons why Indian engineers are unemployable:
1.The engineering education does not focus on developing skill-sets that are in accordance with industry demand.
2. Engineering colleges are run like a business, instead of like an institution, wherein the top management has little incentive to train engineers for jobs.
3.The founders and Executive Directors or key decision makers in most engineering colleges are often non-engineers, who don’t really understand the changing industry and its skill requirements.
4.Most engineering colleges are located in faraway places, at a large distance from industrial area. This along with the classroom-based curriculum limits students’ industry visits. So they get little to no exposure of the actual industry practices.
5.The engineering curriculum prepares students to become officers and managers, not workers. In reality, newly employed engineers belong on the shop floor, not in offices. It is with a lot of experience that they are promoted to become officers. However, as mentioned before, the colleges’ curriculum is fully classroom-oriented, and fails to mentally or physically prepare engineering students to be on the shop floor.
“so they try to pass off something...”
My work life has been little worlds of hell for ten years, because I’m forced to use IT tools for US needs which were “designed” by Germans/Swiss and coded by Infosys programmers of the type you described. Systems modelled after Swiss ways of working from the 1980s. Could not be farther from what my team needs to meet US requirements and demand.
Experiencing a bug in the application that is stopping your work? It’s going to take a $ervice ticket, lengthy email explaining the issue, then a 1 hour waste-of-time live-chat with the offshore support tech (who can never solve the issue, but must investigate further), followed by weeks of delays and non-fix “solutions.”
They have weeks to drag their feet, but heaven help you if you fail to quickly respond to their “gentle reminder” emails to waste 2 hours testing the latest non-fix (”Hey pal, I couldn’t answer because I’ve been up to my eyes in extra work due to what you broke.”) They’ll close the $ervice ticket, collect their fee, and insist you open another.
Want to make a change to the system? Get ready to spend $20k and the next 6 months of your career getting them to understand a simple storyboard.
Costco food. Everything at Costco is just a little bit crappy. I can’t stand Indian food. Every time I have eaten in an Indian restaurant it was bland and flavorless. They don’t have beef or pork and I am tired as hell of chicken. Naan is just Flour and water and a little bit of salt. Bleccchhh.
Back when I was in that business I ran into a few instances where they put a “senior” Indian engineer on a hardware troubleshooting problem, and the Indian engineer “solved” it by breaking something else, announcing that they’d found the broken thing that they broke themselves, and had a technician fix it, then they announced that they had solved the problem. Except the problem was still there.
In each case the guy who had been given “help” in the form of these Indian geniuses later found and solved the problem himself, after the “help” had left.
Computer programming does not equal “engineering.” Computer programming is computer programming. India churned programmers out by the millions. The real engineers (mechanical, electrical, structural, material, aeronautic) I have worked with from India were top notch.
There was a joint venture spin off with an Israeli company, and he retired as part of the reorganization.
[There was a joint venture spin off with an Israeli company, and he retired as part of the reorganization.]
The Indian Engineers - electronic design - that I’ve worked with are a mixed lot - a few good, a ton bad - but are absolutely guaranteed to only hire other Indian Engineers.
😁
What's amazing about this story is that it is THE quintessential American story prior to the 1980’s. My Russian immigrant grandfather graduated 6th grade, then had to go to work. His first real job was at Edison Labs working on radios. They had backyard transistor radio kits in the 1910’s. Self-taught. He became factory supervisor for RCA building the first televisions prior to the crash in 1929. He said the college boys sent plans down to the factory where he stayed up all night making them work! Does this sound familiar?
I work with immigrants and younger people who haven't a CLUE what kind of world we grew up in. If I tell these stories, they just stare as if it's an impossible Utopian dream.
We're so fortunate to have lived in freedom, even for awhile.
Their Indian led HRs hire only dot Indians.
And the biggies have far to fall. Watched biggies from the 80s and 90s make multiple multimillion dollars blunders while on the top of their game...supposedly.
And they ain’t biggies anymore.
They have no knowledge of established industry standards and why they were put in place to start with.
This is exactly the point the article makes.
In IT no sense of urgency and try to bypass the change control process. Your whole company could be burning down and they’ll cut out for lunch.
My hospital is full of them. Their jabbering drives me nuts sometimes.
Happy New Year to you dfwgator.
There was a time when you could start at the bottom and work your way up. I started working in a CRT factory at 18. Went to college in my off hours and moved up quickly because I had a work ethic, ability, and most importantly... a pathway. The company promoted from within, encouraged growth and offered many learning opportunities that were free. Few took advantage, but for those of us who did, the world was our oyster.
It was a different world. My children simply can’t comprehend the liberty and real freedom we had.
Indian food is too hot, too smelly; Chinese food is filed with mystery meats - likely from local pets.
There's a whole bunch of them writing plugins for WordPress but those plugins usually tend to slow your website down due to the code quality not being great.
What occurred with Indians in tech is now well underway in the financial sector, with the same results; just because you can hire four for the price of one Westerner doesn’t mean you’ll get the same or better product...
They seem to be quite good at running phone scams, though.
I have’nt found any good chinese food in 30 years, most noticable is the sauce, not thickened anymore just water with that horrid sweet and sour like flavor that i’ve always hated.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.