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.
I hate sweet-sour, too. Gross.
I can’t even recall the last time I had good Chinese food. Certainly not here in TN.
I agree. You get 4x the problems and in the end it costs less to hire the westerner.
Typical ignoramuses and Racists tend to generalize and turn it into a stereotypes.
India is a complex society. You will find enough extremes and contradictions to over-generate and validate opinion of every shade and perspective. Anything you say about India is true and also a lie, and you will get ample proof of it to cite it. You will find whatever you are looking for - good, bad or ugly. Thats why most narratives do not prevail nor endure.
Generalizations happen because they are generalization. There are always exceptions to any generalization but that doesn’t mean a generalization isn’t true.
Worked in IT for nearly 30 years now… and I have been exposed to countless Indian software engineers in that time.
In those 30 years the generalization that they are not on par with other places is true, in my experience. I have met and worked with exceptional Indians and I have worked with a lot more who prove most of their universities and schools are little more than paper mills.
I would also say that in general things have improved in the overall quality of software engineers in the last decade vs the previous 2.
But, they still need to be vetted, as IIT flunkies DO slip through!
When you teach “canned answers” instead of how to troubleshoot and solve a problem, the graduates of your program can pass tests but not correct real world issues.
Also, there is a culture of “not my job”.
Exactly! We were a much, much wealthier country under Capitalism. A 6th grade education in 1910 provided the tools with which to succeed in life.
Excellent. I'm a big fan of a great engineer who can do all of the above before most folks even get out of bed.
Could you just imagine how much he can do and fix just on general principle?
People ought to learn from the example, because then there goes the whole dysfunctional establishment business model in one hideous, raging inferno.
Like those warnings that went out about Pele's hair.
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Worked with a bunch of Indians at my very last place of employment.
I was on vacation and a change was made to a common routine that affected every program that called it.
The “testers” (who were engineers), rather than writing 1 bug...they wrote up 1600+ bugs and patted themselves on the back for all the bugs they found.
The sad thing is, nobody questioned them til I got back.
While working at Univ of Texas at Austin I learned never to ride the elevator with people from India. Seriously. The odor was unbearable.
I work in tech (and have worked for some of the biggest tech companies for 25 years). Here’s my perspective. The article makes a lot of accurate points. India produces a lot of engineers, but …
1. Their resumes are typically bullshit. “Fake it until you make it” is the norm, not the exception. My wife (also a long term engineering director) told me that an Indian guy had applied for a position as a group manager on her team and given my name as a reference. The Indian guy wasn’t aware that he was applying to my wife. The Indian guy was a low-level programmer. He wasn’t qualified to be a director, and his resume was full of falsehoods.
2. You have to do tech screens before you waste everyones’ time and bring someone in for an interview, because there’s a high likelihood that the interviewee is incompetent. Asking unique programming questions to probe their knowledge will help you discover this fact quickly.
3. Outsourcing IT to India used to be very commonplace but the trend has slowed. You used to be able to get 4 headcount in India for the cost of a single US headcount. That number has shrunk, as Indian consultancies boosted their rates. When you add other factors (very high attrition, difficulty of collaboration due to timezones, language issues, unevenness of employee competence), it makes offshoring less attractive. Indians job-hop constantly in order to climb the ladder. Many of them told me they prefer a title change to a salary increase. Social prominence is most important to them.
4. It’s expensive to bring a H1B Indian programmer to the US, and you have to pay them competitively. So much easier to get a kid straight out of college or an industry hire.
5. There are so many resumes coming from India that look exactly the same. Small scale projects using cookie cutter technologies that don’t distinguish themselves in any way. Finding the needle in that haystack is damned near impossible so many employers don’t even try.
6. There’s nothing particularly creative or innovative coming from Indian (or Chinese) programmers. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Where is the Google or Microsoft or Amazon company-equivalent in India? It doesn’t exist because their ethic is largely about aping things that others have already done. Western programmers tend to be rebels, non-traditional thinkers — and these sorts of folks are the ones that feed technical inflection points. Not the copycats.
All that matters is price.
My experience with Indian IT professionals was that many seemed to have circular type thinking and difficulty coming to (focusing on) the point. I surmised that some of this had to do with English not being their first language, which dictated their need for time to translate/toggle conversation in their mind between Hindi and English.
I am disgusted and angry at our government robbing Americans (our kids and grandkids) from good paying professional jobs, which are taken by H1B1 foreigners.
The republican form of government envisioned by our Founders no longer exists. Sadly, the corrupt and lunatic now govern us. For the sake of my/our kids, I will continue to pray for a return to Christian morality and our Constitution.
I worked with a young Indian Engineer who was not an IT engineer, but instead, a civil engineer. I found him to be a conservative Hindu, honest and hard working and very able to master new technical systems and methods in construction within days of exposure. As smart as any youngster I worked with in that era.
He realized the US might not let him fully become a citizen so he switched to our Canadian office. After a couple of more years he had married by a family arranged marriage and decided to go back to India and augment his fathers engineering group.
Likewise I worked with a middle aged Indian of similar background who, although pleasant to his coworkers, was a cut throat businessman interested only in his own ability to maximize his own income — ethics, coworkers and customers be damned. (Had a wardrobe of the most luxurious business attire custom made from his trips home every two years that you can envision — here they were $3,000 suits and $200 shirts)
They’ve met the terms of the Service Level Agreement, of course.
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