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 live in an upscale neighborhood here in Frisco (Dallas suburb), and everybody here is Indian.
Now they can use ChatGPT, so it's going to get even worse.
I have found most “engineers” of Indian descent are not logical/linear thinkers. If it falls outside their level of expertise, they become paralyzed and grasp for easy solutions.
My experience with them is that they don’t understand things at a root level. They don’t understand the basic theory of operation of IGBT’s, Op Amps, and comparator circuits. They tend to be barely familiar with Pulse Width Modulation. Certainly, incapable with RF systems.
Their software skills are usually Windows based, and are not close to understanding Linux Compute Stack processing over multiple systems using iLo or similar. Their programming code tends to be inelegant and poorly commented or documented.
I’m not big on Indian food. I like Thai food.
I mainly eat Paleo style.
Neither can engineer their way out of a paper bag.
Agree on Thai food. Throw in Italian, Cantonese and Southern food. I basically eat whatever the wife puts in front of me 😋
Even if American educated most of the Indian engineers I’ve worked with are lazy. They do not understand basics. The team suffers and no one wants to work with or for them
The entire kitchen and building
They write crap code and if they didn’t control the recruiting process there’d be very few of them.
Most are inept, but its largely due to poor communication
I have little actual work interaction with them due to their clannish nature. My interactions were largely in schooling, then also talking to people in my work that directly work with them.
I purposely went into power since it’s almost completely white males. I hate HR and their training.
Pretty near everyone I interact with is mostly conservative and the opposite of woke.
You’re retired, correct?
What specific field did you work in?
My Indian sil is an international teacher, hint, she has no degree
You get it!!
... and they don’t understand the business or users’ needs for the software so they try to pass off something that that think it should do and then think there’s something wrong with the users if they don’t accept it.
Some of it’s ok, love mo mo’s
Lots of it sucks
Whoever works for us needs to be on time, especially if you’re a college student doing intern work. As a student, three strikes being late or no-show with no notice and you’re fired. You would think that internships that paid 30% above the going rate even before COVID would have attracted more responsible students - nope. We have fired multiple students for blowing off work. Not one has been an international student. The international students on average have a better work ethic and better work quality. Have a really good native-born intern right now who I would not hesitate to hire full time.
What is a mo mo?
From what I’ve seen from good guys hacking scam call centers....I have to agree.
Yeah. Especially touchy about their cricket matches.
We had Tikka Masada for dinner this evening....with Naan.
Some of it is delish.
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