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.
You nailed it. A dangerous combination of bad technical and bad communication skills.
I know so many white guys who used to work in IT but now won't go near it any price. It's a spiraling mess and no one wants to clean it up.
I regularly see failures from IT staff who are completely unaware that the problems they're causing were resolved back in the 1990s. They have no knowledge of established industry standards and why they were put in place to start with.
A meat filled dumpling in soup served with spicy dipping sauce
Bingo
This is exactly the point the article makes.
Baby shit over rice
LOL. You win the thread.
Masala
The “Bobs” in our IT department are beyond useless. I am their enemy as there were a couple of projects they were working on for years for millions of dollars that I needed right now on the factory floor and had a demonstration running over a weekend, and within a couple of months had running nation wide for a tiny fraction of the cost without any freakin meetings. At the beginning, there were many instances where during a remote call in a meeting with a plant manager, the “Bobs” were giving their usual spiel about one year and x hundred thousand dollars, and then the plant manager would ask what I thought at which time I would announce that I had configured it while the meeting was happening and they could start using it immediately. Our engineering group just does it now if it is remotely touching the factory process.
Was it on a mountain top? Tikka masala.
Not only the software engineers.
During the 90’s a major jet engine manufacturer hired an Indian PHD to be the manufacturing development group manager. He thought that just because he approved or directed something, that made it so. He quickly had his yes man army and wouldn’t hear contrary reports. The guys running the machines came into my office, complaining about a material batch that we were using to make experimental blades. I took their concerns to the engineering meeting. He basically said ‘ what do machine operators know?. I checked out the material, wrote it up, and he told me to keep my nose out of development business. ( He was my bosses boss). I went to the Plant Financial officers office, and told him I needed to speak to him as the ombudsman, because I could see a test stand, a development engine, and our plant taking damage over this bad material. Then I bent the 3/8 thick titanium forging over my knee. After the investigation was over, it turns out our PHD had signed off and skipped a heat treat operation in the routing. The plant manager basically gave me a project position so i could help the floor develop new processes. Because the Indian wanted me fired for going over his head. The best indian Food is a style called Hakka... It’s basically chinese with indian spices.
I’ve never run into a competent engineer from the Subcontinent.
I also forward every single request from an Indian recruiter to the bit-bucket, unread....
Haha! Autocorrect. 😆
I’m glad it worked out well for you. I think the attitude is derived from the caste system, but I’m not sure.
Graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology , IIT’s, (a small minority) are top notch. These are the top tier talent of Silicon Valley. Eg Amit Singhal, who wrote the modern version of Google search before it got corrupted by politics. There are others who have founded unicorn companies ( Bipul Sinha of Rubrik, Jyoti Bansal (AppDynamics) etc..and many others. The bulk of the H1B imports range from mediocre to garbage and plenty are downright fraudsters.
Over the 20 or so years that I have dealt with Indian engineers, programmers and IT contractors, I must have been very lucky. I don’t recall one that was incompetent. Some were better than others, but all were at least useful.
Granted we did go through an outsourcing process where many IT functions were “offshored”, and that did create a loss of service quality, IMHO, but I can’t really blame the people on the Indian side for that. That was our management that tried to turn the work process into a hands off “paint by numbers” system and destroyed personal relationships.
I have known many IIT grads. Maybe I was lucky. Yes they tend to be excellent.
They all knew exactly how much everyone else made, even though the tradition in corporate culture is for no one to share his/her salary with anyone else.
They were very bad at collecting requirements, and they adhered to what requirements they gathered with an obstinance that was astounding. If the requirement was to test that a number was greater than X, even if it was obvious that the customer meant greater than or equal, they would code greater than, generate errors, and require the agreement of a superior to change the code.
I knew it was the beginning of the end for that start up when this happened.
I can never understand a word they say. Even though they are supposed to be speaking English.
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.