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.
Doesn’t keep the US from hiring them. They’re technically competent, but are utterly disdainful of getting their hands dirty. They get the idea that because they’re “professionals”, they don’t have to perform any physical labor whatsoever....and that includes leaving their desk to actually go out on a job site.
We had a good coder from Serbia. His only downside was that he knew that everyone else was “an idiot” and their code “sucked”.
I have worked with many Indian Engineers. Some are great. Most are useless. But they satisfy the corporate ‘diversity’ need. Extremely troublesome. Our large company would hire offshore Indian Engineers, praise them, pat ourselves on the back, and then do the work ourselves.
Mike Lee wants 10s of millions more Indians right here in America in your neighborhood!
Go to any Supply Chain Conference - 75% of WMS & TMS systems Engineers are from India
I can never understand a word they say. Even though they are supposed to be speaking English.
++++++++++++++++
Often when speaking amongst themselves, it sounds to me like a two-stroke motorcycle or chainsaw idling.
I’ve got some buddies that worked with a few Indian guys. Most of them had some basic blocks of code built, and if they couldn’t copy-paste them to get something working (and with almost no bug/error-testing for non-optimal user usage), they often had a buddy back in India or maybe here who would then mash some code together. No sense of security or best practices, what documentation they did do was terrible and sometimes not related to what the code actually did.
And castes were an issue - If the smartest Indian on the team happened to be from a lower caste than the other guys, he was completely ignored and just as useless as if he didn’t know anything.
I saw plenty of this in my industry - AV. One of our clients has some business partnerships with a couple Indian companies, basically mentoring them. End of year, they have their parties so we’re setting up remote streams between our big employee party here and theirs. We’ve got a complex video switcher system, a couple cameras/shaders, playback, PPT, records, and full audio setup as well. Both Indian companies basically had a laptop on a cart that we streamed to/from, I forget what software we used at the time. Way before Zoom started spying on everyone, probably before teams as well. Anyways, we’re just sitting around waiting, all our stuff is good to go. They have a team of folks in India and a couple guys with us, all trying to figure out why the audio wasn’t working or the video looked bad or this or that. It was ridiculous, needed one person on either end to set up, yet it took them almost an hour both times to get it running and looking half-decent.
Actually I’m still working for a few more (3-5) years.
I was an electronics design engineer for AN/SQQ-89 and then technical manager on AN/BSY2 program. Started out as a sub hunter from the surface, to sub hunter/killer under sea. Then Experimental Physicist at an Electron/Positron Collider and from there into medical equipment design management. Currently working as design engineering manager for high speed commercial printers.
I’ve worked with a lot of engineers. Some are very good, others are really bad, not much in the middle. The Rooskies have some really imaginative engineers who can take absolute rubbish and still make it work. Chinese tend to be not as visionary, and choose to make things more complicated than is necessary. Indians tend to be the “easy way” and not the most robust designs (i.e overload components with too wide tolerances [i.e 10% resistor vs 1%] ). I’ve worked with some outstanding Germán engineers, and other Germans who were weapons-grade stupid.
For the most part all of these things were VFW’s (Very few Women) All positions were mostly white (>80%), a few Slants (in order of capability... Jap, Korean, Chi) one or two Indians who were uniformly the weakest.
The Indian are clannish, but that is because they fear losing their status and being deported if they haven’t made the jump to green card holder.
That’s quite the amazing background.
You could probably write an interesting autobiography.
I grew up in the Bay Area, and I still get bugged when people refer to SF as “Frisco.”
This is a cultural thing. America, and some Eastern Bloc nations, produce “nerds” who are excellent at IT. The rest of the world produces techs who are more concerned with the title on their business cards, and with advancing into management as quickly as possible.
It’s not a skill problem, it’s an attitude problem that IMO stems from the fatalistic Hindu culture and extreme deference to authority drilled in by both that and British occupation.
I worked for a very brief time with a Indian [dot] woman S/W engineer.
She was very intelligent and got my legacy system enhanced to dance to my tune in very short order.
I was impressed.
No typical dragged out s/w coding / spec writing drama.
Totally EZ PZ.
We’ve long debated whether the better engineers were those who grew up working on their cars or grew up working on everything on their farm. Ultimately the best ones knew how to tell management to take a hike.
Ruh Roh!
That’s a solid finding.
While HR wins for stupidity, I’ve found young MBAs that can’t see past the current fiscal quarter are the most destructive entity I deal with.
My British colleague loved Indian food, so we often dined at Bombay Palace restaurant in downtown Chicago. They served tandoori chicken with freshly made naan with stuffed onions and chillies. We could not get enough of that restaurant. One time I asked him if he would like to try a vegetarian Indian restaurant. He said not really because he probably will not find anything to eat there. But finally, he agreed to try it.
To make a long story short, on the way out of the restaurant he says, I can see why Indians can live on vegetarian food. There were so many tasty dishes to pick from in that buffet.
I work with a slew of Indians and they STINK as developer and THRIVE on multi step NVA undocumented procedures to get the smallest thing done.
Dumber than a bag of hammers but cheap and put in a ton of free OT,
They have muddied up the ERP IT Consulting industry terribly.
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.