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’d probably agree with you. I have my own caste system. The guys running the machines actually generate revenue by adding value. Everything else is overhead. Actually my grandfather who ran a shipyard in WW2 taught me the rules of economics. You create wealth by growing food, mining minerals, or making product. New ideas are a separate form of wealth, but a transitory way. ( exceptions the wheel, fire, and the alphabet, which let’s you inventory ideas.)
Sounds like your grandfather was wise.
Excellent article. True. “Push by Indian parents for their kids to take up an engineering course.” And some Asian parents push their kids to get dental degrees. Bottom line: The Indian heritage of caste and backwardness leads to sinking Fed Ex, crashing bridges, and no major auto manufacturers in India. Even Buddha tried to get rid of the caste system and failed.
I liked Chicago’s Indian restaurants as well. I would attend IMTS at McCormick regularly during the 80,s 90,s and 00,s. Toronto has great Indian Food as well. Try Haakaa style if you run across it.
At the last company I was at they replaced the 4 positions above our manager within 2 years with people from India.
They proceeded to fire a lot of people and replace them with 3rd party companies and rename existing depts, brought in new software that was confusing for all to use but had better reporting I guess. Hired Help Desk Chat support based in India only to drop them after 1 year and go with support in Poland....
They shuffled things around.
I do not think anything was improved.
I've seen the lack of practical education or real world experience by many (most) Indian and Pakistani engineers (civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical). In the US, these types are especially prevalent in detailed engineering. In DE, they can be shunted into a cubby doing one narrow thing where it is simply 1,2,3 repeat day after year. No way in hell do you want any of this skill set anywhere near conceptual design, production or field support work.
Canada in particular is overrun with Chinese engineers in DE. It's not uncommon for these persons to be restricted to drafting kinds of roles where they can narrowly do what their told and nothing further. Even just functioning as drafters, way more revisions are needed to fix things that are less than correct.
My opinions…
Here’s a slightly different take on hiring Indian engineers... but it could be Indians in other vocation as well. And it’s not a good story.....
I hired a graduate engineer to do some aerodynamic work for my engineering company a few years ago. He has done ok... not great work but I like him, he is honest, good natured, he tries hard and has enough positive attributes that I’ve sort of taken him under my wing as I’d like him to be successful. However, would I hire him again knowing what I know now? Probably not.... and for a reason that is absolutely flabbergasting and has zero to do with technical skills.
About 3 years ago, my Indian employee went back to Indian for a lengthy vacation and got married while he was there. When I asked him about this after he returned, he said his wife had some schooling to finish off and then she would join him here. Weeks went by, then months and at some point I casually asked him how the plan was coming along to move his wife here. Not good... she has had him charged for spousal abuse, cruelty and harassment under something called Section 498a of the Indian Penal Code... she was looking for a divorce and wanted a 6 figure settlement (this from a guy who is only out of university a few years and has all kinds of student debts).
The whole thing was a scam from the get-go and I’m not just talking about the experience of my employee... the backstory on this was that Section 498a was written back in the mid-80s as the vehicle to get rid once and for all of the practices of dowries. Instead what it did was create a monster for women to abuse and to take the unsuspecting totally to the cleaners. Like all such laws which start off with some claims that it will provide protection and improve matters (in this case for women against dowry-related cruelties), it has become nothing but an easy tool for women to misuse it by filing false cases. It is so massive in scale, it has become an industry on to itself.....
One wouldn’t want to overstate this but Section 498a is going to destroy the country by this bomb that has destroyed marriage as an institution. Don’t get some idea that the case for my employee was just some isolated incident.... the havoc that this has caused across all of India is unbelievable. In the case of my employee, it basically tied him up for nearly 2 years, endless legal hearings, lawyers bills etc. I even started getting letters from his ‘wife’s lawyers’, and Indian police and court system etc. In the end, I stuck it out with him but it was so painful that I wouldn’t do it again.... and it would give me very serious pause for thought about hiring anyone that has anything to do with India. One day I asked my employee as to whether he even got to go on a honeymoon when he was in India to get married.... Nope he says... didn’t even have sex with his ‘wife’ once.
Here are a few random articles I found that discuss the issue of Section 498a.....
In my it career i have worked with indians. Had an indian bosses as well. I guess my experience is an outlier as i had good experience with them. Maybe things have changed since then.
[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. ]
[Here’s a slightly different take on hiring Indian engineers... but it could be Indians in other vocation as well. And it’s not a good story.....]
The way I have described it is if you want someone to make 1,000,000 widgets then an Indian is perfect. If you want someone to design a widget, get an American.
I see it as a culture thing. Multi-generation Americans have an independence and “make it work” built in to their upbringing. Very few other cultures have that as universal as we do.
Having said that, I have work with some excellent Indian developers. But it is a very rare one out of a hundred. For that matter, I have worked with some horrible American developers. Like “three time David” where it takes three installs of his code before it actually works. But it is much more rare here.
I would say younger (30ish) Russians are pretty good developers as a group. Maybe the same anarchy style of personal responsibility is the cause of that.
I live in a neighborhood that is largely Indian and Chinese. Being that this is northern New Jersey, the rudeness makes them fit right in. 😂
The USA should make everything in the USA. We need to stop all immigration for decades and put up high import tariffs. Or lose the country.
[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.]
https://h1bgrader.com/reports/sponsors/lca/2022
If Indian talent were obviously inferior, you’d think companies that embargoed this resource would have a competitive advantage and quickly overcome the big IT incumbents. And yet those incumbents continue to stand tall in sales and profits.
Remember trying to get parts from these idiots
They would read from a script and have no idea what to do
To get a replacement hard drive would have to tell them it was literally on fire - smoke flames shooting out real 3 alarm fire .........
Oh, I agree with you. We should work on being completely independent in everything. Energy. Other raw materials. Manufacturing. Medicine. Client support. Totally agree with you there.
But I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the cultural differences that make Indians poor developers.
They make worse managers and execs.
True. The FAANG companies and those like it are cost no bar companies. Their entry criteria is understandably very high. Google's hiring process is legendary in the industry. They could hire from anywhere in the world including from right here in the US of A. The fact they hire so many from India's elite insitutions - mainly the top 5 IIT's including sending their recruiters to India to hire their top graduating students, speaks highly of those institutes. I should add not all H1B's fall in that category. In fact the vast majority don't.
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