This article is clearly biased and (not to put down the original author) borders on hero worshiping of India and her engineers. Some glaringly partisan comments "liberating Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) from Pakistan’s colonialism", "India manage to fight (and win) two major wars just a couple of decades after independence", "slog through med-school, do a post-doc specialization, an internship, become an assistant, and finally 15 years later, in-debt, start your own medical practise.(sic)"<p>There are large number of problems with the engineering system in India (especially about the number of engineers and the quality of engineering education) and the author just sweeps them under the rug.<p>Poorly written.<p>Full disclosure: I am an Indian Engineer now studying in UC Berkeley. Almost a perfect fit to the model described (except that I didn't graduate from the IITs).
The moment I read excerpts from "surely you're joking mr feynman" about Brazil, I thought someone had done a major typo and put Brazil in place of India, because that is how students are taught here; sad part is that Mr Feynman was referring to Brazil of 70's and 80's (correct me if wrong) and I am referring to India of 2011. I assume that Brazil is doing much better now (?). The Indian education is more about serving (read ITES) than leading.<p>The article is indeed right but it misses few points. Given the fact that India is just 60+ years old, the dreams that Indians see is lot different from the ones being seen in west. People in India still struggle with the basic lifestyle, which includes a car, a house, broadband, smartphones, 3g, air-conditioning (yes I think all of these are part of basic lifestyle). You don't find furnished homes in India very often. Once you are in, you have to manage everything (bed, refrigerator, laundry and what not). When you are asked to survive in one of the hottest part of the world and you cannot afford an AC, doing work is nightmare. So for an Indian guy right out of college, there are a lot of questions unanswered. I don't think this is the case in west, is it? (I stayed in London for an year and everything was there right from the first day). So it's a little unreal to expect everyone to jump into doing a startup or becoming famous.<p>But yeah, above all the best part is that situation is changing very fast, lots and lots of Indians are taking the unconventional path, trying to make sure that future holds something good.
Hi HN. I'm the original author, and I certainly didn't expect this to show up on HN. Ill be the first to admit I would've liked a little bit more time to research, and this is my first article for somebody else. I'm an aspiring writer and I'm new to the big bad world of long-form journalism; so treat me nice :) Comments about the ugly parts of the writeup are obviously welcome !
In the past 15 years or so, there is an explosion of engineering schools and the number of graduates.
I've been part of the crowd that lamented the decrease in the quality of Indian engineering graduates.<p>When you look at it in a different way. Would you rather have more engineers than less?
I would go for more.<p>As an individual, having an engineering degree is better than having a degree in arts.
An engineering degree provides these guys with better employment options even if our notion of quality is shattered.<p>India is coming of age and the days when 'I studied roman history because I am passionate about it' are not far off.
As of now, livelihood trumps passion.
The service industry standards in India are quite bad, as I have had first hand experience of the sorry state of our development environment. I have thought about this for quite some time, and as others have pointed out there is a definite dearth of passion as the industry is filled with people who worry nothing more than their paychecks at the end of the month. It's quite hard to find motivation amongst such peers(Just to clarify, I'm not badmouth-ing anyone, just stating the fact)
At times it has often make me wonder at our consistent mediocre attitude. The top programming languages right now(Java, C++ etc) has had it's origins in the US and elsewhere, where the language authors have had put in painstaking efforts in creating libraries so as to make adoption of the language as easy as possible. The irony being since most of the hard work has already been done, the mediocre work gets outsourced for cheap labour.
Just my 2 paisa...
The one thing that the article overlooks is that engineering is still the safest way to get a healthy living standard in India. The salary paid by IT firms is exponentially higher than what middle class India has ever seen. Our culture taboos failure. People are worried about a child doing badly in 1st standard. This aversion to failure mixed with the IT boom has led to such a large number of engineers in India.
The article is trying to show causation from correlation, the reasons for the number of engineers in India have nothing to do with the Independence, Wars with Pakistan, ISRO, DRDO etc. A much better and plausible argument is Y2K, a strong domestic IT sector and herd mentality.
<i>The examination pattern fulfills their expectations – asking questions straight from the book which require no application-level knowledge at all.</i><p>It all fits together now. That's why so much code that is farmed out to India comes back looking in such sorry shape.
The existence of a well-backed military-industrial complex seems to have very little to go with the glut of engineers in India, let alone cross-border politics.<p>As a product of this system, the reason seems fairly straightforward to me. Its plain simple economics. On average, in India, engineering is the path of least resistance to a quality of life better than your parents. When I graduated about a decade ago, engineering was perceived as a stepping stone. Indeed, most of my classmates are not in engineering anymore (most of them weren't even interested in it), and, by all modern measures, quite successful. A 4-year engineering is seen as a foundation to bigger things, and that doesn't seem like such a bad thing at all. Its the generally accepted way of getting to the top of the pile, if you're not born into money, and so its not surprising its such a popular choice.<p>There seems to be a small sliver of anecdotal evidence that this may be changing, with people willing to follow their passions more, but the effects of this 'at scale' remains to be seen.<p>To folks with the bad-programmers-from-India experience, the fault is solely yours. You're looking for engineers from this system to do your job for the least money. You're going to get people who're great at selling themselves, not great hackers.
Here is an insightful take on this topic by Sridhar Vembu (Founder of Zoho an India based startup BTW)<p><a href="http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-it-happened-in-southern-india-an-unorthodox-explanation" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.zoho.com/general/why-it-happened-in-southern-in...</a><p>Although it focuses on only one region of India it provides more clues to answering "Why there are so many engineers in India?"
Its called the Internet and it allowed brains in one area with fewer rewards for brains to connect to another area where brains are well rewarded and to do the sort of work that can be done over a network.
Interesting. I was always under impression that Jawaharlal Nehru's reforms (pretty much socialism) were the key. His policies and reforms were key in establishing India education system.
Without him and his reforms there will be no path for better quality of life for many Indians.<p>How much of credit should be given to Jawaharlal Nehru's reforms?<p>I'm not Indian, so please excuse my ignorance.
I would like to know how to find the great engineers. So far have hired fantastic engineers in the former soviet union and in the Philippines, but have not had one good experience in India.<p>I believe that there are some phenomenally good engineers and a very large number of terrible engineers. So as a foreigner trying to hire, without travelling there it's very difficult. The great people simply don't respond to job ads, and unless you are Google, are not interested in applying. Plus the great people earn $2,000 per month and higher. The large number of very average people earn $300-500 per month. So that's why I haven't found any great people, but I think if you have connections or a good recruiting team in India it's possible to find these people.
The real reason there are so many engineers in India is because there are many many crappy engineering colleges in India right now. The last decade saw engineering become a business and every person with a little money looked to start an engineering college. Yes India has a lot of population but the proliferation of colleges is the main reason.
good article, but the bulk of engineers now come out of private colleges. Engineering Education is the new business, every politician or big businessman owns one or more engineering college.<p>Middle class could afford it, IT jobs are easier to get, engineering is the new the minimum qualification for getting a good job.<p>if government liberalizes medical education, we would see a million more doctors soon.
bad description doesn't connected it with the current problems or its causes rather connected with indo-china war but started making "some sense" after mid of the article.
Doesn't mean they're any good. Last innovative startup you've heard from India in the past several years is....Visual Website Optimizer. Wow, mindblowing.