India Graduates Millions, But Too Few Are Fit to Hire

As an Indian student who tried to get through the "system", I can relate to this. I was really into computers and programming in high school, so I decided to go into the engineering stream in the "+2" years (basically, 11th and 12th grades, as opposed to the biology stream, which supposedly preps you for medical school). I remember the parental and peer pressure particularly well: my dad was pretty much opposed to it because he felt taking biology would "lead to more options later", but I was not convinced. Most of my friends suffered through the biology classes, and yet ended up in engineering degrees at college (and for the most part, are working at either Infosys or Wipro now. <i>No one</i> is doing anything even remotely related to medicine.)<p>The last few years of high school was basically hell for me: the government subsidies OP's article mentions are limited just for the biggies (IITs and RECs), and the chances of getting into them are very slim. You have to get through series of examinations that over the years have gotten very _very_ tough: they basically expect you to know things in Physics, Chemistry and Math that - atleast in the US - are not taught till the third year of college. Forget about high school - I went to IIT coaching centers, and was very miserable because I had no real interest in any of the subjects - I wanted to learn CS, dammit - why was I mugging up organic chem formulae?<p>Its not even worth it to consider joining other colleges. Job options are limited, but the worst part is they all require <i>huge</i> "donations" upfront for a laughable experience (both in terms of the teaching talent and curriculum).<p>Long story short, I didn't end up getting a sufficiently high ranking in the entrance exams (my choices in the placement, if I remember right, were either metallurgy in IIT or mechanical engineering in REC: the top 400 had basically grabbed up all the CS degrees. Remember: over 400,000 students write the exam every year, so almost everyone ends up in a field they're not interested in.) so I decided to take a huge student loan and come study in the US. I don't regret the decision: I'm now doing what I love, and have gotten _so_ much more exposure than my peers back home it's not even funny.<p>When I went back to India to do an internship (and enjoy the vacation) a couple of years back, I was appalled by how little enthusiasm most people have about the work they'd end up doing.<p>Horrible stuff.

A lot has changed, and very little has changed. The whole framing for the story -- that one would expect an Indian graduate to be fluent in conversational English and capable of being net-productive in the global economy -- is one way in which a lot has changed. Historically, that has been true for only the tiniest sliver of folks in India.<p>The outsourcing boom exploited one persistent mispricing of labor: below that tiny sliver of folks at the top of the educational pyramid in India, there was a slice of folks who had a minimal level of competency <i>and</i> prevailing wages which were absurdly low compared to wages in e.g. the US. I've done telephone support before. You don't have to be a genius to do it. Given that you're not looking for geniuses, you could either find a modestly educated American homemaker (or somebody trying to pay his way through college) at $10 an hour plus costs, or you could employ someone near the top of India's educational distribution for less than $2 an hour, fully-loaded.<p>Then apply the same economics to folks in the top of that below-the-sliver slice who are able to do back-office line-of-business CRUD apps, which are the outsourcing sweet spot.<p>Even though India is ginormous, though, there is a finite amount of labor in that slice, and when the global economy became aware of that mispricing, that labor got bid up <i>very rapidly</i>. Prior to the Lehman shock, engineering salaries in India were going up at <i>50% per year</i>. My company had difficulty keeping any engineer on a project for six months -- they were unwilling to match the new market rates so the market did to them what the market does to everyone: allocates scarce resources efficiently. "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys", to quote one of our Indian engineers. (He now works for a Japanese company at a multiple of his former salary, last I heard.)<p>Anyhow, the overwrought reporting about the labor mispricing for that one little slice of the market apparently convinced at least some people of something which is manifestly untrue, which is that Indian education is world-class. It's not. India in 2011 is the same as India in 2001 is the same as India in 1951: it is gigantic and filled with lots of desperately poor people who do not have even minimal levels of competency for global work. (It is entirely possible than India in 2051 will not be, but they've got quite a ways to go yet.)

An important, but tangential point to note is that unlike the US, college education in India does not allow for a student to independently chose his/her major. People join colleges already deciding (without taking a single course) what they plan to get a degree in.<p>This leads to two things: 1. Most people do not have a clue about their interests and passion until it is too late (or never!). 2. The only majors that people graduate with are those that seem to have a lot of jobs and "prestige in society", often due to peer and parental pressure more than their own volition. This explains why there are so many engineers and doctors.<p>Combining these two, it is not surprising that a lot of graduates are not passionate about their work but see it as a means to an end.

As the price of talent in India continues to increase, the problem may be that these companies aren't willing to pay the new premium for the same talent they used to pay less for pre-offshoring boom in India.<p>Leading them to outsource their own resource needs to cheaper places

As somebody who has experienced the education system both in India (Bachelors in CE from a decent, but non-reputed school) and US (Masters in CS from a very good school), here are my thoughts on the article:<p>First off 24/7 is a terrible, terrible company to take as an example, being and ITES company the only skill they require is the skill of communicating in a non-native language, which unsurprisingly is not a strength of most of the college (some of them being Hindi Medium) graduates. If we consider real programming work (which is language neutral), there are absolutely brilliant programmers in India. In fact Indian students were the second highest fraction in GSOC last to last year.<p>Secondly the point that the curriculum is outdated is totally ridiculous, the books I studied during my Masters and those during my Bachelors had a big chunk in common. One big difference I found was the quality of teachers is top-class here in US, while not so much in India, and the argument from the article about low pay scales for the teachers, being the reason, stands water.<p>But the biggest difference is in the teaching methodology and the grading system. Here in US there is a great emphasis on 'Learning by Doing' and a majority of the grades depend on the homework even at college level. While in India, as the article mentions, it is almost solely based on end of the term exams, which encourages cramming and discourages daily learning.<p>But as an encouragement to the Indian students, I would like to add that if you wish to pursue a field in today's world, there is no stopping you back, specially with the advent of places like Khan academy, MIT open course-ware etc. All you need is will and a little persistence.

Full article: <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html?mod=WSJ_article_related" rel="nofollow">http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870351550457614...</a>

I ran a startup in Kathmandu, Nepal for 4 years (www.olenepal.org) and this mirrors my experience there. The modus operandi of Nepali Schools is the "the teacher speaks and the kids repeat." this means that you can't judge applicants at all by their educational background. The best ones I had were almost entirely self-educated. Also, I think I found that only one in 50 applicants were worth hiring.<p>That said, I believe that the geeks I hired are totally world class. I also believe that w/in 5 years time they will be earning 100,000 USD per year, whether they are living in Nepal or elsewhere. cuz, they are worth it.

The article clearly explains the current situation in India, I am an Indian myself. I graduated two year back from a decent engineering college.<p>In a decent engineering college most of the bright students will be hired by one of the software services companies like Wipro,Infosys,TCS,cognizant. Those who are considered "unworthy" by these companies will end up being a lecturer at some engineering college. Most of the bright kids never choose teaching as a profession.<p>The CS degree taught in these colleges are not worthy, most students copy their lab exercises and get their job done.Again if you look at the quality of the lab exercises they are not worthy enough. A typical lab exercise will sound like "Implement library management system with <i>Turbo-C</i>", (yes Turbo-C) where the student will be given with 100% mark if he creates a structure and prints the contents of it.The point is, a student in 4 years of his college life never create something real and useful.<p>No one from a decent college will go to a call centre.<p>Here is a paper done by one of mentor, who is into free software advocacy among students, this paper clearly explains the mentality of students and tutors in most of India's engineering colleges <a href="http://www.shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/shakthimaan-paper/shakthimaan-paper.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.shakthimaan.com/downloads/glv/shakthimaan-paper/s...</a>

Part of the problem is a social and cultural system where due to the success of IT industry, every parent wants to see their kid become an engineer. Many of the engineering colleges do not even take minimum tests for admission and you can buy seats on so called management quota. Even in premier institutes like IITs, NITs etc 30% of seats are reserved under SC/ST caste based quota scheme. It is no wonder that majority of people who are graduating are not employable. The article is well sourced but ignored some of the social and political issues in India which are the root of the problem along with a dysfunctional government.

3 out of 100 applicants is not surprising. <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/gy/you_are_not_hiring_the_top_1/" rel="nofollow">http://lesswrong.com/lw/gy/you_are_not_hiring_the_top_1/</a>

That is probably true globally.

To me the most disturbing thing as described in the article is that despite an emphasis on rote learning, they can't even teach how to read.<p>To me it seems that reading and 'thinking' are such fundamental skills in IT that they would just be assumed elsewhere... but an educational system that fails to teach reading is really enormously broken.<p>That said, I have actually worked with two lots of people in Bangalore. One lot got flown out to my country, and they were nice if a little lazy. On the other hand, they put up with some shit that the 'white natives' wouldn't have, like ridiculously long compile times because some idiot (most likely a well educated white person) had thrown the kitchen sink at their ant script. <i>I</i> wouldn't have put up with a 30 minute build, I'd have lost my nut. They were at least as smart as the 'white natives', they could converse, their English was at least as good (and better in some cases) than the native English speakers.<p>However, they said that in Bangalore working for companies is very stratified. Everyone wants to work at the large American companies (e.g. IBM) so they are the top tier and get to pick the best candidates, and then you get this trickle down effect, till you get to relatively small non-US foreign companies (like us). From the article, it seems there are even lower tiers, e.g. presumably the good candidates don't apply to the smaller Indian companies.<p>Funnily enough, later on I got the opportunity to work with some guys in Bangalore who were employed by IBM, and they were completely, atrociously bad. The only time I've seen worse is deliberate sabotage. These guys got on the excuse merry-go-round and never got off, and would keep recycling excuses why they hadn't done any work, even though you'd think "didn't we already deal with this the previous two times it came up?". These guys did nothing.<p>Naturally, I cheated. :D I took a page out of the managers handbook, declared 'victory' and ended the programming phase. Now we were into the testing/bugfix phase. My 'white native†' colleagues who had also been frustrated by lack of progress in Bangalore were puzzled by this. They said how can it go into testing, they haven't done anything? So I said "run the tests and if you find any problems, fix them" so they said "but there's nothing to run!" and I said "well, that is the first problem to fix then isn't it?". And suddenly the lightbulb went on and they 'got it'. We actually made up all the lost time and then some.<p>So I'm not particularly impressed with these so called 'top tier' candidates either.<p>†Not necessarily white or 'native', but naturalised citizens of an English speaking country

The basic problem is that instead of focusing on improving one's skill set, the focus is more on hacking the system; getting that job or admission into a college. I have seen how resumes were photocopied from a standard template with only personal details changed. Also most of the answers were canned and memorized based on what the interviewers would like to hear. I am not sure if this happens across the globe,perhaps someone can comment. Also most of the engineering entrance exams test on math, physics and chemistry. A lot of the graduates come from areas where the standard of english teaching is not very high, which explains why they may have poor comprehension.

Something that is not mentioned is that the options in terms of higher education is mostly limited to engineering and medicine, at least these are the only socially acceptable degrees to a large extent. So virtually everyone ends up doing an engineering degree and it becomes a situation where there is quantity but no quality.

"For their next challenge, they had to type 25 words a minute" That's pretty slow, right?

I think the main difference between India and, say, the West (US/UK) is that in India, students pick a profession based on the earning potential, or what their parents what them to do. Very few people pick it based on what they want to do.<p>So you have people getting CS degrees, but their hearts are not in CS. So there's no passion, no excitement, no enthusiasm.<p>Meanwhile, colleges also don't light a fire inside their students. It's all rote learning. One of the few colleges that really teaches people how to think independently is BITS Pilani <a href="http://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/</a> (I may be biased a little ;) ). Even though I got a Mechanical Engg degree from there, I learnt enough CS that I was able to get a full assistantship in the US in CS (where my heart was). I am grateful for the education I got there.

Its not the educational system that is the main reason here. Well the system needs to change but the problem here is caused by the proliferation of engineering colleges (and other technical degree colleges). Its too easy to start a engineering college in India. There are way too many "engineers" and degree holders pushed out that don't deserve to get that degree. The schools only care about getting money and are really shitty. That is what is making for the influx of poor candidates into the employment pool.

People are educated in India. That doesn;t mean they have to speak English or be able to read English books. English is not the native language for many school and college going people and their education have been through vernacular medium schools. Its how sharp they are that matters. Teach them English properly and they will be able to grasp that too! This articles tries to judge students based on "So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants." which is ridiculous!!

I had a couple of Indian grad students in my office last Fall who were seriously distraught that they were getting an A- in one of my courses. They thought this would prevent them from getting a job. I tried to disabuse them.

The problem seems to be poor communication in English and lack of a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension. These are problems to be addressed at the high school level.<p>I attribute these squarely to the teaching methodology which is mostly memorization with no encouragement to creativity whatsoever. On top of this, the teachers in most schools are utterly incompetent and hence lack enthusiasm.<p>One solution may be to start private institutions that teach or increase the proficiency in such language skills (like how NIIT and Aptech did to computer education when schools couldn't do it).

Being an Indian, I agree that it is a mad race &#38; it is very tough to identify the right guys in the vast pool of students coming out every year.<p>I faced similar issue in my previous startup &#38; to solve it, started <a href="http://stalkninja.com" rel="nofollow">http://stalkninja.com</a> . It is a way a deserving &#38; self-starter student can differentiate himself/herself from the rest even if they are not from one of the top colleges like IITs.

Indian who finished Engg in CS (from a less known university) here, I can pretty much attest to the story. Some facts that I want to state are below.<p>#1. Reason: Most of the folks joining (CS in) Engineering do so due to parental/societal pressure. Engineering degree from an established college is a sure shot way to that cozy job in BigCo Inc. through campus placements, once they clear those stupid interviews (usual stick arranging/manhole puzzles) and have a 70%+ aggregate. From there on, it's the usual journey of going onsite i.e., a long-term assignment to US(##1), a trophy wife and a big apartment, a car and so on and so forth.<p>#2. Practical subjects have set syllabus in many universities; essentially a set of programs which most of the folks mug up and clear through. (hence the term 'procrammers') VTU (<a href="http://www.vtu.ac.in/" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtu.ac.in/</a>) is most notorious for it. Ex. Data Structures lab : <a href="http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/766.html?article=" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/766.html?...</a> OOP lab: <a href="http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/772.html?article=" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/772.html?...</a> Algorithms lab: <a href="http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/785.html?article=" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/785.html?...</a> syllabus details for all branches and all semesters: <a href="http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/299.html?article=" rel="nofollow">http://www.vtu.ac.in/index.php/scheme-and-syllabus/299.html?...</a><p>#3. Most of the teachers (lecturers/professors) have no idea what they are teaching. Many folks take up teaching only if they cannot get through campus placements or another corporate job. A fellow from my batch who failed in Microprocessors (twice) is a lecturer teaching Microprocessors in a small town engineering college. They themselves not being aware of the right set of tools to be used, they would even promote usage of archaic tools. Almost all the colleges affiliated to VTU Belgaum, in Karnataka, state which has Bangalore as capital, use Turbo C as IDE. They have no idea what compilation/linkage is, but only know Ctrl-F9/Alt-F9. Usage of CLI is something that is seen as too technical/geeky. Most of the 'software engineers'/lecturers/professors have never used an OS other than a flavour of Windows. (Few are not even aware of the existence) Very few know about useful sites like StackOverflow or HN; and many would land up in various forums with ‘can haz codez’ requests.<p>That said, there are few people who land up in IT cause they love computers and programming. Numbers are not in their favour cause for every one of these truly passionate ones, there would be a thousand odd zombie types in Indian IT scenario; and the latter would stand out. The numbers of passionate ones is growing, though slowly.<p>But there is more to this topic, imho. Article linked by OP talks about folks not being fit enough for the job. The companies which cry foul about the crop of engineers and their capability are not really bothered about technical skills but more about 'soft-skills'. Simply because most of these firms are outsourcing service providers who would not want great programmers in their payroll but some sub-standard/mediocre guy who can keep his head down in the cube farm, conform to org-wide (sometimes ridiculous) policies/norms, follow through checklists, churn out filled up excel-sheets/documents by dozens and get the job done. I am sure many would miss this fact.<p>(##1) Ask any IT guy from India how someone who has been in IT but hasn't been onsite would be treated. Lepers are better off, much better.

It was medicine and engineering 5-10 years ago, now it's MBA. Everyone wants to do whatever is currently hip or what their peers are doing. The society here is breeding passionless robots.

Here is what is wrong after having been taught in a decent engineering college in India.<p>1) One studies hard trying to get into a decent engineering college. If they are even wee bit good, they get into a decent college.<p>Sidenote: For anyone who says they did not get into a good college and are doing great in life now (at least intellectually), here is what happened.<p>You were not so great or smart when you gave that exam. You got to learn through self learning, fear of not being able to do great stuff in life and a lot of experience or got away to US in a decent college because your family could afford it.<p>2)Once they get into the college, the freedom, the fun, the energy, the beer, the drugs often bring the worse out of them. If none of the above they probably trade lectures for Counter Strike sessions (I mean 6-7 hours of continuous sessions everyday) or Poker or some new shit.<p>The sad part is these people are still doing the right thing since the guy taking the class most probably knows nothing about the subject too and if they do are either bad teachers or too obnoxious to be able to impart knowledge to a mind that is vulnerable to wandering off to butterflies or scribbles at the back of notebook or tweeting (the hot new stuff).<p>3) So even if you were the CS guy in school, the agony of being taught by people who were not the best people for the job leaves one disappointed. Something as cool as programming no longer is exciting because you have to do exactly what is expected of you. [Anecdotal evidence: I actually was never much of a programmer. I kept passing every exam by just writing logic and pseudocodes. I did write a simple factorial using something other than recursion and the lab in charge got the better out of me. Then on I left bothering myself, so by the time we were being taught data structures, I had lost my ground.]<p>The people who are the toppers in a class are those who attend every lecture (does not matter what they get out of it) and show utter respect for the profs. 100% attendance and you are bound to get a decent score in the end sems. That is when studying loses its charm.<p>4) At the end of college getting a good job means getting into a consultancy. Many smarter companies just do not allow Non CS people to sit for programming jobs even when they prove to be great. [ Anecdotal Evidence: A friend of a friend from a non CS degree got into Facebook US, before being not allowed to sit by Google India and MS India]<p>So call it lack of opportunities, self belief, hard work of students, peer pressure, you end up being just a graduate. Not an engineer in any sense of word.

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