Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence • Hacker News Board

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#221

Post by JAlexoid » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #199

JAlexoid wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60k is about 4% of all CS related engineering students in India. So, the generalisation is accurate.

60k from tier one engineering colleges. It includes all branches. Not only CS students. Similar number to the number of students enrolled as undergrads in entire engineering colleges in USA. The number of engineering students enrolled in India as undergrad is around 350k (It's not over half million. My bad). So students from tier 1 colleges makes about 17%. That's not a small fraction that can be ignored.

Statista says that CS in India is 880k + 660k of Electronics Engineering (CS adjascent field). That's 1.54mil students in the field that we are talking about.

60k of tier one - are fairly smart and probably half of them are brilliant and passionate(being very generous here). They are the outliers that prove a point.

That said - 4 year degree shouldn't be a requirement in software engineering. It's a very poor quality marker

https://www.statista.com/statistics/765482/india-number-of-s...

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#222

Post by PedroBatista » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:35 AM UTC

erikerikson wrote: post #214

rafiki6 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The truth of the matter is for most organizations, IT is a cost center along with legal and finance. It is not their money maker. They have no interest in innovative IT/software "technology" until their competitor in the same industry as them has it. Price matters. Laying off people easily matter. Accurate and poignant. Having lived in the banks for a while, this will always be the case in industries. They don't gi…

Isn't this why a variety of industries such as banking are being or will be disrupted? For example in banking, I would love to set up income apportionment (i.e. x% here, y% there, ...) but for some reason I have to split out income deposits every once in a while via manual, external tools. Why is it again that we haven't set up two sided and payee specific authorizations so that we never hand out data that can be use…

Banks aren't being "disrupted", every new fintech hotness has an old fat bank behind, so either way they win.

Like every musical chair game, some poor schmuck will sleep and lose but most of the banks will be just fine.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#223

Post by PedroBatista » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

kumarski wrote: post #43

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ra…

> I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ratio. We've done work on crazy levels of core infrastructure and are scaling.

Easy there eloquent soldier! You might create a blackhole with that much talent.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#224

Post by entha_saava » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

blocked_again wrote: post #63

entha_saava wrote: post #39

As an Indian there are reasons you can point out for this. Education: Engineering syllabi are pretty outdated. And due to a work-just-enough-for-month-end-salary mindset, professors are against being up-to-date. As a result, everywhere but in top notch colleges, quality of teaching is piss poor. The "Rat Race": There is no better word to describe this. 90% of people who enter computer science / engineering courses do…

Your generalization of Indian colleges is not right. India has a lot of Engineering students. There are around 60k students joining Tier 1 colleges every year in India (IITs, NITs, etc funded by the Central Government alongside some private colleges like BITS). Very few students from Tier 1 colleges join these consultancy companies. Most of them studying CS from these colleges join product companies like Flipkart, Sw…

Yeah. Tier 1 colleges. Tell me more about NITs and IITs.

I study at a so colled top college. Where highest placement is always around 50-60 LPa. That doesn't mean teaching and other things are good (sure better than average, but that's not what I call 'good'). The highest placements are more because of students and a FEW professors who actually happen to be passionate.

But in the entire class, there are less than 15% of people who actually have interest in CS or Programming. Many came through good scores in entrance exams (myself included) and many through management quota (i.e Paying the institution heavy sums). While the first group has some people who like programming and CS, it also has more number of people who just happened to get good scores because of relentless studying and practice, then took CSE branch because placements.

I don't think NITs and IITs look much better these days. I attempted JEE but that was really hard to get an NIT without studying hard for 2-4 years. People who have money take coaching classes and study for JEE exclusively, but a rural student like me can't do that. The system is gamed like hell. With the abundance of such coaching kids, I don't think IITs and NITs can keep their previous charm.

Here is a paper on the Joint Entrance exam (JEE) tragedy:

https://www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/hk/jee/press/currScienceJEE...

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#225

Post by meddlepal » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:06 AM UTC

kumarski wrote: post #43

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ra…

You've just shifted the cost from onshore developers to hiring incredible management and developing complicated process to deal with the a heterogeneous staff. That's not necessarily better allocation of money... just a different one, with a lot more variables, and vastly more potential for failure for the majority of companies.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#226

Post by kaiwenwang » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

afrojack123 wrote: post #67

Indian IT consultancies have been struggling against technological obsolescence for 30 years. And they will continue to struggle for many more. This is an idiotic hit piece hit written by a journalist who needs to meet his quota. This journalist has never worked for one of these consultancies, a tech company, or been in C-suite of any org. I have worked in these "consultancies" so here is my take. There is a wide ran…

Off-topic from the thread, but was the sample size of GT students you've interacted only one, or greater? My intuition on well known public universities has been that they accept all the talented people at the cost of letting some who would struggle with the material while private universities accept only talented people at the cost of missing some people who would thrive.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#227

Post by kumarski » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:30 AM UTC

meddlepal wrote: post #225

kumarski wrote: post #43

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ra…

You've just shifted the cost from onshore developers to hiring incredible management and developing complicated process to deal with the a heterogeneous staff. That's not necessarily better allocation of money... just a different one, with a lot more variables, and vastly more potential for failure for the majority of companies.

Nope.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#228

Post by babaganooj » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

Cisco's IT is almost 100% Indian, and by almost 100% I mean I've only seen one or two out of thousands who weren't Indian. Cisco's Indian IT department managers having exclusive preference for Indian companies. It's so against the law for Cisco to have their IT department almost fully staffed by H1B visa holders who work for some Indian outsourcer and are themselves all Indian. The work they do is only half decent (well, not really, it's purely best effort, and depends on the individual or team doing the work it can vary dramatically)

The CEOs of many of the Indian outsourcers are so incompetent and focused so exclusively on relationship based selling that it's pointless to even bring up the topic of them falling behind the tech adoption curve. It's a giant heap of incompetence and corruption.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#229

Post by afrojack123 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 3:51 AM UTC

kaiwenwang wrote: post #226

afrojack123 wrote: post #67

Indian IT consultancies have been struggling against technological obsolescence for 30 years. And they will continue to struggle for many more. This is an idiotic hit piece hit written by a journalist who needs to meet his quota. This journalist has never worked for one of these consultancies, a tech company, or been in C-suite of any org. I have worked in these "consultancies" so here is my take. There is a wide ran…

Off-topic from the thread, but was the sample size of GT students you've interacted only one, or greater? My intuition on well known public universities has been that they accept all the talented people at the cost of letting some who would struggle with the material while private universities accept only talented people at the cost of missing some people who would thrive.

Yes, my sample size was 1. Its not a big deal that he didn't know. Not everybody knows everything and with a background like that he can be taught. It requires some hand holding on my end but others have held my hand too so its just part of the job.

Its a sad state of affairs for new grads in these consultancies. I have met Math majors from top Canadian universities, physics, and biomedical engineers. They were learning .NET and similar tech that operates at the app layer lol. I think its a waste of brainpower but work is work I guess. They probably couldn't find jobs in their field.

Also, this was in the US and a small sample of their US hires. I don't know too much of how it is in India.

Re: Indian IT consultancies struggle against technological obsolescence

#230

Post by oa335 » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:06 AM UTC

kumarski wrote: post #43

I have a team of 14 engineers in Pakistan. It wasn't always easy to do this and now I always feel at odds with hiring where everyone else is hiring or paying a premium for a western passport developer when I know I can get killer talent elsewhere. I feel the talent we have now has the ability to crush, kill, and destroy the talent in Silicon Valley "engineers" at a fraction of the price in terms of output to input ra…

India devs =! Pakistani devs. India has many large consultancies providing services to mega corps, where sub par talent can hide out for years. Pakistani devs (and other devs in countries that don't have similar dynamic as India) don't have that luxury, so they are on average more highly "vetted".