In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects

>The actual hard working technical guys(programmers, hackers >or whatever you may call them) are treated like commodity, >worst like a foot ball tossed around by 'business guys',

True. However, more and more product based companies are setting up shop in India. Many of these have vigorous and interesting interview processes that identify truly capable technical people. And believe it or not, they offer very high pay packages that sometimes exceed that of Executives.

I agree that the number of such opportunities is still small compared to openings in Service-based companies. But the trend has started to catch on. Recently, Infosys announced an increasing focus on products because they realize that the services business ‘provides revenue that scales only linearly with headcount’. As more and more product work happens in India, core techies will gain greater value. Also, as the years pass: a) more Engineering students will graduate, the total number of really strong engineers (vs. the let-me-please-mom-n-dad types) will increase leading to the creation of great techie environments in more companies. b) more well experienced Engineers will stay in hands-on roles leading to proper mentoring that enhances the techie environments.

The Business guys will still be more important as anywhere in the world. But the treatment of programmers as commodities that worries you will decrease, IMHO.

There are some structural problems that contribute to (but don't cause) this phenomenon. By most university rules an engineering student needs to do an 'external project' with a company or research lab to complete his degree.

Technically you can do a project of your own but most professors of engineering in India are clueless about real world engineering projects and don't do any research or have projects of their own. Most students are not pigheaded enough to buck the system by formulating their own projects and risking failure. (note: I said 'most', IIT s etc are different. Here one is talking about the equivalent of a school in Hicksville in the middle of nowhere and totally disconnected from industry).

There are tens of thousands of students needing such an internship/project in a given city every year. Most schools just wash their hands off the whole deal and ask their students to 'go get a project done' with no additional guidance. Most professors, with class sizes of 30 - 50, don't care about formulating or supervising projects.

How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an internship on a sharply defined project?

In CS it is often possible to get some kind of project thanks to all the software companies in India, but in other fields like mechanical or electrical engineering, there simple are no projects available. These 'project providers' step into the void and provide 'internships' which exist only on paper and provide a complete project report to the student, who pays substantial (in local currency) fees, submits the report to his clueless profs and ticks off his 'project complete' checkbox.

Now, added to this structural problem is the fact that most engineering schools in India approach the teaching of engineering as 'book learning'. Students memorize formulae and regurgitate them in exams without the faintest clue of how to actually build anything (hence the 'can't build a circuit' description in the OP). Just to complicate things, students have no training in technical writing, and even assuming they have a thesis, and know how to do confirming experiments and so on they still have trouble writing a hundred pages in English.

None of this is to excuse any of the participants in this farce. This needs to be exposed, and corrected. Just identifying some underlying factors. If the professors decided to clamp down on such fraud, there is no way this will continue. But most are happy to play along.

An offshoot of this is the business of creating personal essays for admissions to US schools. Professors in the US, if you see a hundred admission letters starting with "Two Roads diverged in a wood " ( I am NOT joking. I've seen 'professionally prepared' essays that start this way,) you know your prospective student has outsourced his personal essay.

Some of these outsourcers get admitted to US universities, or get good jobs and so their path gets validated for younger generations as the 'smart thing to do'.

And so the dance continues.

somewhat tangential, personal 'external project' anecdote from a long time ago

I studied Industrial Engineering in a decent but not great school and my profs were well meaning but not particularly clueful. They saw Industrial Engineering as an offshoot of Mechanical Engineering and shot down all my proposed 'build a compiler' type projects (I wanted to do a software project), because 'That is computer Science, not Mechanical or Industrial Engineering. You have to do a project in Mechanical Engineering'.

So I compromised by forming a team with a couple of sharp guys, writing a small but sophisticated (given the circumstances) CAD program in Turbo C on a 486 PC ( hey it even had a scripting component - I did get to write a compiler after all), printed out all the code, added an introductory page and that was my 'project report'.

The profs were a bit taken aback at the hundreds of pages of C code (which they couldn't read or grok) but the software worked, I could answer all their questions, and CAD was "mechanical engineering" so I got top grades for the project. [1]

I later heard from some of my juniors that the profs used to tell them about this 'very talented bunch of guys who did a great project and you should emulate them' but I don't think anyone took that advice ;).

[1]That was the only 'course' for which I had anything like a top grade. I was bored to tears and rarely attended class and spent all my time chasing girls and scraped by in some of the "write down from memory the formula for stress in a cantilever beam" type examinations by deriving enough stuff from scratch to get a passing grade. Most classes (and exams) I completely ignored.

I completed my degree only because my employer(Cybercash, now defunct, but was one of the pioneers in payment processing, HQ in Virginia, with the devs in Bangalore) begged me to, so I could get a visa to go to the USA, and you couldn't get a visa without a degree. I wrote 22 exams in two weeks and got my degree. To this day I don't know anything about Mechanical Engineering.

PS: In retrospect I should have just (minimally) played the game of dutifully attending classes and so on and spend half an hour or so every day memorizing the facts and formulae required to get good grades. Would have saved a lot of stress.

Instead I rebelled against the insanity and quit attending class except to meet my friends. As pg said in one of his essays, (paraphrasing) when you rebel, you are still playing someone else's game,only with a logical 'not' added to the rules. You are still dancing to someone else's tune.

I don't have any regrets, but then I was thoroughly confused by the way engineering was taught and learned and what behavior was lauded and what was punished.

This was before the internet arrived in India. Now Coursera etc offer me a veritable cornucopia of insanely great teachers, Amazon has all the books and I am as happy as a pig in a mud pit learning new stuff well after my hair turned grey.

>>How is a 19 year old supposed to get a non existent company to give them an internship on a sharply defined project?

Actually answer to this question lies in understanding a simple thing. Most of us really study to just get a job. That is the fact.

Most people get into software after hearing stories from the 90's. How some some uncle of theirs, or somebody from their far relatives, or neighbors or someone from their village did CS engineering, Got into an IT company. And then went to the US, after which within 5 years the guy became a manager. Stories of how such people 1.5-2L a month, has a very posh home, car etc. And then talks of all the beautiful infrastructure, glass buildings. Lets be frank, most of the people join software for that reason.

The problem now is they don't really know what they are getting into. They lack the desire or interest to genuinely work towards solving problems. So at the end its all about 'Somehow get a job'.

The days of 90's are long gone. And there is no such rapid growth these days.

Your prof was a douche. Perhaps he required some special language to get through to him but you never know.

I know profs who would be more than happy that someone took some initiative.

At the same time the same prof was completely cognizant of how the game was played.

When I took a course and answered like a sane person, he held his head in his hands and directed me to a few students who reminded me that a 5 point answer was a minimum of 1 page of regurgitation.

I had even more fun when I spoke to the bio med students. I remember their jaws dropping to the ground when I described how I had worked on an autoclave/run gels and generally had fun running genetic experiments over summer break.

Their final project? Making ghaghras and perfect pineapple juice - because the board had decreed that graduates should have some "usable skills once they are in the real world."

> A good warning for companies to start recruiting only from top engineering colleges. I belong to a college which was opened just because my chairman had a lot of money, heavens know if it was back or white. It was started the year I had to secure admission to some random foo college as I had completed class 12. When you dont expect a 19 year old to make a minor project choice. How can you expect a 16 year old to make a full career choice?

I was forever interested in what I was doing. Be it studying biology in class 12 (Yes, I had PCMB) or studying the subjects in my engineering class. I initially took admission to Computer science but soon realized my affinity to electronics. I took a branch shift. I never copied any lab experiment or any project, minor or major. Being the only girl who wanted to make her own projects, I was left alone, yet I struggled and learnt enough to be picked now by the largest open source hardware company.

But when I was completing graduation, no company would come to take students from my college. Yes, not even Infosys or TCS. Also I would have been more or less rejected even if those companies came as my area of studies and expertise is very specific and narrowed down. What deters core companies to pick students from small colleges? I strongly believe that I would have got a better career beginning if only core companies came for interview. My currently employers did not care for my degree or the 'percentage' I scored. It was simply my contribution to the open source community that got me where I am today.

TL;dr : I strongly vote out against companies discriminating against 'small' and 'big' named colleges. Least there is another interested hard working mostly self-taught engineer as me in any of them.