The Story of Engineering Education in India

He means to say that an engineering student should have an aptitude of solving problems. All he needs is a hint of solution. Google is happy to give that..

Let me take another viewpoint where everyone is too biased to the idea that the parents put the clamps on their kids. I am an engineering undergrad and honestly, the kids doing Tier-3 Engineering won't be even slightly better off if they weren't. For the simplest reason, for 90% of people there is a no sense of purpose in life except settling for a 20K income and have a well settled family of four.

I see no sign of passion, creativity in 9 out of 10 people. For the remaining "one", there is no stopping them to what they want to become. People want to shrug off their shoulders blaming they were forced to do engg.. without knowing what would they be doing if not it.

You are absolutely right. But this is a problem and the sooner we fix this ( is it possible? ) the better it will be for India ( or any other country for that matter with a similiar population ) .

There are a few things that I think requires serious change in India :

1. We need to develop a culture that supports, encourages and rewards innovation - which means we need to develop a startup culture that is akin to US. We should make it damn easy for people to start companies in India (Hopefully you are listening Mr.Modi and Mr. Manmohan Singh ). So far all I have heard is that its hard. With a labor force like ours we can surely go far ahead.

2. The second part ( and the part that is addressed by this blog post ) is training or bringing this large labor force to a level that is usable by the companies that are thus created. This is a much harder problem but perhaps there is a way this too can be disrupted and changed. Changing the mentality of people towards something is not really that easy. But considering how people flock towards all those Indian Idol, Saregama etc.. maybe something similar ( I dont know what that is ) might help.

I'm in the process of converting my team of 50ish programmers in Chennai into a DevOps and "legacy apps support" org because finding people with the necessary current skills is proving too difficult. And by "current" I'm talking basic stuff like javascript competency, an understanding of what MVC is (versus dragging toolbox controls onto a webform and writing a couple lines of databinding), and the impossibility of hiring people who have programming experience in anything besides .Net (and to a lesser extent, Java, but even Java is hard to recruit for) and SQL Server or Oracle. My "low cost" (which, as a result of demand and globalization, has turned into "US light" rather than "developing world") country of choice now is Mexico, and -- judging from the recent recruiting challenges there -- I'm not alone. In the Guadalajara area, HCL, Tata, Infosys, HP, Dell, Oracle, and a raft of others are all gobbling up freshers who really can code themselves out of a box, who have good communication skills with at least passable English, who are able and interested in learning new skills, and generally speaking have much more in common culturally with the US.

I am certain there are both bright spots and bright futures ahead for the Indian IT economy (and education system), but for now I'm either putting my creative work in other countries or hiring [much higher cost] consultancies to augment the local skills in my captive team there. The cycle mentioned by other commenters here and in the blog post of finding employment solely for the sake of certification or learning a new skill to support jumping to a new employer is a huge turn off for two reasons: 1) a lot of the incoming freshers literally have zero skills and it's a huge time sink for the experienced folks to get them to the point where they can contribute, and 2) by the time someone is contributing they're already either looking for a new job or expecting promotions and salary hikes in the 20-50% per annum range. This is untenable and quite ridiculous, even with the recent inflation/currency issues. My company, like many others, have a different job code/title scale for India than everywhere else in the world, just to support the concept of having a dozen steps in between fresher (literally zero skills) and senior engineer/architect... not to mention similar things on the management side.

I could write a book on this crap and, frankly, I'm already feeling riled up just thinking about it so I'll stop here. I'll just leave it at this: I truly hope the Indian education system and cultural issues surrounding employment, family, corruption, and financial stability are worked out in the coming years, but the stress dealing with this mess through the past ten years has put me off enough to abandon ship. The cost savings is just not worth the productivity hit (not to mention subjective issues like time difference).

Are you really programming in C? If so, good for you and your organization. If not, i suggest not wasting time becoming a career counselor and try finding a faster way to eliminate idiots.

I don't buy the crap that they have not been taught in collage. In the age of the internet, there are so many damn resources on every language possible on the internet that a person claiming that they know how to code in c should have a much, much higher bar set.