9 ms·

Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable'

101 points by Elepsis 17y ago

quizbiz 17y ago
The article makes a case for "the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce": Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries ... to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.
- kqr2 17y ago
  In his criticism, replace American grads with corporations and you get: Many corporations are looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich Of course, corporations want a cheap labor workforce that they don't have to train. A good college education should give you a solid foundation for learning new things; not just job training.
  - avner 17y ago
    I concur. It should also be noted that the work culture in the US is different than that of India. Very often, foreign companies investing in the U.S. make the mistake of expecting the same uniformity in the local workforce that they are used to seeing back home. I should also mention the monumental levels of competition overseas students like in India have to clear to have a shot at a school like IIT, and I guess this radiates into everything else that follows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology#Entrance_competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...
- deleted 17y ago
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- patio11 17y ago
  I have been managing a portion of my company's Indian outsourcing operations for the last two years. Speaking in generalities, I think that the system over there privileges "methodologies" and certifications over both core skills and core CS concepts. I have talented Java engineers working for me who I have had to teach regular expressions to. Many American engineers with graduate degrees in CS from a good university would be able to predict that /ab+/ matched the string "abc". It would be unlikely in the extreme for them to have never heard of the word "regular expression" before. I am oh for five on this with my most recent five Indian engineers. Even after teaching them basic regular expressions I have not found them capable of using them to accomplish tasks without specific direction. (For example, if someVariableName is used in the project, and the customer later informs us that our naming of it does not match their understanding, we might have to rewrite that variable name and associated variables and methods globally. It should be trivial to find all instances of that with a search by regexp, right? But they don't hear that in the instruction "X is now called Y, change all appropriate variables and methods" -- instead, two days later I'm told they're done with a job that I expected to take a few hours, and then I fire a regexp against the source tree and see that 40% of it is still not done.) I have frequently had to explain bugs to our engineers which resulted not from chance or carelessness but from simple ignorance of core CS101 concepts, such as pass by reference. (Example: In our first code review, I noticed a lot of reuse of HashMaps to carry parameters to DAOs. I told folks to not reuse them, because that introduces the risk of somebody changing the HashMap in the DAO, thus causing later users of the map to have unexpected behavior. I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it. This does not happen, and it is a CS101 misconception. Sure enough, we had bugs caused by reuse. So, after a remedial CS101 lecture to the team, I reiterated that maps were not to be reused, because they would cause bugs. What do I find in Code Review #2? More reuse of HashMaps, with "final" applied to all of them. Final does not magically turn pass-by-reference into pass-by-value. (The fact that this obviously did not fix the bugs and would have been caught by ANY testing of the code is another matter. We get that a lot.) When I ask our engineers what they wanted to accomplish in terms of professional growth in their time in Japan, the answer was unanimous: study for certs, which they all already had several of. I'm not necessarily hostile to certs in theory, but I'm sure starting to cool to them in practice. As for teaching "tools": I won't be too harsh on India because American universities fail at it, too, but if they're teaching fundamentals of source control or IDEs I have yet to see any evidence of it. We have been trying to change a corporate culture at our Indian partners away from having one "source control master" per twenty engineers. They're the only ones permitted to commit -- everyone else mails their code to the source control master, who integrates it. This is to "stop people from breaking the build". Our Indian colleagues have their own requests for us. For example, they would prefer not to use source control, "since it adds overhead to our management processes". I freely admit that I only have seen about three corporate cultures from over there and may just have terrible, terrible luck. [Edited to add: Neither my company nor I are blameless for this state of affairs. Believe me, we have many, many areas we could improve upon collectively, and I have many, many individual weakpoints, including a longstanding cavalierness about how much testing needs to be done prior to shipping. I don't want it to sound just like I'm blaming our Indian colleagues.]
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- avner 17y ago
  Your opinion has to be one of the most unconversant comments I have read on HN in a while. Please stop - Thanks. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - digamber_kamat 17y ago
    ---Your opinion has to be one of the most unconversant comments I have read on HN in a while--- :D :D I am pleased to know that the students in US are unemployable. But then I guess its the case world over. India has 5 lakh engineering graduates. only 20% of them are employable.
    - jrnkntl 17y ago
      And the other 80% tries their luck on elance / similar sites.
- dthakur 17y ago
  I agree it isn't wrong to expect a good salary and make a good living for yourself and your family. However, the article is about how American tech graduates are either uninterested or under-trained for work in the industry. Your comment is mostly reiterating stereotypes of Indian students which is not a meaningful addition to the discussion.
smanek 17y ago
ITIL and Six Sigma? They're looking for the wrong skills. If that's his complaint, he's right. I'm not going to waste my time memorizing a series of 'comprehensive checklists' in college. I doubt I know a single CS/Math student who has done more than peruse the Wikipedia article (or maybe read a book in their spare time if they're feeling particularly masochistic) on Six Sigma - and I like to think that I know many great students in the field (several who've worked for Google, Sun, NSA, Microsoft Research, etc). There have been many times that I've said 'Damn, I wish I knew more about X.' In the last week alone X has included POMDPs, multi-dimensional interval trees, or functors. I have never, not once, wished I knew more about the management fad du jour.
- thwarted 17y ago
  The best way to learn about management fad du jour is to be subjected to it. And the main, perhaps only, thing worth learning about it is that you want to avoid it.
- plinkplonk 17y ago
  HCL (like Infosys, TCS Wipro etc) is a body shopper firm and has nothing much to do with "Computer Science" or the cool things you mention (multidimensional interval trees, POMDP etc). Mr Nayar is just saying that he thinks American Graduates don't have the kind of crap enterprise buzzword "skills" that he can sell to clueless managers at x $/hr. Mr Nayar and his firm wouldn't know what to do with someone who is really good at Computer Science or Math, because those are not the "markets" he addresses. I would imagine an American grad student would be happy to be unemployable (by Mr Nayar). Really this is just a bodyshopper trying to justify why he isn't hiring costly Americans (vs cheap Indians). Of course he can't say "I am looking for cheap bodies to ship offshore and Americans are expensive", and still retian his job. These mumblings aren't worthy of being upset over. Due Disclosure: I am Indian. I work in India (Bangalore to be precise), but I do work with POMDPs, MultiDimensional Interval Trees and so on ;-) (My latest project is in Robotic Vision and Navigation, for the Indian Defence Dept)
  - sdave 17y ago
    well said plinkplonk ! As an indian techie myself i have to second with you.
scscsc 17y ago
Get it? Lower your expectations! Do not want to get rich! Want to work for the same amount as people from undeveloped economies! Then maybe you can find a place in the organization of this top CEO, if you're lucky enough.
andreyf 17y ago
HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships. In my experience, the largest influence of employers on schools has been the pervasiveness of Java in higher education. Since it's now all but obvious how horribly short-sighted "teaching Java in college" turned out to be, I think the burden of proof is on him to explain why teaching everyone "ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like" isn't equally short-sighted.
gscott 17y ago
Having worked with Indian Developers I would never suggest anyone be trained to not be able to see the "big picture" or not be able to take instructions longer then one sentence. It's insane and this person is right, American graduates just can't think that way however, McDonald's workers CAN think that way. He is looking in the wrong place for employees, he needs to cull employees from the fast food industry who can do one step then stop, one stop then stop, one step then stop, and be happy with that lifestyle.
known 17y ago
I think this CEO is saying that it is hard to find non h1b wage slaves in America.
jeswin 17y ago
I call BS; and I live in Bangalore, and I run a software company. Over the last 8 years I have worked with dozens of American programmers, and on an average they are better than their Indian counterparts. His own company (HCL) employs some of the people who I thought formed the bottom of the class. Yet another senior programmer in another IT major (TCS) who was a CS grad, thought he was writing code for a new 16 bit computer. From the article itself, it is easy to see what he considers talent: following Six Sigma, CMM etc. Guess what, CMM itself is so ridiculously outdated that only Indian IT companies seek it. In a CMM review I was part of in 2007, they said 80% were Indian IT companies. Needless to say, there are more failed projects that successful ones. Our website says "Made in India"; but sadly, thanks to these IT companies it could be mistaken as a 'Process-driven, cheap, intellect-independent way of building software'. These massive "brick-in-the-wall", "Enterprise" Indian IT Companies compete exclusively on "hourly-billing-rate". There is hope in sight, but they come from smaller, newer companies.
- muon 17y ago
  As we all know, there is no silver bullet, that will miraculously rescue the ailing software engineering. Yesteryear's process becomes today's joke. It's unfortunate that Indian companies are madly following the buzz words/process without understanding how it is supposed to work.
  - metachor 17y ago
    "madly following the buzz words/process without understanding how it is supposed to work" This sounds like a form of cargo cult software development management. On a more general level this sounds like a common, if insidious, human trait: merely emulating the outward signs of successful persons or groups in an attempt to recreate or capture that success for oneself.
sachinag 17y ago
Frankly, his complaints are why the West has nothing to fear from India any time soon. As an Indian, there is nothing more important than external verification of one's social status. For example, in India, they ISO certify everything. FFS, the number one dating (I wish I could use strikethrough on HN and put matrimonial after, but c'est la vie) website for Indians is ISO certified: http://www.shaadi.com/customer_relations/faq/iso-certification.php http://www.shaadi.com/customer_relations/faq/iso-certificati... Indians are fantastic at rote memorization and will listen to directions to the letter - no freelancing there. To India's benefit, it should mean that they'll be spitting out really, really good cars (as long as they're designed elsewhere) and large industrial output in the near future.
- wheels 17y ago
  Frankly, his complaints are why the West has nothing to fear from India any time soon. Well, the rich countries aren't going to lose their edge in tech innovation in the short term, but that doesn't mean that a lot of jobs won't continue to migrate to poorer countries. This is an old tune though -- as technologies slip away from the leading edge they tend to relocate to places where they can be produced at a lower cost. It sounds like what the CEO quoted in the article is saying is that Americans don't fit the bill for that kind of development.
- ideamonk 17y ago
  "Indians are fantastic at rote memorization" , and you know what being an Indian, I hate that lot of the crowd. There is a lack of independent thinkers here, and the rotten education system that puts emphasis on memorization (eg. my college) are the ones responsible for creating such a crowd of fantastic memorizers... I wish they encouraged more of learning by doing here and we could've had better people to boast about.
- silverlake 17y ago
  You're being too hard on India. In every country there is a small % of talented programmers. Many of those smart Indian programmers are doing fantastic work in grad schools around the world. They are a huge part of Silicon Valley (as are Chinese ex-pats). Of course, there's a larger % of code monkeys. Indian code monkeys are, IMO, better than American code monkeys because they follow instructions and work hard despite their limited talents. Rote memorization and checklists and "process" are necessary to get less capable programmers to function.
fab13n 17y ago
What he's observing is that his jobs--the ones given to outsourcing companies--have diverged from the ones taken by companies in Western wealthier countries. It ought to be so: if Americans and Indians were competing for the same jobs, the current difference in salaries couldn't have been sustained for so long. Most people who have worked with outsourcing know the limits, especially in terms of initiative, understanding or even common sense, of what can be done successfully by Indian IT companies. The whole article only makes sense for people who think that "guys who are paid to do stuff on a computer" are a single, mostly uniform resource. What is very worrying is that this illiterate understanding seems to be held by top executives of international IT companies.
prtamil 17y ago
What HCL CEO was saying is true, American Grads are not employable because they are interested in creating new technology and starting new start ups, Ideal American grad wants to start a startup.And look its the American started google, microsoft, ibm, youtube etc... If you want perfect employee who want to maintain the 10 year old technology created by American companies you can get it only from india and China. I never seen an Indian created new product that changes world. Apart from creating bull shit products for maintaining documents for Sig Sigma , iso 9001, CRM etc. --- Angry young Indian.
- Arun2009 17y ago
  Dude, you can start by creating your own new stuff. There's nothing stopping you.
- unexpected 17y ago
  You can start by creating a product that changes India. Americans are predominantly the ones who do startups because America is the biggest player in the global economy, and no one understands American culture, desires, and needs quite better than America. Look at Shaadi.com. A site like that would have fallen flat on its face in America. Conversely, a site like Match.com and eHarmony would be really unsuccessful in India. You have a unique opportunity in India. There are tons of startups that could only be done in India, and not in America. These startups need to be done by Indians, not by Americans. The track record of American VC's in India isn't very good, they just don't "get it". Historically, business in India has been dominated by the big family players- the Ambami's, the Birla's, the Tata's. This is because every business in India has a huge government overhead to deal with- it's hard to go above the mom-and-pop level without dealing with the corruption and bureaucracy that plagues India. The Internet changes all that. More and more people are getting wired. The local politicians, the corrupt officials that want bribes, and all the other authorities can't control you in cyberspace. You instantly eliminate all that overhead! So go and develop your idea! It's stupid to speak in terms of generalizations and stereotypes. Yes, there's a large culture gap between America and India- this makes it hard for Indians to innovate- it's hard to cross that chasm and understand our needs. But there's nothing stopping you from developing a site just for Indians. The Indian version of cyberspace is basically like 1997. Everyone is still building these big "portals". Indian newspapers are still coming online. American companies are just using India as a bodyshop and not really serving India's needs. Stop thinking about how India can cater to the US, and start thinking about how India can cater to India. Once India does this, India can control her own destiny and become the superpower it so badly wants to be. --an ABCD
luckystrike 17y ago
I guess a better title would have been: "Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable' for his firm" In my opinion, this article and his views do not deserve too much attention. But it scares me how top management of some of these so called 'software development' firms trends to drift away from reality, and just start equating developing software to having an assembly line like process.
baha_man 17y ago
"Many American grads... [are] far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland..." Ireland? A developing country? I don't think so.
- puzzle-out 17y ago
  It may be soon.
  - falsestprophet 17y ago
    It is absurd to declare that one of the most prosperous countries in the world is going to be suddenly rendered into a country of subsistence farmers (like China, Brazil, or India) because of a real estate bubble.
    - tybris 17y ago
      Well, developing doesn't necessarily mean substistence farming. They're just developing beyond the rest of us. On the other hand, this is probably one of the last countries in the world where you still pay more than 50 euro's per month for 1Mbps ADSL.
      - ajtaylor 17y ago
        Hear, hear! I get flyers in my door all the time talking about "fast broadband" where fast == 1-3Mb. I'm moving soon and will be switching to NTL (cable) and getting 10Mb/1Mb for less money. Death to Eircom and their €26/mo line rental charge!
  - IsaacL 17y ago
    More like "it used to be". It now has one of the highest GDP/Capita rates in Europe. Actually, I just checked Wikipedia - it has the 6th highest GDP/c in the world.
dinkumthinkum 17y ago
Surely, the fact that he has an Indian surname has nothing to do with this, even though his view is very simplistic and overly optimistic about the quality of training in "Indian bootcamps."
heresy 17y ago
He can have his ITIL/Six Sigma jobs. I'm sorry my education didn't prepare me to be a dumb ass robot. Oh wait, no, I'm not. And enjoying my intellectually satisfiying job.
- gurtwo 17y ago
  What do you do for work? I'm frustrated with mine. The saddest thing is my colleagues are either equally frustrated or indifferent. I don't know much people around me that would say "I'm satisfied at what I do". So I'm curious about yours.
voidpointer 17y ago
In other words, universities are still not good at producing the code monkeys that Mr. Nayar requires to run his body shops. Now if someone could explain to me why that is a bad thing?
- vinutheraj 17y ago
  Exactly !! The process of college education is not to make drones out of people but to imbibe the culture of learning.
  - redrobot5050 17y ago
    According to my co-workers, its so they can get a sweet ass job and get paid.
- zaidf 17y ago
  Fair enough. Do you think it's better to not be a code monkey and be unemployed than be a code monkey and have a boring-ass job?
  - tybris 17y ago
    I bet that for every unemployed MSc/PhD from a respectable CS department you can find >100 unemployed code monkies.
    - zaidf 17y ago
      I think that is the possible flaw in your interpretation of what this guy said: he's not asking people so much to not do PhDs as he is asking people who are neither PhDs nor code monkeys to become code monkeys. I may not agree to the guy's agenda. But I see nothing wrong in encouraging more Americans to become programmers. Whether they are code monkeys or PhDs is a personal choice folks make and nothing is stopping current code monkeys to become PhDs.
      - voidpointer 17y ago
ajju 17y ago
In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. Hahahaha .. if Six Sigma is more "real world" and rigorous than what they teach in good CS programs in the US, I am Warren Buffett. God forbid Vineet here gets his wishes about influence with U.S. colleges, because if he does, bank on the number of great engineers graduating from these schools dropping precipitously.
geebee 17y ago
I don't think Mr. Vineet is incorrect when he suggests that most American grads are unemployable. Most people are, in fact, not employable as software developers. The funny thing is, I actually found the Indian outsourcing teams I worked with nearly unusable as well. It may have to do with culture. I gave broad, general guidance about what we needed to do (store the millions of variables in a non-linear program in memory in an efficient data structure), and I got back code that used arrays. It's just one single example, of course, but a result like that is enough to want to dismiss the entire team and start over. But you know, I doubt Americans are producing all that many programmers who can do this either.
JabavuAdams 17y ago
I have no experience working with Indian outsourcing companies, so for now I'll just accept the general consensus here. Ok, if it's true that these people lack initiative, but are very good at following directions, then can one game the system to get essentially a parallel processor made out of humans? This would require the Indian outsourcing firms to be programmable. I.e. what's the overhead in uploading your own custom process / methodology, and training people on it? Do the benefits of scale outweigh the "re-tooling" time?
rnugent 17y ago
1/5th of the worlds population. 0/5ths of the worlds killer apps. Nothing of any value has come from India or Indian nationals.Except more Indian Nationals... India is a factory, nothing more. In this context this clown is right. No US Grad is employable as a mindless drone code monkey. We train our Grads to think on their feet, question the status quo, innovate and create. 1 Billion Indians and you will you will NEVER find one of those.
- Arun2009 17y ago
  Relax man. Chill a little. No one doubts that US universities are the best and that Indian universities and graduates have quite a long way to go (to put it mildly).
uniwiz 17y ago
Indians do great work and are smart, but fail to take shower daily. So correct title would be: Most Indian Grads Smell.
- iamelgringo 17y ago
  Completely inappropriate.
- queensnake 17y ago
  .. and chew with their mouths open, with the result that they sound like dogs eating. Yeah, downmod but, I'm performing a service so y'all know; better some anonymous person on the internet than someone to your face or, that you don't know altogether.
zandorg 17y ago
The British computer science teaching in Higher education is very high standard, but I can't get a job here myself. The BCS (British Computer Society, whose President I met in 2003), sets targets for University CS degrees in the UK. "BCS accredited".
alecco 17y ago
May I hate both the CEO of the anti-creative drone shop HCL CEO and the pompous elitist and medieval university system?
kris75 17y ago
Like he really means what he says -- first it was the employee first bull, now this -- so get the f*ck out of the US. None really cares about you and your company.
sarvesh 17y ago
Bullshit, somebody should ask him why undergraduates and grads from the top most schools in India refuse to work for companies like HCL, Wipro and Infosys. I studied in Bangalore and every good computer science grad I know never even had considered working for these companies.
rjurney 17y ago
To compare: most Indian grads (read: not IIT) have utterly useless degrees, and are happy to learn real skills under an IT services company and slave away for years.
PhillipJFry 17y ago
I generally agree with the sentiments expressed here, but might I play devil's advocate for a second and explore the other side? We are a self-selecting group of programmers who put a high degree of emphasis on bettering our skills and learning, and innovating. I would imagine that we all subscribe to the notion that a good developer can provide a value multiples higher than that of the typical "code monkey." I don't know if we'd all agree on the specific factor, but it's clearly greater than two. I got lucky and managed to find a very competent mentor. It's turned my world upside down, but I've managed to see the light. That's why I'm in this community. I work for a startup, etc. But how do you create value? What matters? This CEO clearly thinks that the way to create value is to hamper the free-flowing development processes that can truly yield great results given a good team. Instead of that he emphasizes top-down highly controlled development. To him developers are cogs in a machine. But honestly, if you have a product that isn't meant to be revolutionary, and you work in a well-defined field, then maybe this isn't such a terrible approach? Hypothetically speaking, with a few people on the top who know what needs to be done, and a very rigid lower structure, then it could clearly work. And by "work" I mean create revenue and satisfy customers. Now think back to your CS education (if you had one). In the US, a CS education attracts a lot of folks who aren't interested in the inventive, exploratory, creative method of programming. They learn Java (and only Java) because that's what's popular. They don't spend much time thinking about bettering their skills and the do what they are told. This is probably the vast majority of programmers, I would imagine. Now a lot of you guys out there probably attended more of the elite universities where you are exposed to this competitive / creative atmosphere. Or maybe you got that elsewhere, it doesn't really matter. But if you went to a lesser school, you'd see that the majority of the CS grads really aren't that different than code monkeys. They hate the theory classes because they don't expect to use it. And if they don't see the point in theory, then they won't use it. There are a few that will "get it" and they will excel in what they do. Because they are passionate. So why would you hire an American code monkey who costs five times as much as an Indian? I can't see the value either. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I feel that we also see so many stories of unemployable software engineers in the US. Knowing Java inside and out is a valuable skill, no doubt, but it isn't something all that creative. Now, back to reality here. The guy's main complaint is that Americans expect to get rich. Now at this point, I can't say that I agree. I don't know if your typical American "code monkey" is after that result. But I think that those of us who love what we do can justify higher pay, because we are more likely to generate much more revenue per body than the average code monkey. It's just that his management structure has no way to take advantage of greater talent. But that can be difficult.
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devicenull 17y ago
While the skills he are looking for are not something I think need to be taught, my experiences with classmates showed me that most don't have any idea what they are doing. In a class where we were supposed to be learning assembly language, I had to explain to more then a few people what the System.out.println() function did and java, and how to concatenate two strings. I'm unsure of how they couldn't figure this out by a 300 level course.

101 points by Elepsis 17y ago

The article makes a case for "the failure of the U.S. education system to prepare the country's next-generation tech workforce": Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They're far less inclined than students from developing countries ... to spend their time learning the "boring" details of tech process, methodology, and tools--ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like.

kqr2 17y ago
In his criticism, replace American grads with corporations and you get: Many corporations are looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich Of course, corporations want a cheap labor workforce that they don't have to train. A good college education should give you a solid foundation for learning new things; not just job training.
- avner 17y ago
  I concur. It should also be noted that the work culture in the US is different than that of India. Very often, foreign companies investing in the U.S. make the mistake of expecting the same uniformity in the local workforce that they are used to seeing back home. I should also mention the monumental levels of competition overseas students like in India have to clear to have a shot at a school like IIT, and I guess this radiates into everything else that follows. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology#Entrance_competition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...
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patio11 17y ago
I have been managing a portion of my company's Indian outsourcing operations for the last two years. Speaking in generalities, I think that the system over there privileges "methodologies" and certifications over both core skills and core CS concepts. I have talented Java engineers working for me who I have had to teach regular expressions to. Many American engineers with graduate degrees in CS from a good university would be able to predict that /ab+/ matched the string "abc". It would be unlikely in the extreme for them to have never heard of the word "regular expression" before. I am oh for five on this with my most recent five Indian engineers. Even after teaching them basic regular expressions I have not found them capable of using them to accomplish tasks without specific direction. (For example, if someVariableName is used in the project, and the customer later informs us that our naming of it does not match their understanding, we might have to rewrite that variable name and associated variables and methods globally. It should be trivial to find all instances of that with a search by regexp, right? But they don't hear that in the instruction "X is now called Y, change all appropriate variables and methods" -- instead, two days later I'm told they're done with a job that I expected to take a few hours, and then I fire a regexp against the source tree and see that 40% of it is still not done.) I have frequently had to explain bugs to our engineers which resulted not from chance or carelessness but from simple ignorance of core CS101 concepts, such as pass by reference. (Example: In our first code review, I noticed a lot of reuse of HashMaps to carry parameters to DAOs. I told folks to not reuse them, because that introduces the risk of somebody changing the HashMap in the DAO, thus causing later users of the map to have unexpected behavior. I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it. This does not happen, and it is a CS101 misconception. Sure enough, we had bugs caused by reuse. So, after a remedial CS101 lecture to the team, I reiterated that maps were not to be reused, because they would cause bugs. What do I find in Code Review #2? More reuse of HashMaps, with "final" applied to all of them. Final does not magically turn pass-by-reference into pass-by-value. (The fact that this obviously did not fix the bugs and would have been caught by ANY testing of the code is another matter. We get that a lot.) When I ask our engineers what they wanted to accomplish in terms of professional growth in their time in Japan, the answer was unanimous: study for certs, which they all already had several of. I'm not necessarily hostile to certs in theory, but I'm sure starting to cool to them in practice. As for teaching "tools": I won't be too harsh on India because American universities fail at it, too, but if they're teaching fundamentals of source control or IDEs I have yet to see any evidence of it. We have been trying to change a corporate culture at our Indian partners away from having one "source control master" per twenty engineers. They're the only ones permitted to commit -- everyone else mails their code to the source control master, who integrates it. This is to "stop people from breaking the build". Our Indian colleagues have their own requests for us. For example, they would prefer not to use source control, "since it adds overhead to our management processes". I freely admit that I only have seen about three corporate cultures from over there and may just have terrible, terrible luck. [Edited to add: Neither my company nor I are blameless for this state of affairs. Believe me, we have many, many areas we could improve upon collectively, and I have many, many individual weakpoints, including a longstanding cavalierness about how much testing needs to be done prior to shipping. I don't want it to sound just like I'm blaming our Indian colleagues.]

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avner 17y ago
Your opinion has to be one of the most unconversant comments I have read on HN in a while. Please stop - Thanks. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- digamber_kamat 17y ago
  ---Your opinion has to be one of the most unconversant comments I have read on HN in a while--- :D :D I am pleased to know that the students in US are unemployable. But then I guess its the case world over. India has 5 lakh engineering graduates. only 20% of them are employable.
  - jrnkntl 17y ago
    And the other 80% tries their luck on elance / similar sites.
dthakur 17y ago
I agree it isn't wrong to expect a good salary and make a good living for yourself and your family. However, the article is about how American tech graduates are either uninterested or under-trained for work in the industry. Your comment is mostly reiterating stereotypes of Indian students which is not a meaningful addition to the discussion.

smanek 17y ago

ITIL and Six Sigma? They're looking for the wrong skills. If that's his complaint, he's right. I'm not going to waste my time memorizing a series of 'comprehensive checklists' in college. I doubt I know a single CS/Math student who has done more than peruse the Wikipedia article (or maybe read a book in their spare time if they're feeling particularly masochistic) on Six Sigma - and I like to think that I know many great students in the field (several who've worked for Google, Sun, NSA, Microsoft Research, etc). There have been many times that I've said 'Damn, I wish I knew more about X.' In the last week alone X has included POMDPs, multi-dimensional interval trees, or functors. I have never, not once, wished I knew more about the management fad du jour.

thwarted 17y ago
The best way to learn about management fad du jour is to be subjected to it. And the main, perhaps only, thing worth learning about it is that you want to avoid it.
plinkplonk 17y ago
HCL (like Infosys, TCS Wipro etc) is a body shopper firm and has nothing much to do with "Computer Science" or the cool things you mention (multidimensional interval trees, POMDP etc). Mr Nayar is just saying that he thinks American Graduates don't have the kind of crap enterprise buzzword "skills" that he can sell to clueless managers at x $/hr. Mr Nayar and his firm wouldn't know what to do with someone who is really good at Computer Science or Math, because those are not the "markets" he addresses. I would imagine an American grad student would be happy to be unemployable (by Mr Nayar). Really this is just a bodyshopper trying to justify why he isn't hiring costly Americans (vs cheap Indians). Of course he can't say "I am looking for cheap bodies to ship offshore and Americans are expensive", and still retian his job. These mumblings aren't worthy of being upset over. Due Disclosure: I am Indian. I work in India (Bangalore to be precise), but I do work with POMDPs, MultiDimensional Interval Trees and so on ;-) (My latest project is in Robotic Vision and Navigation, for the Indian Defence Dept)
- sdave 17y ago
  well said plinkplonk ! As an indian techie myself i have to second with you.

scscsc 17y ago

Get it? Lower your expectations! Do not want to get rich! Want to work for the same amount as people from undeveloped economies! Then maybe you can find a place in the organization of this top CEO, if you're lucky enough.

andreyf 17y ago

HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. For the most part, he said, those institutions haven't been receptive to such industry partnerships. In my experience, the largest influence of employers on schools has been the pervasiveness of Java in higher education. Since it's now all but obvious how horribly short-sighted "teaching Java in college" turned out to be, I think the burden of proof is on him to explain why teaching everyone "ITIL, Six Sigma, and the like" isn't equally short-sighted.

gscott 17y ago

Having worked with Indian Developers I would never suggest anyone be trained to not be able to see the "big picture" or not be able to take instructions longer then one sentence. It's insane and this person is right, American graduates just can't think that way however, McDonald's workers CAN think that way. He is looking in the wrong place for employees, he needs to cull employees from the fast food industry who can do one step then stop, one stop then stop, one step then stop, and be happy with that lifestyle.

known 17y ago

I think this CEO is saying that it is hard to find non h1b wage slaves in America.

jeswin 17y ago

I call BS; and I live in Bangalore, and I run a software company. Over the last 8 years I have worked with dozens of American programmers, and on an average they are better than their Indian counterparts. His own company (HCL) employs some of the people who I thought formed the bottom of the class. Yet another senior programmer in another IT major (TCS) who was a CS grad, thought he was writing code for a new 16 bit computer. From the article itself, it is easy to see what he considers talent: following Six Sigma, CMM etc. Guess what, CMM itself is so ridiculously outdated that only Indian IT companies seek it. In a CMM review I was part of in 2007, they said 80% were Indian IT companies. Needless to say, there are more failed projects that successful ones. Our website says "Made in India"; but sadly, thanks to these IT companies it could be mistaken as a 'Process-driven, cheap, intellect-independent way of building software'. These massive "brick-in-the-wall", "Enterprise" Indian IT Companies compete exclusively on "hourly-billing-rate". There is hope in sight, but they come from smaller, newer companies.

muon 17y ago
As we all know, there is no silver bullet, that will miraculously rescue the ailing software engineering. Yesteryear's process becomes today's joke. It's unfortunate that Indian companies are madly following the buzz words/process without understanding how it is supposed to work.
- metachor 17y ago
  "madly following the buzz words/process without understanding how it is supposed to work" This sounds like a form of cargo cult software development management. On a more general level this sounds like a common, if insidious, human trait: merely emulating the outward signs of successful persons or groups in an attempt to recreate or capture that success for oneself.

sachinag 17y ago

Frankly, his complaints are why the West has nothing to fear from India any time soon. As an Indian, there is nothing more important than external verification of one's social status. For example, in India, they ISO certify everything. FFS, the number one dating (I wish I could use strikethrough on HN and put matrimonial after, but c'est la vie) website for Indians is ISO certified: http://www.shaadi.com/customer_relations/faq/iso-certification.php http://www.shaadi.com/customer_relations/faq/iso-certificati... Indians are fantastic at rote memorization and will listen to directions to the letter - no freelancing there. To India's benefit, it should mean that they'll be spitting out really, really good cars (as long as they're designed elsewhere) and large industrial output in the near future.

wheels 17y ago
Frankly, his complaints are why the West has nothing to fear from India any time soon. Well, the rich countries aren't going to lose their edge in tech innovation in the short term, but that doesn't mean that a lot of jobs won't continue to migrate to poorer countries. This is an old tune though -- as technologies slip away from the leading edge they tend to relocate to places where they can be produced at a lower cost. It sounds like what the CEO quoted in the article is saying is that Americans don't fit the bill for that kind of development.
ideamonk 17y ago
"Indians are fantastic at rote memorization" , and you know what being an Indian, I hate that lot of the crowd. There is a lack of independent thinkers here, and the rotten education system that puts emphasis on memorization (eg. my college) are the ones responsible for creating such a crowd of fantastic memorizers... I wish they encouraged more of learning by doing here and we could've had better people to boast about.
silverlake 17y ago
You're being too hard on India. In every country there is a small % of talented programmers. Many of those smart Indian programmers are doing fantastic work in grad schools around the world. They are a huge part of Silicon Valley (as are Chinese ex-pats). Of course, there's a larger % of code monkeys. Indian code monkeys are, IMO, better than American code monkeys because they follow instructions and work hard despite their limited talents. Rote memorization and checklists and "process" are necessary to get less capable programmers to function.

fab13n 17y ago

What he's observing is that his jobs--the ones given to outsourcing companies--have diverged from the ones taken by companies in Western wealthier countries. It ought to be so: if Americans and Indians were competing for the same jobs, the current difference in salaries couldn't have been sustained for so long. Most people who have worked with outsourcing know the limits, especially in terms of initiative, understanding or even common sense, of what can be done successfully by Indian IT companies. The whole article only makes sense for people who think that "guys who are paid to do stuff on a computer" are a single, mostly uniform resource. What is very worrying is that this illiterate understanding seems to be held by top executives of international IT companies.

prtamil 17y ago

What HCL CEO was saying is true, American Grads are not employable because they are interested in creating new technology and starting new start ups, Ideal American grad wants to start a startup.And look its the American started google, microsoft, ibm, youtube etc... If you want perfect employee who want to maintain the 10 year old technology created by American companies you can get it only from india and China. I never seen an Indian created new product that changes world. Apart from creating bull shit products for maintaining documents for Sig Sigma , iso 9001, CRM etc. --- Angry young Indian.

Arun2009 17y ago
Dude, you can start by creating your own new stuff. There's nothing stopping you.
unexpected 17y ago
You can start by creating a product that changes India. Americans are predominantly the ones who do startups because America is the biggest player in the global economy, and no one understands American culture, desires, and needs quite better than America. Look at Shaadi.com. A site like that would have fallen flat on its face in America. Conversely, a site like Match.com and eHarmony would be really unsuccessful in India. You have a unique opportunity in India. There are tons of startups that could only be done in India, and not in America. These startups need to be done by Indians, not by Americans. The track record of American VC's in India isn't very good, they just don't "get it". Historically, business in India has been dominated by the big family players- the Ambami's, the Birla's, the Tata's. This is because every business in India has a huge government overhead to deal with- it's hard to go above the mom-and-pop level without dealing with the corruption and bureaucracy that plagues India. The Internet changes all that. More and more people are getting wired. The local politicians, the corrupt officials that want bribes, and all the other authorities can't control you in cyberspace. You instantly eliminate all that overhead! So go and develop your idea! It's stupid to speak in terms of generalizations and stereotypes. Yes, there's a large culture gap between America and India- this makes it hard for Indians to innovate- it's hard to cross that chasm and understand our needs. But there's nothing stopping you from developing a site just for Indians. The Indian version of cyberspace is basically like 1997. Everyone is still building these big "portals". Indian newspapers are still coming online. American companies are just using India as a bodyshop and not really serving India's needs. Stop thinking about how India can cater to the US, and start thinking about how India can cater to India. Once India does this, India can control her own destiny and become the superpower it so badly wants to be. --an ABCD

luckystrike 17y ago

I guess a better title would have been: "Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable' for his firm" In my opinion, this article and his views do not deserve too much attention. But it scares me how top management of some of these so called 'software development' firms trends to drift away from reality, and just start equating developing software to having an assembly line like process.

baha_man 17y ago

"Many American grads... [are] far less inclined than students from developing countries like India, China, Brazil, South Africa, and Ireland..." Ireland? A developing country? I don't think so.

puzzle-out 17y ago
It may be soon.
- falsestprophet 17y ago
  It is absurd to declare that one of the most prosperous countries in the world is going to be suddenly rendered into a country of subsistence farmers (like China, Brazil, or India) because of a real estate bubble.
  - tybris 17y ago
    Well, developing doesn't necessarily mean substistence farming. They're just developing beyond the rest of us. On the other hand, this is probably one of the last countries in the world where you still pay more than 50 euro's per month for 1Mbps ADSL.
    - ajtaylor 17y ago
      Hear, hear! I get flyers in my door all the time talking about "fast broadband" where fast == 1-3Mb. I'm moving soon and will be switching to NTL (cable) and getting 10Mb/1Mb for less money. Death to Eircom and their €26/mo line rental charge!
- IsaacL 17y ago
  More like "it used to be". It now has one of the highest GDP/Capita rates in Europe. Actually, I just checked Wikipedia - it has the 6th highest GDP/c in the world.

dinkumthinkum 17y ago

Surely, the fact that he has an Indian surname has nothing to do with this, even though his view is very simplistic and overly optimistic about the quality of training in "Indian bootcamps."

heresy 17y ago

He can have his ITIL/Six Sigma jobs. I'm sorry my education didn't prepare me to be a dumb ass robot. Oh wait, no, I'm not. And enjoying my intellectually satisfiying job.

gurtwo 17y ago
What do you do for work? I'm frustrated with mine. The saddest thing is my colleagues are either equally frustrated or indifferent. I don't know much people around me that would say "I'm satisfied at what I do". So I'm curious about yours.

voidpointer 17y ago

In other words, universities are still not good at producing the code monkeys that Mr. Nayar requires to run his body shops. Now if someone could explain to me why that is a bad thing?

vinutheraj 17y ago
Exactly !! The process of college education is not to make drones out of people but to imbibe the culture of learning.
- redrobot5050 17y ago
  According to my co-workers, its so they can get a sweet ass job and get paid.
zaidf 17y ago
Fair enough. Do you think it's better to not be a code monkey and be unemployed than be a code monkey and have a boring-ass job?
- tybris 17y ago
  I bet that for every unemployed MSc/PhD from a respectable CS department you can find >100 unemployed code monkies.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    I think that is the possible flaw in your interpretation of what this guy said: he's not asking people so much to not do PhDs as he is asking people who are neither PhDs nor code monkeys to become code monkeys. I may not agree to the guy's agenda. But I see nothing wrong in encouraging more Americans to become programmers. Whether they are code monkeys or PhDs is a personal choice folks make and nothing is stopping current code monkeys to become PhDs.
    - voidpointer 17y ago

ajju 17y ago

In an interview following his presentation, Vineet said HCL and other employers need to have a greater influence on the tech curricula of U.S. colleges and universities, to make them more real-world and rigorous. Hahahaha .. if Six Sigma is more "real world" and rigorous than what they teach in good CS programs in the US, I am Warren Buffett. God forbid Vineet here gets his wishes about influence with U.S. colleges, because if he does, bank on the number of great engineers graduating from these schools dropping precipitously.

geebee 17y ago

I don't think Mr. Vineet is incorrect when he suggests that most American grads are unemployable. Most people are, in fact, not employable as software developers. The funny thing is, I actually found the Indian outsourcing teams I worked with nearly unusable as well. It may have to do with culture. I gave broad, general guidance about what we needed to do (store the millions of variables in a non-linear program in memory in an efficient data structure), and I got back code that used arrays. It's just one single example, of course, but a result like that is enough to want to dismiss the entire team and start over. But you know, I doubt Americans are producing all that many programmers who can do this either.

JabavuAdams 17y ago

I have no experience working with Indian outsourcing companies, so for now I'll just accept the general consensus here. Ok, if it's true that these people lack initiative, but are very good at following directions, then can one game the system to get essentially a parallel processor made out of humans? This would require the Indian outsourcing firms to be programmable. I.e. what's the overhead in uploading your own custom process / methodology, and training people on it? Do the benefits of scale outweigh the "re-tooling" time?

rnugent 17y ago

1/5th of the worlds population. 0/5ths of the worlds killer apps. Nothing of any value has come from India or Indian nationals.Except more Indian Nationals... India is a factory, nothing more. In this context this clown is right. No US Grad is employable as a mindless drone code monkey. We train our Grads to think on their feet, question the status quo, innovate and create. 1 Billion Indians and you will you will NEVER find one of those.

Arun2009 17y ago
Relax man. Chill a little. No one doubts that US universities are the best and that Indian universities and graduates have quite a long way to go (to put it mildly).

uniwiz 17y ago

Indians do great work and are smart, but fail to take shower daily. So correct title would be: Most Indian Grads Smell.

iamelgringo 17y ago
Completely inappropriate.
queensnake 17y ago
.. and chew with their mouths open, with the result that they sound like dogs eating. Yeah, downmod but, I'm performing a service so y'all know; better some anonymous person on the internet than someone to your face or, that you don't know altogether.

zandorg 17y ago

The British computer science teaching in Higher education is very high standard, but I can't get a job here myself. The BCS (British Computer Society, whose President I met in 2003), sets targets for University CS degrees in the UK. "BCS accredited".

alecco 17y ago

May I hate both the CEO of the anti-creative drone shop HCL CEO and the pompous elitist and medieval university system?

kris75 17y ago

Like he really means what he says -- first it was the employee first bull, now this -- so get the f*ck out of the US. None really cares about you and your company.

sarvesh 17y ago

Bullshit, somebody should ask him why undergraduates and grads from the top most schools in India refuse to work for companies like HCL, Wipro and Infosys. I studied in Bangalore and every good computer science grad I know never even had considered working for these companies.

rjurney 17y ago

To compare: most Indian grads (read: not IIT) have utterly useless degrees, and are happy to learn real skills under an IT services company and slave away for years.

PhillipJFry 17y ago

I generally agree with the sentiments expressed here, but might I play devil's advocate for a second and explore the other side? We are a self-selecting group of programmers who put a high degree of emphasis on bettering our skills and learning, and innovating. I would imagine that we all subscribe to the notion that a good developer can provide a value multiples higher than that of the typical "code monkey." I don't know if we'd all agree on the specific factor, but it's clearly greater than two. I got lucky and managed to find a very competent mentor. It's turned my world upside down, but I've managed to see the light. That's why I'm in this community. I work for a startup, etc. But how do you create value? What matters? This CEO clearly thinks that the way to create value is to hamper the free-flowing development processes that can truly yield great results given a good team. Instead of that he emphasizes top-down highly controlled development. To him developers are cogs in a machine. But honestly, if you have a product that isn't meant to be revolutionary, and you work in a well-defined field, then maybe this isn't such a terrible approach? Hypothetically speaking, with a few people on the top who know what needs to be done, and a very rigid lower structure, then it could clearly work. And by "work" I mean create revenue and satisfy customers. Now think back to your CS education (if you had one). In the US, a CS education attracts a lot of folks who aren't interested in the inventive, exploratory, creative method of programming. They learn Java (and only Java) because that's what's popular. They don't spend much time thinking about bettering their skills and the do what they are told. This is probably the vast majority of programmers, I would imagine. Now a lot of you guys out there probably attended more of the elite universities where you are exposed to this competitive / creative atmosphere. Or maybe you got that elsewhere, it doesn't really matter. But if you went to a lesser school, you'd see that the majority of the CS grads really aren't that different than code monkeys. They hate the theory classes because they don't expect to use it. And if they don't see the point in theory, then they won't use it. There are a few that will "get it" and they will excel in what they do. Because they are passionate. So why would you hire an American code monkey who costs five times as much as an Indian? I can't see the value either. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why I feel that we also see so many stories of unemployable software engineers in the US. Knowing Java inside and out is a valuable skill, no doubt, but it isn't something all that creative. Now, back to reality here. The guy's main complaint is that Americans expect to get rich. Now at this point, I can't say that I agree. I don't know if your typical American "code monkey" is after that result. But I think that those of us who love what we do can justify higher pay, because we are more likely to generate much more revenue per body than the average code monkey. It's just that his management structure has no way to take advantage of greater talent. But that can be difficult.

deleted 17y ago

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devicenull 17y ago

While the skills he are looking for are not something I think need to be taught, my experiences with classmates showed me that most don't have any idea what they are doing. In a class where we were supposed to be learning assembly language, I had to explain to more then a few people what the System.out.println() function did and java, and how to concatenate two strings. I'm unsure of how they couldn't figure this out by a 300 level course.