

Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are 'Unemployable' - Elepsis
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2009/06/top_indian_ceo.html

======
smanek
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.

~~~
plinkplonk
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
well said plinkplonk ! As an indian techie myself i have to second with you.

~~~
kris75
techie? what exactly are your skills, may I ask?

------
jeswin
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
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
"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.

------
voidpointer
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?

~~~
zaidf
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
I bet that for every unemployed MSc/PhD from a respectable CS department you
can find >100 unemployed code monkies.

~~~
zaidf
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
You are right. The guy runs a business and he is looking for a certain type of
worker. What I take issue with is the view that it is the responsibility of
academic institutions to provide the type of workers that he needs.

If he finds that people from an academic background are not willing to submit
to his requirements I would assume that they wont submit because they can find
more fulfilling work elsewhere.

Furthermore, it's not how methodologies are called at these places, it is how
they are used: an excuse for middle management to look at charts and metrics
without having to deal with the human aspect of their team.

~~~
zaidf

        I would assume that they wont submit 
        because they can find more fulfilling work elsewhere.
    

Again, I don't think he is addressing people who already have a job. Think
about why he was even asked this question: apparently because there is this
popular notion that America does not have enough IT workers and therefore
needs to get 'em from India etc.

I am not sure how true or untrue that notion is. But it is widely accepted.

I do see your point and think it is valid: the current American compsci grads
and engineers usually can find a job. What this guy should be talking about is
EXPANDING the total size of the engineering/compsci grads so even folks not
necessarily very inclined can come in and do tedious but decent paying jobs.
The end result is more money goes to Americans and fewer importation of labor
from India etc.

~~~
voidpointer
Well, since there is the need for this work to be done, it makes sense that
someone gets trained to do that work. I remain skeptical though whether a
university is the right provider for such a kind of education.

I'm from Germany and we do not really have an equivalent to US college
education. Secondary education is partially integrated in our equivalent to a
high school and you go to university after that. Alternatively, there is
another path of secondary education/apprenticeship where you split your time
between working for a company to get hands-on experience in your chosen line
of work and attend classes the rest of the time. Such apprenticeships are also
available for IT and software development related work.

Nevertheless, a lot of people believe that programming a computer is a
sufficiently complex activity which only people that have attended university
are capable of. That may be a part of the problem that the guy in the original
article was complaining about: although people can acquire the skills needed
to be a programmer elsewhere, they still go to universities in order to secure
some credentials that will increase their chances of employment.

------
sachinag
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-
certificati...](http://www.shaadi.com/customer_relations/faq/iso-
certification.php)

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.

~~~
silverlake
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.

~~~
DougWebb
"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."

I don't think I'd use the word "better" here. As a US senior developer who
delegates a lot of work to both Indian contractors and in-house junior
developers, it really doesn't help me when the person I'm delegating to can't
do the job well, but works real hard at it. That just wastes time and still
produces inferior code. I'd much rather have the person tell me "I'm lost and
can't do this" right away, so I can either delegate to someone else or provide
more detailed directions earlier rather than later.

Also, consider applying that statement to any other professional career. Would
you want your less-capable doctor to be allowed to practice medicine because
he can memorize really well and follow checklists? No, of course not: the
less-capable doctor should be forced to find a career he's good at.

~~~
iamelgringo
Sadly, I'm a critical care nurse, and I've worked with a lot of doctors that
aren't really capable, but they practice medicine because they were able to
memorize really well and follow checklists.

The person who graduates at the bottom of his medical school class still gets
to write "Md" after his name.

------
andreyf
_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.

------
ajju
_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.

------
prtamil
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.

~~~
unexpected
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

~~~
mynameishere
_Look at Shaadi.com._

[Looks at Shaadi.com...]

Well, no kidding. I couldn't even fill in the form right. What the hell is my
caste? No one told me.

------
fab13n
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.

------
baha_man
"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
It may be soon.

~~~
falsestprophet
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
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
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!

------
quizbiz
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._

~~~
patio11
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.]

~~~
adinobro
I may be wrong but I'm fairly sure that /ab+/ would not match the string
"abc". I might just be using a different library but /ab+/ would match "ab",
"abb", "abbb", etc. The plus means one of more of the previous character.
/ab?/ would match "abc" though...

~~~
cousin_it
The regular expressions built into many programming languages have the
semantics of matching any part of the string, not necessarily the whole
string. If you want to match the whole string, you're supposed to put ^ at the
beginning and $ at the end, or something like that.

------
scscsc
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.

------
gscott
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.

------
geebee
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.

------
luckystrike
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.

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

------
heresy
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
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.

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

------
JabavuAdams
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?

------
devicenull
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.

------
zandorg
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".

------
rjurney
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.

------
kris75
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.

------
PhillipJFry
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.

------
dinkumthinkum
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."

------
sarvesh
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.

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

~~~
iamelgringo
Completely inappropriate.

