Anyone who works in a high tech profession in America probably works with a lot of Indians. In fact, outsourcing and the related problem of importing cheaper Indian computer programmers was an issue for many Americans in the 2004 presidential election. Which party was more likely to keep that high-paying programmer job here and not ship it overseas?
There were those who charged objectors with racism, but, honestly, it was more about keeping one's wages and the quality of programming high. In 2004, the average American programmer made $60,000, while his foreign counterpart was making about $53,000. And I know from personal experience, big companies were more than happy to lobby for more H-1B and L-1 visas (those used to bring in Indian programmers) so they could hire more foreign workers.
Worse from a programmer's perspective, the new Indian programmer with a master's degree willing to work for $40,000 a year couldn't program anything. It was amazing to Americans, with our huge college computer labs, but many Indian programmers could graduate without having done any programming. In India, electrical outages are commonplace and few people have computers at home. Access to the same technology found in America could be scarce.
The complaints by American programmers of the poor quality of Indian programmers isn't racism, but reality, and the Guardian article confirms it.
Much of the problem is rooted in a deeply flawed school system.
As India's economy blossomed over 15 years, spawning a middle class desperate to push their children further up the economic ladder, the higher education system grew dramatically. The number of engineering colleges, for instance, has nearly tripled.
But the problems have simply grown worse.
India has technical institutes that seldom have electricity, and colleges with no computers. There are universities where professors seldom show up. Textbooks can be decades old.
Even at the best schools - and the government-run Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world's most competitive, with top-level professors and elaborate facilities - there are problems.
The brutal competition to get into these universities means ambitious students can spend a year or more in private cram schools, giving up everything to study full-time for the entrance exams.
Instruction is by rote learning, and only test scores count.
"Everything else is forgotten: the capacity to think, to write, to be logical, to get along with people," Pai said. The result is smart, well-educated people who can have trouble with such professional basics as working on a team or good phone manners.
"The focus," he said, "is cram, cram, cram, cram."
But after 15 years of turning out computer programmers of whatever quality,
India is now running out of high tech workers.
Nearly two decades into India's phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It's running out of workers.
There may be a lot of potential - Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year - but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say.
Instead, graduates are leaving universities that are mired in theory classes, and sometimes so poorly funded they don't have computer labs. Even students from the best colleges can be dulled by cram schools and left without the most basic communication skills, according to industry leaders.
So the country's voracious high-tech companies, desperate for ever-increasing numbers of staffers to fill their ranks, have to go hunting.
"The problem is not a shortage of people," said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. "It's a shortage of trained people."
A country of 1.03 billion people having a worker shortage? It sounds bizarre, but it isn't that there aren't enough people. It's that there aren't enough trained people. That's the same argument American companies used to raise the number of foreign programmers that could get visas in this country. Is India going to need a similar program? Or worse, raise wages?
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