Indian CEO Says Most US Tech Grads "Unemployable"

theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable.' Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."

Comments

outsourcing and unemployment

[walshy007]

yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have 10 people and none of them have jobs, you have 100% unemployment. If you then bring in 90 people with jobs and keep the 10 people with no jobs, you have 100 people and only 10% unemployment.

See? Bringing in people and giving them jobs does help local unemployment.

dom

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there's no way to turn it off. It was designed by all those incompetent American programmers!

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[gbjbaanb]

unfortunately, it seems that if /. *had* outsourced their coding this silly javascript nonsense we're seeing would be fixed.... eventually, and for lots of money, after a process consultant had submitted the change request forms and the technical lead had decided that a complete rewrite using .net was the only way to solve the problem.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[Anachragnome]

Interestingly enough, changing my preferences (and saving them) to simple view, low-bandwidth, no icons did ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING.

Same garbage all over my screen.

I am thoroughly convinced this is a Phishing site and all of our passwords are now being used to pound our Karma into the mud so NewYorkCountryLawyer looks even better then he already did.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been having a tough time finding a reasonably qualified programmer from straight out of college. I'm not looking for senior database developers, just people who can solve basic logic skills and... write software!

You are in luck. As fate has it, I am straight out of college student, looking for work as a programmer.

 

From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)

No worries, I will give answers instead of blank stares, though blank stares may last 10-15 seconds as I parse questions. My language of choice to answer questions is Ruby. Let's look at some answers that you claim Master's graduates have trouble with.

 

1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?

def string_replace(str, find, replace="")

    pos = Regexp.new(Regexp.quote(find)) =~ str

    if pos.nil?
        return nil
    end

    ret = str[0...pos] + replace + str[(pos + find.length)..-1]
    return ret
end

This function returns a string with find changed to replace, first instance only. A nil is returned is the target string is not found, and removes the target string if a replacement string is not provided. For instance:

def string_replace("I like blue.", "blue", "red")

would return:

"I like red."

 

2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?

arr.map{|num| num=num+5}

 

3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?

UPDATE tblname SET col = col + 5

 

4) Write up any form of database "select" query. I don't expect it to parse, just have the basic pieces. Honestly, just a simple "Select field [, field2] from [table] where (conditions));" would suffice.

You pretty much answered this one yourself. In any case, for an example,
SELECT firstname, lastname FROM people WHERE age >= 21
would get the names of people who can drink (in America)

 

5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 children".

x = 5
str = "I have " + x.to_s + " children."

 

These are all questions I would consider basic when looking for a database programmer, which is the position being advertised, and for which many of the resumes I see are clearly targeting, with words like "Oracle", "Database", and "Information Architecture" in them, underneath "Masters Degree" and "Information Science".

I'm ok with missing a few. But getting only 1 or 2 sensible answers out of 10 or 20 like this?!? How *does* one get a Masters Degree in Information Science without being able to answer basic questions like this?

About me, I am a college graduate from a well-known university with a Bachelor's in Computer Science from the College of Engineering with a 3.5+ GPA. Since you don't correlate degrees with talent, I won't bore you with the details. However, if you are willing to take a chance, I am willing to demonstrate my abilities and prove that I can do what you need, so take a chance on a random guy from Slashdot.

No Slashdot account, but I can reached at hire.random.guy.from.slashdot@gmail.com (Registered just for this purpose.)

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[PinchDuck]

If those 90 people are forbidden from eating cows by their religion, the original 10 are still screwed. McDonald's won't be hiring.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[xSauronx]

wtf does mcdonalds have to do with cows?

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[balloonhead]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Slashdot fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a MacPro (3GHz / Quad-core, 8GB of RAM), directly connected to one of the internet's root servers, for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to load the front page with all the new scripting. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4 on a 300 baud modem with IP over Avian Carriers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers), which by all standards should be a lot slower than this MacPro, loading the old site would take about 10 seconds. If that.

In addition, during this page load, Chrome will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Twitter is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while surfing the new site, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is being unable to get the preferences to actually change anything, despite the open source 'Bazaar' architecture seemingly allowing the community to quickly suggest a fix without waiting for a proprietary solution to release a solution. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram printing on a daisy-wheel printer and posting that surface mail to OSDN directly to request a printout of the front page by return post delivers content faster than this cutting edge computational monster on government-grade bandwidth. From a productivity standpoint, browsing Slashdot no longer just occupies my employer's paid time but interrupts my personal life and sleep pattern too now.

Slashdot addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use Slashdot over Digg.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[GeckoAddict]

Woah... did you guys here that giant whooshing sound?

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[pwfffff]

"Seriously don't expect university graduates to be able to do any professional job well, engineering, architecture or software coding, all the graduates will require years of training to become anything approaching useful."

Years of training, eh? Hmmm... if only there was some kind of institution that could offer this training, perhaps for a tuition fee...

Huh? HCL?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just graduated in computer engineering in the USA. I know stuff, but we never learned the HCL programming language.

Fixed that for you...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Most Americans are unemployable...

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[Swampash]

India has not done a damned thing for the USA

It would be hard to neatly express the USA's $11,400,000,000,000 debt without the zero. Invented in India.

OOOH BURN!

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[t0qer]

I would totally mod you up if I had points. Your comment was so poetically simple yet dead on. Thank you.

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[nine-times]

I'd much rather we were $114 in debt.

...News at 11.

[nine-times]

CEO of Indian outsourcing company says Indians are better workers than Americans. In other news, CEO of GM says that GM is a better company than Toyota.

Yes, we yanks are such dolts!

[spiffmastercow]

If only we could have those 2-week programming courses you give your Indian programmers before you let them loose on mission-critical projects, imagine what great programmers we could be!

'walking the extra mile'

[jsse]

of bugs and loopholes?

That explains everything...

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think $114 would be easier to pay off than $11.4 trillion, do you? Those bozos in Washington would bicker for months over how to pay the damned $114 and we'd miss a payment, get the late payment penalty, then the overdraft charge and telephone-assisted payment fee, then Barack's Amex would invoke the universal default clause in the fine print and BAM! we're back up to 11.4 trillion before you know it!

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be hard to neatly express the USA's $11,400,000,000,000 debt without the zero. Invented in India.

1.14E+13 :p

Re:Huh? HCL?

[Opportunist]

I'd guess any programmer who takes this approach fits perfectly into a vat of HCl. Solves the problem for sure!

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[SoVeryTired]

The USA is $11,399,999,999,999.9 (recurring) in debt.

HA!

Lost in Translation

[rob_benson]

By "Boring details" I assume he means the ability to follow a support script verbatim long after it has become amazingly obvious that it does not apply to the problem that needs to be solved.

Re:Wrong

[necro81]

Perhaps, but the concept of zero didn't migrate into the mainstream of human culture via the Mayans. The height of Mayan civilization was pre-Columbian, and there's no evidence that their ideas made it across the Pacific, so they didn't have a chance to contribute their ideas to the rest of humanity.

Now, if they'd only filed a patent...

Re:Unemployable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, also Americans have a god-given right to be fat and lazy.

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[pottymouth]

How about $11,399,999,999,999 + $1 ? Ha!! Smarty pants!! Of course that was before Obama.... The number is a lot bigger now...