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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."
I'd say its time to pull the plug on free trade and let these people jump start their own local economies on their own merits, and not on shoveling their crap into the USA. India has not done a damned thing for the USA and I see no reason why the USA should throw its people out of work to subsidize India's economy.
Free trade is not worth it.
This is my sig.
I posted this before and I'll post it again.
So far in the last 12 months I've had three side projects that projects that were outsourced but for whatever reason such a mess was made of them that the clients have brought them to us to fix at a higher than normal rate.
My employer's now collaborating with an "reverse" outsourcing mob who've set themselves up to help people bring their failing outsourced projects back and are getting a fair bit of work through it.
To be honest, the quality of code I'm seeing is easily the worst I've ever seen and that includes half-assed open source projects. Whether that's because it's just "sweatshop code" as one client put it or they are attempting to write super advanced AI code generators and using them to generate the code...and failing miserably, I don't know. But it's terrible. From the complete lack of imagination and forward thinking in design, right down to the god awful highly inconsistently cased variable names.
Remember this is *three* different projects from three different Indian companies theoretically written by three different sets of programmers. The code all looks and feels the same, which leads me to believe there's something going on industry wide over there. What that is I have no idea but they need to fix it quick smart as the industry as a whole is getting a bit of a reputation.
What I do know is people are willing to pay much more once they've tried outsourcing and failed.
Those that don't go out of business in the mean time that is.
(Yes I'm sure there's some top quality code coming out of India, I doubt most of it is written by the sorts of companies in this articlee).
I have to review code coming from India it is full of bugs, short cuts, and shit that doesn't make a damn bit of sense
Amen. I won't say that all the programmers in India suck, because that would be an inaccurate stereotype. However, I will say that The worst code I have ever seen from American programmers I have worked with was better than the best code that came back from Indian outsourced groups. I suspect that all the GOOD INDIAN PROGRAMMERS CAME TO AMERICA TO MAKE BETTER MONEY.
Why would you hire the leftovers? Really, you think that you can just get better quality by spending less? Really?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The biz lobbyists first claimed that not enough US citizens were going into the field. Now it's that we are "too lazy for the details", not quantity? Which is it? Outsourcing and H1B's were never sold as a way to replace "C" Americans with "A" 3rd-worlders. Did they lie to Congress and voters?
Table-ized A.I.
Supposedly, the Indians coming to the States are the smartest. I find them to be no better than American educated and trained workers. IIT is not a breeding ground for great talent, rather superior attitudes. No different than the Ivy League in the United States. I have worked with plenty of Indian talent in Silicon Valley, and managed many as well. It depends on the person; where you go to school, or if you go to school, is irrelevant.
The Chinese and Europeans are the folks I move to the top of the interview list.
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
That money came from banks who threw as much as you wanted at you provided you put up your house as collateral.
How it works now, where the real estate bubble popped and banks cling to money like it's worth anything anymore is beyond me, though.
But ... maybe just because banks stopped handing out money like crazy, people can't spend anymore, got no job or got laid off, and the economy is in the gutter? I don't want to say that spending money you don't have is any good, nor do I say that banks should hand any bum money for nothing (and, face it, giving you money for a house that's already drowned in mortgage is 'for nothing'). But what some people don't understand is that the economy can only thrive if people have money to spend. To have money to spend, people need jobs. To make "everyone" have a job you effing have to stop shipping in more people. It should be a no brainer.
One of the core reasons for the economy downturn is simply that companies tried to manufacture in China and India and sell in the US and Europe. That doesn't work. You give a little money to Chinese and Indian people who can basically survive (but not buy your fancy high tech, 'luxury' crap) and pay nothing to US and European people who should in turn buy it. Buy it with what money? People need jobs to earn money, to have money that they can spend. It is as simple as that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Is there any way to turn off all this superfluous and stupid javascript and AJAX shit that is totally ruining slashdot these days? I know this is OT, but there's nowhere else to ask. Man, I pine for the days when the pages loaded fast, rendered properly, payed attention my prefs, and didn't have !stupid! slider widgets and ridiculous color-scale search things.
Slashdot is nearly unusable anymore,
Being a coder from India, I can answer your question. The reason is plain and simple economics and greed. While Indian coders in general come cheap when compared to those in US companies wanna further reduce costs there are other factors.
I earn a lot more than my counterparts doing same job because I belong to a top engineering school and quality of work expected from me is different than several others. While my company is full of guys from lower level colleges where education situation is really bad. Companies hire these guys cause they come cheap (some earn even 1/4 of what I do). While guys from top colleges ask for more companies refrain from hiring these people and hire college grads from lower colleges who would work on minimum wage.
IT job is thus considered worst in most IIT's and most engineers end up doing MS/PHD or MBA's.
yes.. because getting in foreign workers will help REDUCE local unemployment.... maybe in soviet russia.
Yeah, because unemployment is "the problem" - not getting the damned job done so that something of value gets created and sold so that wealth can actually get produced, salaries, taxes, and bills paid, and economies improved, right?
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!
From fresh grads with MASTERS degress in IS I get blank stares from such questions as: (in any language of choice!)
1) If you had a string, and wanted to replace part of that string with another string, how would you do it?
2) How would you add 5 to each element in an array of integers?
3) How would you add 5 to a field of integers in an SQL table?
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.
5) In your language of choice, take a variable containing the value 5 and construct a sentence that says "I have 5 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? Supposedly, the job I'm offering is why they went to school, but they aren't even qualified to begin. So what did they do for 6 years?
If you are hiring a welder, he'd better know how to weld. If you hire a doctor, he'd better have a good working knowledge of medicine.
Why can't we expect to hire fresh programmers who know how to... program?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I don't qualify my advertising with *any* form of educational requirement. I only list the skills required. Of all the programmers we now have at our small-but-growing-fast company, none of them have even a BA.
PS: We're flexible enough with our hours that one of our programmers is going to school to complete a degree in Mathematics.
I'm not asking for Masters degrees, but I'm getting them. And they sure aren't helping them much, at least as far as I'm concerned.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Use NoScript. It loads me a nice reasonable rendition of slashdot without all the bullshit. Slashdot is actually the reason I started using the plugin. I don't know what the fuck Slashdot coders are doing that is so script intensive on a fucking news/forum site since Google docs and Gmail which uses tons upon tons of Javascript runs reasonably while what should be a simple site of html,css, and a conservative amount of javascript feels like I am loading 72 instances of Eclipse on a 486. Get your shit together slashdot.
I work in Silicon Valley, was a consultant for most of the last 30 years. Manager for about half that time.
I have hired lots of Indians, Chinese, Philipinos, ... no Indians have ever hired me. My friends and I don't know of a case where an Indian has hired a European. Some of the sharpest people I know have been rejected at companies like Brocade by Indian interviewers who pronounced them "not sharp enough".
Indians, generally, think Americans aren't much good. I have had Indian teachers in a local college class remark to their class of non-Indians that their daughters would never marry Americans, as they aren't suitable -- not serious people, etc. This was a standard attitude among Indian parents in private schools our kid has attended.
Judging people across a cultural divide is difficult. Standard interviews are nearly useless in making hiring decisions (lots of research to this point), so most people are hired on some dimension of "we like him/her, he/she is like us". Thus, the groups within Silicon Valley companies, and entire companies, who are all of one ethnic group, e.g. mainland Chinese, Taiwanese, Hindi speakers, ...
If we Europeans discriminated like that, EEOE would be down our necks.
Uhm, the guys who invented the transistor, and setup a bunch of well-known semiconductor companies, the traitorous eight, how many were born outside the USA? Of the rest, how many were born to immigrants to the USA?
(The answers: "at least 3" for the first, and "at least 1" for the second).
It's hilarious that a nation whose success was built on waves of immigration can spawn people so ignorant of the contributions of immigrants. The rest of the 1st world doesn't mind though - we'll be glad to take the USAs spot as patron of the world's best & brightest - please do stop your H1-B programme.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Agreed. I used to read Slashdot 10 years ago on 233 MHz Sparc 5 workstations, running SlowArseis and it was perfectly reasonable. Now it keeps beachballing my MacBookPro, which is ten times faster on clock speed alone, never mind it can do a lot more in a cycle, has faster bus, RAM and hard disk.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Seriously though, it really sounds like a study of the TCO of MBAs is more in order -- how many outsourcing snafus, and how much of the current financial woes in the US, are due to MBAs with precisely the mentality noted by the GP:
Unfortunately, we find much of this same short-sighted idiotic MBA behaviour in the US government over the past several years:
"We support our troops," indeed. How bitter. I have good friends in the military, and these Blackwater goons are effectively stealing wages from them. Meh. Another example:
By any strict economic definition, there is another word for "profit" -- "inefficiency". Ethically speaking, one might even stretch things a bit and call it "theft". Making a living is one thing, but fleecing your customers simply because you can is a crime in all but name.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That's why I dropped degrees as a requirement altogether. Yes, that means that sifting through applicants becomes a lot like an American Idol casting (you have a few hundred applicants for the position, 90% of which don't even come close to qualifying), but it's worth it.
As it's for malware forensic, asm plays a role. Especially understanding asm you didn't write. So one of the centerpiece questions is basically:
You have this piece of code in a subroutine:
pop eax
inc eax
push eax
retn
What do you expect it to do, and what would you do in your disassembler?
Believe it or not, anyone who was able to solve that was a VERY good analyst. That's a question you can hand out in written form, get written answers and you sieve out those 90% that don't even have the foggiest idea what's going on (those are also the 90% you don't need). I don't even read the answers (ok, I glance at them so I won't get someone who wrote "no idea, but I don't care, I'm here for the fat check"), I don't care how they answer it. I care that they understood what's there and that they have an idea or at least a hunch (hunches are quite valuable in that biz) where to put the crowbar.
The rest is training. What I need is people who don't fear to get their feet wet, who don't mind poking at code and who can play with it. I need explorers and tinkerers. It doesn't matter if your answer is right. What matters is that I see you pondered it and had an idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would've thought Slashdot of all places wouldn't succumb to the gleeful bloat which has rendered spectacular advances in hardware almost irrelevant to the end user experience.
Indeed, this shit does not bode well for the future of slashdot. These sorts of counter-productive and superfluous web-site "upgrades" are the kind of thing that often precedes the death of a company. It's like the brains have already left the building and the company is just left running on empty until it collapses under the weight of the remaining stupidity.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Until a couple of years ago, I worked for a major US IT firm, in Storage, and went to Bangalore to train new 2nd-level support guys on our mid-range products. The guys themselves were generally OK, since they weren't new to the industry, though there were some odd gaps in basic storage knowledge, such as SCSI protocols. Not something you'd expect to find in a person who'd allegedly done 2nd level support at another company, one that specialized in storage!
In general, though, I wasn't training new graduates from the likes of IIIT-B, but I met a few and had discussions with their managers. What I learned was that these young people were under immense pressure to succeed in IT, with the hopes and expectations of whole extended families riding on their backs. IT is the ticket out of the slums, and families make enormous sacrifices to get their kids in to the industry in the first place. In college, I was told, there's also massive pressure to score high marks, and the process is more biased towards rote learning and cramming for exams. Not totally, of course - that would be impossible - but the point is that, like the Indian education system in general, it's tighter and more authoritarian in terms of curriculum, and the schools themselves were under govt. pressure to deliver high numbers of graduates.
I hate to say this, but I met a few "graduates" who were simply not "graduate material", in terms of basic intelligence, curiosity, enthusiasm, or ability to absorb new concepts. Other graduates I met have great careers ahead of them, but I came away with the impression that "graduate" over there is a bit (again, not totally!) like "MCSE" in other countries: a statement of the exams you have passed, not a wider measure of your ability to function in a complex, ever-changing IT world. The problem with "cramming" is that while it might get you through an exam, the knowledge is not integrated and retained as well as it should be. I'm seeing this myself, now that I'm getting to go to university as a mature student (Engineering), where some subjects would IMHO be better assessed by e.g. thesis, not exam.
(this is not a