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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 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.
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.
The fair price is 10 cents in both places.
Under real free trade, you couldn't prevent it.
Prices are not relative under real capitalism.
So right now, I compete with someone who makes 1/10th of what I do-- in part because I'm subsidizing research on his health care and his movies and entertainment.
By your logic, billionaires should pay 2 million bucks for the same shirt that you and I buy for 20 bucks.
Cable TV should cost a billionaire 100k a month.
Prices are not relative-- it's only because of gross sellouts and artificially protected regions that such *extreme* price differences are maintained.
Within the U.S. competition brings down prices rapidly-- but between the U.S. and India, it doesn't.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Just because you haven't been able to think of the reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
To take the example of a DVD, only considering America and India. A film has a fixed cost of say $100 million to recoup from DVD sales, and each individual DVD has a cost of say $0.20 to produce and sell. If the DVD seller only sold at $19.99 in both countries then sales in India would be negligible, meaning that sales in America will need to cover the entire cost of both making the film and pressing the DVDs.
If they sold DVDs at $2.50 everywhere then the margin would be insufficient to cover their costs.
What you are ignoring is that the by selling the DVD in India at $2.50 the company knows it wont cover all the overhead costs, but it will cover some of them. If Indian sales generate $5 million then it lowers the amount they need to charge in America to make a profit by $5 million. If films etc weren't sold at a lower price in countries with lower wages then they would have higher prices in the countries where they are sold in order to cover the lost revenue.
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.
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?
When it comes to shipping out labor, everyone seems to miss the big picture.
What is the purpose of a nation? To benefit and protect the citizens therein (at least that's what is sold to the citizens). Everyone has to be a member of a nation whether they want to or not, and most nations only allow you to be a citizen of their nation and no other. So people are effectively trapped within one system. As of yet there is no such thing as a global citizen.
So a nation's goal is not to server the world, but to serve its citizens. If it can serve both the world and its citizens simultaneously, that is great. But if it has to choose between one or the other, then it must serve its citizens first.
Originally in the US corporations were limited entities that were only allowed to exist for public benefit and only for a limited duration until their objective was reached. But that changed over time, and now corporations are some of the most powerful entities in the US. Corporations in the US benefit from many things, including physical production, access to the US market, subsidies, government contracts, tax breaks, tariffs, and many other benefits from being registered as a US corporation.
One must remember that a nation and its government is there to serve the betterment of its citizens, and not corporations. If it benefits a corporation to outsource to another country, but not the citizens, why do it? The nation has no obligation to benefit the corporation unless it also benefits citizens. In fact that's why US corporations are given all the advantages they get - in the end it benefits the citizens.
But once the public is being injured by the current regulations governing international business, it's time to change the laws. Why benefit a tiny proportion of the US population consisting of high-level execs as well as foreign nationals at the expense of the vast majority of the US population through regulation?
If a company wants to be "global" and hire foreign workers at the expense of US citizens, I have no problem with that. But they must lose the benefits of a being a registered US corporation. They must truly go international, meaning no tax breaks, no subsidies, no being on the advantageous side of tariffs, etc..
It's really simple.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
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