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

India: The skrypt kiddies of programming

[TiggertheMad]

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?

I find most Indians incompetent

[ishobo]

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.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[mcrbids]

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?

Re:Where's India's domestic economy?

[N1AK]

There is *no* reason the clothes, drugs, movies, songs, etc. etc. should have that extreme of a price difference.

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.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:outsourcing and unemployment

[damburger]

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.