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India is Betting On Compulsory Internships To Improve Its Unemployable Engineers (qz.com)
India has come up with a solution to improve the quality of the engineers it churns out. From a report: Over 60 percent of the 800,000 engineering graduates that India produces annually remain unemployed, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex body for technical education in India, says. So, to make them more employable, engineering colleges across the country will now have to ensure that undergraduate students complete three internships lasting between four and eight weeks each during the course of their programme. Currently, less than one percent participate in summer internships. [...] Indians are obsessed with engineering, particularly since the IT boom. The mid-1990s saw a huge spike in the number of engineering graduates as demand increased in sectors ranging from IT to infrastructure.
First, I will say that the program seems like a great idea and I wish them success.
Next, I can say that in my company, we had very, very bad luck with Indian engineers and SW developers. I am not talking about H1 imports either. Ultimately, I think it came down to cultural differences which created a mismatch of expectations from both sides.
After the 5th one, we more or less stopped considering those applications.
We are not a large company, but we do tend to have 5 to 10 interns at any one time. We did accept a few interns from India as well. We sponsored the visas and all that. Didn't really work out.
Then, we starting bringing German interns in. Maybe some people will get offended by this statement, but I can say in about 95% of the cases, the German interns we got were far superior engineers than our full time US master degree engineers. Their problem solving skills, critical thinking and overall work ethics were, for us, amazing.
For nearly all of them, at the end of their internship we offered them a contract plus visas. Of course, this is much easier to handle with Germans because of the visa treaty.
The thing is, they also ask for much less money than out of school Americans and they are vastly better engineers. Whatever they are doing in their schools seems to be working.
Basically what I am saying is, why do so many companies jump through hoops to bring in scores of cheap Indian guys when way better engineers are also willing to come?