

Testing India's graduates

The engineering gap


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xxx hardcore

you sound as though you have a chip on your shoulder, and thats ok. Your time might be more constructively spent however, venting out in the presence of a clinical psychologist, rather than on the internet."""

Thank you for your advice. But The Economist forums are for everyone to give their opinion. I do not recall a policy saying that different opinions are not allowed.

Are you one of the "engineers" this article talks about? Perhaps you are a case-in-point?


USA has 1710 best higher educational institutions in consideration of 6000 best of the world. India have only 50.Then how India producing double size of quality Engineers or Techies compare to USA? Even China has 552 best institutions among 6000,40 might be considered as world class and 200 as Asian standard. If the test is the outcome of tech revolution of Indian quality its alarming. Some third grade surveyors made Indian IITs and IIMs among world best. But as per Webometrics, the Spanish higher education institution surveyor (which might be considered as the best) found not a single institution of India among 500 best institution for last 8 years and only 4 among best 1000 institutions, which you consider as class, 10 among Asian standard and 31 among Sub-continental standard.


Nobody with any experience in outsourcing will find this surprising. But I wonder why anyone at all finds it surprising. Do people flock from Germany, Britain and the U.S. to study computer science at Indian universities? Of course not. And why would anyone seriously expect that an MS degree would mean exactly the same thing in each country in the world?

xxx hardcore

Also, Indian companies cannot innovate. This is NOT my opinion (so please don't delete this comment) but the opinion of the NY Times:


Indians are granted about half as many American patents for inventions as people and firms in Israel and China."""


The NY Times says its for 'cultural reasons,' which is the politically correct term.


I have used Indian freelance programmers. Overall the quality is several grades below programmers in Western countries. They are good and reliable for simple task, at least a lot more reliable than the Eastern Europeans. If you search hard enough you will find good Indian programmers. For more complicated task I usually use an experienced Indian programmer (in his mid 40) if he is available. He is better than your average Western programmer with 6-7 years experience.


Our company shut down its back office in London and started a new support centre in India. The support centre in India is filled with qualified accountants and other highly qualified professionals.

Three years later, the headcount in India is three times that of London before, the infrastructure dismal, and no one in our Africa, Latin America or Asia offices can understand the heavy accent of the support staff in India.

India and China may produce engineering graduates by the millions, but I am afraid that MIT and Standford have nothing to fear for the next 100 years. Worthless degrees issued by diploma mills do not equate to a real education.


As a software product/consulting organization in the Business Intelligence (e.g. complex database query/analytics) space, I find it ironic that 50% of our business is providing products and consulting to companies in the US who are either US offices of India based consulting organizations or are US based software companies with a large portion of Indian based founders and employees with substantial offshore development back in India. This irony extends to include that one of our key founders is a Canadian born Hindu.

Personally, I've never been impressed by the skills that University Graduates display from so-called Software based degrees from any country. In North America may employees of companies like ours are former employees of companies like Microsoft, IBM or many other large software organizations where they acquire in-depth skills that they take out to the market place.

While my experience with Indian software engineers has been excellent, India based software engineers who are limited to working in India have a handicap that's difficult to overcome.

Gautam Agrawal

Menonin has made an point. We are assuming that American graduates will come out with flying colors on tests such as the one prepared by Aspiring Minds. That is a big assumption!

Nevertheless the key point the tests have brought out is that the IT Industry must not ignore the colleges outside the top 100 when looking for new hires.


It would be useful to know how American engineering graduates do on this test? That would be a more useful basis of comparison.


Now why is this conclusion so insightful! Given the huge disparities in income levels should you have expected anything else?

The more relevant questions would be :"Is the quality of Indian tech workers improving fast enough?
" Do we see sustained improvements in the average competency levels of Indian tech works in successive cohorts of graduates? What is the quality/price ratio that enables Indian business' to maintain growth rates and sustainable competitive advantage? How much additional training investment is made by firms to plug skills deficits among new hires?"

In the early stages of the IT boom conventional wisdom of analysts, economists, business magazines was that the country would very quickly run out of qualified tech workers. What was ignored was that changes in economic policies and exposure to competition could lead to a strong supply response as well as incentivize firms to invest in training.

So far despite periodic gloomy predictions the supply response keeps happening. Firms and the market have been able to overcome many deficiencies and tackle many bottlenecks. Is this increasing responsiveness of the skills market and of firms coming to an end? That is the critical question.

In fast growing, reforming and structurally changing economies merely looking at the stock situation at any one moment in time can be misleading as can be a reliance on past data from a very different economic environment.


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