Team-BHP (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/)

-   Shifting gears (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/)

-   -   IT Industry and Employability of Technical Graduates (https://www.team-bhp.com/forum/shifting-gears/69434-industry-employability-technical-graduates-52.html)

Yet another report on sad state of technical education - workshop in mechanical engineering dept. converted to akhada.

http://indianexpress.com/article/edu...egree-4977240/

Well as I read there was not a single admission in any branch of Engineering in this college so management leased half of college campus to Yogeshwar Dutt for wresting acadamy.

Engineering colleges mushroomed during boom era and now as they go bust it is a positive sign in a way :-) only good quality colleges will survive.

Just came across this thread, and perhaps I can digress a little to ask a question that may face many young Indians in future.
These days one finds many success stories in India of someone that came from the village to the city, worked as a driver/cook/servant, raised children, educated them, and many of whom are now are in the Indian IT industry - and not just the call centre kind. But not many of these are engineers that are creative or inventive enough to design the tools/robots that are supposed to take away many coding jobs in the days ahead as is being said everywhere. Now, these Indians are marrying out of their usual arranged marriage systems and marrying colleagues, and to all intents and purposes, living a much better life than their parents, and a MUCH better one than their grandparents in villages.

All well and good, and it is also good to see. But the question that keeps coming in my mind these days is how secure is their future with all the upheavals that the Indian IT industry has begun to see? Are they going to become casualties as well as successes?

India will always remain a back-office to the companies in the Western countries with not much innovation or creative work getting done here. Blame it on ecosystem, culture or education but the harsh reality is we will always be followers and never the leaders when it comes to creativity.

Yes materialistically people are leading a better life - for now. Maybe this chase for the material well being is rendering people to become complacent. Things will not look so pretty when the cheese starts moving. :)

Employees who entered the IT industry a couple of decades back might just scrape though to retirement but for the future generations, it is a different ball game all together.

These are people that have entered the industry in the last 5-10 years and are just starting their lives, many recently married, and some with EMI burdens.
I don't worry about future generations, they will find another way to a job, or remain jobless. Let me correct that - I don't worry about them in the same way. But these are people that have just found their feet, and if footing is lost they will be in a different set of problems.
If the cheese starts moving and they can't move, what happens to them? No one will bother retraining them, even where possible. And retirement is decades away.

Interviewers who ask coding puzzles (or any puzzles) live in lala land. That is not how programmers must be hired. I would have answered "Dude, don't waste you time. Use a double link list" instead. No client will insist you use single-link-list over double-link-list. These are just ego trip for interviewers. Instead just ask how SLL and DLL is implemented. Programming needs curiosity and clear thinking, that is what needs to be checked. With experience, problem solving will come. It is not a skill I expect from a freshers. I value curious above everything else. If they are curious, they will end up learning a lot as time passes.

This has a reason, getting H1B requires 4 year degree. If they hire you, they can't send you to USA.

Ah, so that building finally sees some real learning. :) In fact, I am sure of it.

Since I run a software company in a village, I see a lot of first generation engineers. Lot of them are kids of drivers, carpenters, painters, tailors, etc. Fortunately, programming talent is not restricted to rich/middle class. In fact, these kids are lot more resilient to recession because of their humble upbringing. Most of them spend carefully, and don't assume the party will continue forever. It may be also because most of them live with or close to parents. I can't comment on what they do in cities.

I feel that is something only Time can tell. No one can answer that definitively. A lot depends on the person, how much foresight s/he has and also how they react when pressed against the wall. Give up or adapt and fight back?

A paradigm shift of the kind I read about will be more than a recession, it will result in a permanent loss of demand for the kind of skills that these people have - and this will affect everyone irrespective of where they come from in terms of geography or parentage. It is just that having been the first generation to find a different way of life in cities, far from their native villages, it will be particularly cruel if it was swept away as it threatens to do.

Union Human Resource Minister suggests this:

But aren't all the teachers products of the same system? How many of them are willing to dedicate themselves to life long learning and inspire their students? When the concept of learning takes online route, do we need teachers in the real sense?

Not entirely true specially for hiring freshers with CS background

(1) If a CSE graduate does not know lists , trees , search and sorts and order of algorithms it means he did not pay attention to most important part of his syllabus. In a fresher interview for a coder I find this is more relevant than how good he/she was as a organizer of college fest or curator of college magazine content.

(2) At-least in the type of programming environment I have worked optimization for performance and memory is the routine work. Usually a quick prototype emerges and months are spent on optimizing it to perform with in specified boundaries or time , power consumption and memory.
Even if you are not a device based company but a cloud based startup choosing right algorithms can make a lot of difference in the bills which AWS / Azure will generate.

Are we talking about freshers from 3/4 tier colleges here?

Anybody who has followed my posts in this thread since 8 years, would remember that 50% of the candidates I get don't even know which century they are living in. Why would I waste my time asking puzzles? :Frustrati

Since 2004, I have only hired freshers from various 4-tier colleges. Some of them have reached director level now. So I have had the opportunity to watch them grow as professionals all the way. I don't know how many of you get to hire fresh programmers and then watch them grow for 5-10-15 years. I have had that privilege. And it has forced me to change my beliefs over the time. I have often seen some average-sounding people bloom after 1-2 years of training and become extremely good.

You have to keep in mind that our engineering college are down right pathetic when it comes to teaching. So I expect nothing from them. If a fresher can explain SLL/DLL implementation, I would be thrilled. Most of time the reply is "I remember hearing about linked list, but that was long ago...".

Even with tier 3/4 collages, it is now very easy to recruit good students. A simple online coding test is a great filtering tool.

Even a bad collage will have 1 or 2 good students in each batch. Such tests make it easy to find those and take them through rest of the technical interviews.


My experience has been dramatically different in last few years. Comp Science graduates are now much better at coding + data structures as compared to 90s or early 2000s.

Now, it is really tough to find a candidate who fails to answer questions from "XXXXX interview questions" kind of list from geeksforgeeks et al. Everyone in collage knows to google this term before appearing for interviews.

You are located in Mumbai, probably working for a MNC. You are bound to get lots of applications from around the country, and you have your pre-screening criteria, before you even meet the candidate.

My experience is very different. My company is located in a village, we attract applications from colleges within 100kms. Those who come from far, usually don't have any strong reason to move to this remote location. We stopped hiring people from far away because they either didn't join or left within weeks.

When we were in Bangalore (until 2006), we used to get 10,000+ online applications in matter of couple weeks, after we advertise the opening. But because of our location, we never get more than 400 applications over 4 months of recruiting drive.

That (10k applicants to 400) is the crux of the problem I think. IT pretty much means Bangalore/Hyderabad/Channai/Pune/NCR for good jobs and good developers.

From my experience with product development; you can expect to easily get 50 developers from these 10k (with online tests). And out of 50, 4 - 5 can be hired after interviews.

First, let me tip my hat to you, slow applause in the background. Am sure you would have learnt it the hard way, as an employer.

When it comes to jobs we follow a "entitlement" system, where we assume that jobs belong to people who "deserve". Blame it on the 70s and 80s when jobs were scarce and hence jobs were reserved to the best of the best. Even for a clerical job one has to solve puzzles, remember in which year Chandragupta Mourya died and the name of satellites launched by ISRO that year. The tests had no relevance to the jobs they were expected to perform, and was just meant to weed out the worst of the best.

We follow that kind of recruitment process even now, only wanting to hire the most studious of the lot, without even caring whether the person is the one fit for the job.