Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

Abishek_Muthian

The issue has to do with Institutions & services firms here in India.

It is normal to see IT Engineers (coders) define they career as X programmer where it's now time for every programmer to have full-stack skills and treat programming language as a drill-bit in a tool-box.

Since the services companies benefited earlier by recruiting a graduate and training them to be X programmer for life, the institutions didn't have a reason to adapt to changing times because 99% of their students were placed in these companies and remaining 1 % in Google, MS etc. [Fun note - Sundar, Satya, Shantanu, Sanjay Jha , George Kurian etc. belong to that 1% and yet capable enough climb to the top-most seat.]

But I wouldn't buy the 'Indians not hardworking' stereotype,for an average Indian every opportunity in their life has to be fought for with thousands (some times millions) of other competitors. I've seen several people who were the first graduate from their entire family history while living in a hut and create a sustainable life for them; thanks to these services companies.

But it's time for a change, Institutions should build skills which make their students recruit-able by startups.

Its strange that you take the names of CEOs and proceed to deduce that as a proof of them being good programmers. Most of them go to Ivy league engineering schools, and then Ivy league management schools. And then from there straight jump into management barely spending any time at all in engineering. And the whole reason why they do engineering is largely because they need a bridge course to get into a masters level management degree. Once you get into a Ivy league management school, going wherever from there is essentially a networking activity not exactly a great indicator of your engineering performance. It helps to have friends in high places.

Management positions have long been seen as replacements for IAS.

The 1% you talk about parse XMLs at Google and Microsoft. The 99% parse the same XMLs at services firms. The 1% thinks they are special because of a association with a certain Ivy league brand name.

Lets talk of the Indian 1% when somebody in a Indian university writes some thing the equivalent of a Linux, Perl or FreeBSD.

Lets not over glorify these placement agencies as some institutes of engineering excellence.

For what its worth the 99% what people generally berudge look down upon essentially is employed in Indias space programs that sends probes to mars and moon, built bulk of Indias pretty advanced tech defence infrastructure.

Only thing IITians are good at is self worship.

There's a reason for me quoting the CEO's as 'fun note', the context of my statement is complete different.

> Only thing IITians are good at is self worship.

It's almost as though you've got an axe to grind with people having any respectable pedigree.

They did damage to their own selves by flashing their degrees as some kind of life long privilege, while contributing a net negative to the Indian economy(As their education is heavily subsidized at the Indian tax payers expense).

> while contributing a net negative to the Indian economy (As their education is heavily subsidized at the Indian tax payers expense).

Below a link to a study from '08 that tried to assess the contribution of IITs to the economy. Perhaps some numbers might change your mind? (It's incomplete but includes the executive summary.)

https://www.ibef.org/download/Content_19dec.pdf

Perhaps an article (from TOI nonetheless)? - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/IITians-contributi...

Before you dismiss these with whatever reason, perhaps you can show some data to back up your point?

Amount of non-IITians running/starting industries far exceeds in number. And they don't get the same funding or training or any human resources help in return. Of course if you run institutions for decades eventually good people are going to come out of it. But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries. Why should the tax payers pay for them?

An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India. And people coming out of that obviously would contribute way more. The scenario is a net loss for Indian tax payers. This is way more in lost opportunity costs.

Most of these arguments sound very similar the arguments against privatization in 1980s India. You can talk of the benefits of using tax payers money to manufacture bulbs while you don't invest the same money else where, where some thing real can happen.

Please feel free to run IITs using fees or whatever endowments you can get. Also most of these people harp day and night about how awesome they are, makes sense to generate some IP, sell that and make some money to fund themselves.

> Amount of non-IITians running/starting industries far exceeds in number. And they don't get the same funding...

Can you give me a source on this? One that compares the economic contribution of students from the next-10 colleges in India and finds it to be more than that of the IITs. Because otherwise, you're comparing different sample sizes and your statement becomes trivially true as a result.

> But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries.

Try looking up statistics of what % of students go abroad immediately after graduating from an IIT. Perhaps that might help you revisit this assertion.

> An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India.

The government's already spending 10x on that than they are on Higher Education. (2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India#Budget How much would an extra 0.5x help.

> Lets talk of the Indian 1% when somebody in a Indian university writes some thing the equivalent of a Linux, Perl or FreeBSD.

Easy-peasy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_B._Shah

He didn't even go to IIT - regular University of Mumbai undergrad.

Here's another: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nehanarkhede/ - co-creator of Kafka, attended University of Pune for undergrad.

I'll grant you they both benefited from attending grad school in the US.

As an aside, India seems to have much more international level manganent talent than say China.

That is because of our English speaking skills. We can communicate better than the Chinese.

Also the fact that most people have good English speaking skills, means a lot of HBO and Star Movies watching as kids, which gives a good idea about American slangs, culture and other things in general.

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