While reading editorials one thing that always strikes my mind is that what part of it is close to truth and what part is just what the writer thinks. A week back or so i read an article in Times of India and it just made me almost go mad. So to release some frustration 😉 and comment on what the reality is, thought of writing a post. I am just taking quotes from the article and posting comments on them. Your comments are welcome ;)
Back in 2002, India claimed to produce 350,000 engineers per year. But this included “diploma engineers” who were not true engineers at all. India actually had only 102,000 real engineering graduates in 2002. This went up to 222,000 in 2006 and may be double that in 2011.
Yes ! That was dependent upon number of colleges. When IT was booming after recession in 2004, Comp Engg was a hot cake so Engg College an awesome business. That is what gave rise to opening of engineering colleges like karyana shops.
India does have some excellent engineering schools, but McKinsey estimates that only 25% of Indian engineering graduates are good enough to work for multinationals (and only 15% of finance graduates and 10% of those with degrees of any kind).
Yes true again because these are not collegses. There are currency printing shops. They are charging high fees and collecting some good money. Who cares about the quality and standard of the education provided ?
Yet in 2007, India’s five largest IT services companies added 120,000 engineering jobs, and IBM and Accenture added another 14,000. Pharma R&D companies boomed. And foreign car companies made India an export and R&D hub to capitalize on its engineering skills.
Because the IT work was being outsourced to India like anything and Indian companies needed to show employee strength to catch those projects. They needed the head count and the easiest way to get that was to go to campus and hire masses.
In recruitment, Indian companies stopped looking at resumes. Good resumes often reflect an ability to write good resumes, not real skills. Instead, Indian companies put applicants through psychometric tests and rigorous interviews to identify general abilities and aptitude, rather than specialized skills. Instead of hiring only from elite engineering colleges, companies like Infosys and TCS recruited from second- and third-tier colleges, and also from arts and science schools.
Bullshit ! Perhaps, except top institues like IIT and others, where else the graduates know how to make their CVs. Almost all of them look the same, talking about some small projects done there and other academic details.
Multinationals preferred to recruit people with established skills. But Indian companies realized that recruits had to be trained from scratch. Many companies virtually became universities, employing hundreds of trainers.The Infosys Global Education Centre at Mysore trains 13,500 people at a time. For arts and science recruits, TCS provides an additional three months of training. In all, many recruits get four to seven months of training before starting work.
So, as per the author, this is the real juice but in reality its such a superior quality bullshit that you won’t believe it. First thing, only biggies can afford to send people on tranings for months (And boy that has been reduced to 1/3 or less, in the name of cost cutting). Second important thing is that in which company people are trained & made to work on the same technology ? Whatever little i have come across in 6 years of my careers is that A is trained on Technology X, made to work on Y; B is trained on Y made to work on Z; C is trained on Z, made to sit on bench. Where the heck do you see that knowledge grabbed from the tranining being used ? Its almost nowhere. And id you saw it somewhere, that must be accidental.
This would be impossibly expensive in the West. It is economic in India. Thus, low-cost training has been transformed into an international advantage, giving India a competitive edge in high-tech exports.
Cheap labor ! Thats it !
Training is a continuous process, not just in technical issues but also in management skills, quality consciousness, communications, foreign language and personal-effectiveness skills. Companies commonly mandate one to four weeks of yearly training. The career development and salaries of staff are linked to skills acquired from training. Mentorship by senior executives is another key Indian practice. Cadence India has a “leaders-as-teachers” program: every manager must spend one to two weeks teaching internal classes. Even the CEO is not exempt.
What the heck ?
Managers are groomed through fast-track programs for the best-performing employees, who then get preference for promotion. Once, Indian companies desperately sought foreign-returned managers. Today, they can find better talent locally. Returnees from abroad can have a hard time getting a good job.
Hahaha..lol…
Employees get reviewed at the end of every project and are prescribed training if found to have weaknesses. Mechanisms such as 360-degree reviews (wherein you review your bosses and peers) and balanced scorecard reviews are widely used.
360 degree reviews ? Dude say something against your manager and see your rating. You would come to know what this 360 degree shit is !!!
Managers are evaluated on a variety of non-financial measures, including employee satisfaction, attrition rates and mentoring.
Another factor that is missed is that how much a manager can butter his boss !
The software industry complains of a high attrition rate — up to 30% employees leave every year. But this means that companies end up training people not just for themselves but for the whole industry. That is one more secret of India’s success.
Money dude ! People can get good money by changing jobs every year. So that drives the attrition rates !
Enough of crap. No more energy left in me. So leaving it here for your judgment considering what the reality is !
And see; this article was published in Times of India, India’s so called No 1 English newspaper. And someone who is not aware of the actual situation in Indian IT would think that don’t know what kind of high-tech rocket making India was into 😉 .
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