All that you wrote is absolutely correct.

Almost all of my friends from college are working with big companies on some big projects, been onsite and earning good and they are happy and satisfied doing that.

On the other hand I am working for a small company which is into web development and as its a small company I had to take care of a lot of aspects of the project, including analysis, architecture design etc. (even though i was barely a few months old in the industry) As a result of which, i have been exposed to the latest and the best in the technology. Although I am not proficient in any of it but I’m glad that I at least know my options well.

When I compare myself with my peers, it feels odd that they are probably earning good but lack behind in the technology, and I know my technology well but am earning peanuts. And this thought gets frustrating sometimes (i’ve written a blog about this on my personal blog too). The point being, the social structure in India puts financial security above everything else and to achieve it, you have to go with the flow, which is the service class.

But I still believe that things are improving and as you and me are aware of these things today a lot of others would catch up soon. The conditions wouldn’t be the same for long.

keep up the good work.

I’ll drill down on one of the core issues that you have mentioned:

Our education system does not focus on making innovators, we have the perfect setup for creating ‘employee material’ - people who would rather be happy with listening to orders in return of a fat paycheck than to risk it all and start a new company.

People are not taught to answer questions themselves, they only know to ask questions which the revered teacher always answers. And students are *expected* to be stupid. I learned it the hard way when my teachers in computer science decided to give me Zero (0) marks for a project because my program worked using different algorithms - but the input/output was same, it hardly ever crashed and the user interface was more intuitive.

For India to be a software “Leader” we must create leaders among the students. If most of our institutes generate mind-labourers, the country will nto look much different.

Good to know more people feel the same way as me

Cheers!
Harshad (hiway @ twitter)

The point I made above says that there is no orientation towards research in most Indian engineering colleges .. at no point am I doubting the ability of indian students to do research they are the best brains out there .. the thing is the orientation is most colleges is towards passing exams … and those exams can only be passed by cramming your professors notes and not by doing research … talk to an engineering student and you’ll know.

What you are doing is excellent because I think that can in turn drive colleges to spend more energy into research

You mention two kinds of innovation socialistic and capitalistic … although both kinds are happening in India … my point is they are not happening at a scale big enough to matter.

Now coming back to my original point about a disconnect between education and industry … well … catch the next software engineer you meet and ask him the question … how much of his college education as a computer engineer does he use every day ?… and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Very valid points about our education system, i believe that it needs radical change ..

I recently came across a discussion on Jeff Atwood’s blog and I have since come to believe that what is discussed there is the best way to educate software engineers … Computer Science class rooms should be like little startups, trying to build products in a protected supervised environment .. read more here http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001035.html

I recently discovered Mutiny.in and I love it ….you guys are doing a great job, Keep it up !

Coming to your post, I think your points are very valid.

Although I am not sure if IITs are still the same as it used to be. Met quite a few students at IITB and IITD and I was disappointed to say the least.

Whatever you have mentioned is correct especially the part about outsourcing industry. I am wondeirng what would happen when Chinas and philipines of the world would become cost competitive and would have english speaking citizens. All the call centers and development centers would be out of business. Another 5 years?

Your thoughts on no blogging culture are also spot on. Why look at Flex, look at Wikipedia. In a country with 40 mn Intenet users, articles contrubuted from India are miniscule as compared to other places like Taiwan and Japan.

Apart from that, I believe our education system needs a revamp. I think the reasons are

1. Legacy education system. If you go to an engineering college, they would still be teaching C++ and Data structures in the 4th semester. A student thus is learning about basics of programmig for 2 years. Max they have updated from there is introduction to .Net.

2. Focus on mediocracy rather than meritocracy. We want students to be well rounded and a student who can score 90% in an exam is considered better than someone who scores 70 and does other fantastic stuff with coding. Then obvisouly we need to show our competence in subjects as wide as English, History etc along with coding if we need to clear the university exam and get a degree. A truly gifted progrmmer migh flunk english and be ultimately thrown out of class.

3. Bookish knowledge rather than practical. We want our students to get maximum in exams (as pointed earlier too). we do not let them xplore freely. We do not encourage them to create applications. If we allowed our students to make stuff instead of taking mid-terms, end-terms etc, they would atleast use original thought rather than cramming bubble sort and linked list algorithms.

Please read my earlier post on mutiny about perils of indian education system and would love to have your views there.

Regards,
Saurabh Garg

P.S.: Nice blog. Bookmarked. Hope to catch up with you for real sometime soon.

My criticism above was constructive in nature, the intention was to understand the problems and maybe figure out solutions … your comment on the other hand is ignorant at best and I cant help but mock your opinion.

As long as you do that, there would never be problem picking up new technologies, new trends etc.. Job security would never be problem, good work would follow you since you would have all as a good developer.

-abdul