Rags to Riches

en route to a “richer” Internet

1. fenin 11.25.07 / 4pm

   Well said Mrinal.
   As you mentioned one of the core problems is that there are very few practitioners teaching the subjects at engineering colleges.The system in place, by default, considers teaching as something thats for “those who CANT do”.
   Another reason is that hacker culture is almost non-existent [guys like Gopal V of dotGNU, Abdul Qabiz of Yahoo! being exceptions ] .Most students end up taking CS at college, only because their parents wanted them to.
   On top of it ,universities and media highly encourages fresh engineering graduates to take jobs at India’s “major IT sweatshops in disguise”. This is all bad. Real bad.
2. Abdul Qabiz 11.25.07 / 11pm

   Mrinal,

   I agree with most of things you said. But things are changing, lots of startups are happening in India. Infact, VCs see a value to have a startup-team in India, not because of cheap-labour rather how fast you can build a good team.

   I know, how service companies make engineers suffer and engineers don’t even realize until its too late.

   Even though Indian engineers contribute to most of software projects in this planet, India is not yet leader.

   We have long way to go and that would happen when innovation, startups etc would happen.

   Sometimes cultural differences matter, students pay a lot of money to study in good college, come from middle-class or poor family, they have to get a job to take care of things (family, life, loans or whatever), that pushes them into a environment (service company or a mundane job), once they realize its kindda late (they are old or married or loaded with responsibilities).

   I guess, it has a lot to do with financial stability. How many young entrepreneurs coming up? Only a few, who have some savings or good financial background or have guts to take risks?

   I am sure, these things would not be an issue in future and we would see innovation, hopefully our education changes to support the cause.

   Thanks for the nice post.

   -abdul
3. Mrinal Wadhwa 11.26.07 / 5am

   I totally agree with you when you say things are changing … this post is a record of our current state .. hopefully in five years we can look back at this post and say .. “See how far we have come in five years” … in the mean time though we all need to think about and help implement solutions to these problems and do our bit in making the change happen.
4. dinesh 12.07.07 / 5pm

   Mrinal,
   you are right.Now im facing the problem what you have said.im a fresher(2007 passout) not from good college but luckly i got the apportunity to work in(banglore) flex . ..For the last six months from june i learned only flex/actionscript now im comfortable to code in flex understood many things what flex does even i attened barcamp i talked with you there.but what next i have to study some other language for my future life so any time i can jump to other company living flex. .. if i start continuing in flex surely after some years ill be master in that domain and can able to handle and develop any thing related to flex but as per our industry needs i have to shift to others. . .
5. Abdul Qabiz 12.08.07 / 12am

   @dinesh: It’s good to be good at one particular technology, but try to focus on ideas, problem-solving and users. Whatever it takes to write a kick-ass application, do it. Don’t block your mind or lock yourself with one thing. As of now you are working with Flex and you like it, but tomorrow you might get a interesting project which requires more than flex, be open to learn other things… This would keep you motivated, as you learn new things, and satisfied because you are growing overall…

   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
6. dinesh 12.08.07 / 11am

   Thanks abdul. . .sure i will follow what u have said.. .Lets make india a software Leader and in future no one will have the doubt that mrinal have. .. . Is India a Software Leader?
7. Gerardo Paz 02.11.08 / 3am

   India is a leader in giving service to outsourcing jobs. They can work “for a coke and a sandwich”. In that they are leaders… They are leaders in “making” web pages clones, graphic designs, etc in less time and almost for free. That´s their leadership.
8. Mrinal Wadhwa 02.11.08 / 11am

   Gerardo,

   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.
9. Saurabh 02.18.08 / 12am

   Hi Mrinal. I landed here from Mutiny.in page (you posted a comment there)

   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.
10. Mrinal Wadhwa 02.18.08 / 2am

    Hi Saurabh,

    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 !
11. Pradeep Atraya 02.18.08 / 6am

    Mrinal,
    Very valid points indeed. However I would have to disagree with one of your points, the disconnect between education and industry. Managers involved in outsourcing R&D are quite happy with the Indian educational system. In my job as a business analyst, I have met several companies in the US looking to offshore embedded software, nobody raised a concern about India’s Universities. Please check out my website (embeddedoutsourcer.wordpress.com).
    I have listed some necessary conditions for innovation. Chief among them are the presence of socialist systems with a lot of funding. So though it may seem unbelievable, we just need to keep spending 1000’s of crores on government funded research labs to have innovation.
    Private companies and startups are great at tinkering with real innovation made by these socialist institutions and coming up with widely used products, but have never come up with any real breakthrough innovation. For example the internet was first started by the Department of Defense in the US (similar to our DRDO) and the microchip was not invented by intel but by Stanford university.I don’t know what type of innovation you want, if you only want companies like Microsoft and Intel, then your idea of having startups is probably valid. Then again in a few years you will complain that though we have companies like MS and intel we are not doing any real research and developing products originally invented by foreign universities.
12. Brajeshwar 02.21.08 / 10pm

    Bang on target. You’ve many valid points.
13. Mrinal Wadhwa 02.21.08 / 11pm

    Pradeep,

    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.
14. Hamilton 05.10.08 / 11pm

    Thanks for an interesting post on the state of the Indian industry. It may be my browser, but between the black background and the small white type, it was a bit difficult to read.
15. Mrinal Wadhwa 05.11.08 / 8am

    Hamilton,
    Thanks for the feedback, i am planning a theme change for the blog soon, will try to make it better.
16. Harshad Sharma 05.17.08 / 9am

    Very precisely said…

    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)
17. Danish 05.17.08 / 10am

    Nice article Mrinal..

    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.
18. Jay V 05.17.08 / 11am

    Mrinal, well said. Totally agree with your key points. Our education system doesn’t drive passion, services companies do not innovate, and if someone has that passion, they will end up losing it over a period of time. I am a tech-ethusiast who had diehard passion for object oriented technologies and my life changed for worse when I joined the biggest service company in India. For 3 years now, my confidence took a battering and I am in a state, where my frustation levels are at peak. Blogging, Twittering and ocassionally creating trendy applications is keeping me alive for now! Nice article, keep up the good work.. and btw, I landed up on your url while tracking for the word India on twitter
19. flex xc 05.22.08 / 1am

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