(Wednesday, October 27)

Indian Outsourcing Email

I am part of a lot of Email Usergroups that deal with Programming Jobs in the Atlanta Area. I like to kinda keep a pulse on the job market. Since I landed my last job (which I really dig) I only check out the emails in passing more as a gauge on the Atlanta industry (what languages are hot, experience, etc) and lately on one of the chains there has been a pretty big email battle going back and forth with an American programmer, a Russian programmer (who lives/programs in Russia and uses the Usergroup to pickup sales leads) and today I got an email from an Indian programmer who lives here in the states and has been working in ATL on and H1-B since 1994. Very interesting email and basically reinstates my earlier posts about H-1Bs. My main focus point is what I have stated all along 'you do not have to worry if you truly are a good programmer' and also I would like to add a side note 'even if you are just as good of a programmer as an H1-B, you will generally get the job because of better communication skills' I foresee a pretty big drop in companies like Wippro in the next couple of years. Not from bad work necessarily (which still could be the case) but from a balancing of the market in outsourcing in China. China stands to take over a lot of the Outsourcing market as it grows into a semi-capitalist society. Anyway here is the letter I found very interesting from the H1-B Indian programmer working in Atlanta, and describes in a great way how saturation of any professional market is never a good thing for any country. Regardless of who they are. Email to the Atlanta Group (who is in midst of an H1-B argument) [I changed some of the names]: I just read this e-mail from Bob. Though I am an Indian, I agree with him so much, I could not resist sending this message. I am an Indian. Born, brought up and educated in India. Came here on a H1B back in 1994. A lot of today's H1Bs coming from India are not upto the mark, except, those that are from some reputed Indian companies. Here is a message I sent to Jim Jubak of MSN Money Central back in 2003 in response to his article "The threat of the job-is-worth-less recovery" http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P62365.asp that he never cared to respond: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Mr. Jubak: I read your article. It was an interesting one. I am originally from southern Indian state called Andhra Pradesh. I am currently working in the US. You might have heard of Hyderabad - it is the capital city of Andhra Pradesh. I wanted to reveal some facts about the current state of Indian education system (especially Andhra Pradesh's). Out of those 300,000 engineers produced by India every year, about 65,000 of them are produced by Andhra Pradesh alone. Isn't it odd for one of the 27 states to produce as much as 1/5 th of the engineers? All, thanks to the current cheif minister of Andhra Pradesh, who, in last 5 years or so, authorized a wave of new engineering colleges to be set up to meet the global demand for engineers. Here is the fact sheet showing number of institutions: Source: Commissionerate of Industries - Gov. of Andhra Pradesh - http://www.apind.com/apfactsheet.html) 174 - Engineering Colleges - Awarding Bachelors & Masters degrees in Engineering 103 - Polytechnical colleges - Awarding Diplomas in Engineering 502 - BCA colleges - Awarding Bachelors degree in Computer Applications 236 - MCA colleges - Awarding Masters degrees in Computer Applications 143 - MBA colleges - Awarding Masters degress in Business Administration 12 - Medical Colleges - Awarding MBBS and MDs in Medicine 564 - ITI Institutes - Providing vocational training. Education has now become a pure business. Almost every politician owns an Engineering college, easiest way of making money. Most of these do not even have adequate infrastructure, let alone teaching staff. Most of the institutions encourage and help students to cheat in examinations, so, their institute can show a higher percentage of graduations, in turn bringing more prospective students for the next acadamic year. It is has become a business after all. It is equivalent to buying a engineering degree for about $8,000, only difference is, you need to attend classes for 4 years, before you are awarded one (in some cases you can buy them outright for a bit more). Thank god the Government did not allow this kind of dilution in medicine(only 12 Medical colleges), they would have killed a lot of patients. Every year about 200,000 students take an entrance examnation (like SAT) to get admission into Engineering colleges. Generally 65,000 of them qualify, but, now there are as many seats available. They are comtemplating on removing this qualifying exam also, as it does not make sense any more. In 1988, I stood 120th among about 60,000 examnees in this exam. Andhra Pradesh was just producing 5,000 engineers a year then. Most of these engineers don't even have enough aptitude to clear 12th grade. These are the ones that are willing to work at any salary, leading to loss of jobs here in US. I have a lot more to say. I wish I can talk to you. You can probably send in an investigative journalist to Andhra Pradesh to unearth the real facts about Indian Education System. Thanks for your time and look forward to talking to you.