Hi,
I was extremely happy to read your e-mail, Philip. I concur with your statements.
My thoughts below:
--- Philip Tellis philip.tellis@gmx.net wrote:
In general, I've seen more programmers from China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea who are keen on learning than in India.
I agree. You can also include Americans, Europeans, Russians and the Japanese.
During my MS I have worked/done projects with students from different parts of the world, and I really found them all to be very, very, very hard-working. They also have their fun when they have to.
Indians seem to want people to tell them what to do and they'll gladly do it.
This "need to be spoon-fed" culture comes from the current education system in most institutions. Some thoughts that I had written:
http://shakthimaan.com/misc/to-students.html
Web standards, accessibility, new trends are available online for anyone to study and build prototypes. Yet, I see more people from the US and UK,
I agree.
From all the colleges/universities that I have visited
so far:
* Out of say 40-60 students in a class, only 5-6 students are serious about "learning".
* Most of the students waste their time with gossip, movies, sports and they live in their own "shell", without knowing the world around them.
* Management themselves don't know about "quality" education/research and simply get an ISO standard because everyone has to.
* Faculty are not motivated to contribute/learn for themselves or to help their students *learn*.
* Some colleges motivate faculty to do a M.Tech. or PhD so they can show off that they have x number of PhDs, but, really don't contribute to the community or do research thereafter.
* People are lazy and have a very "indifferent" attitude towards their own country.
and even Taiwan trying these things out than from India.
Taiwan is a country that is a big player in VLSI fabrication, next to Japan, considering that even China doesn't have fabs. They, again, are very hardworking people.
In the UK, US and Korea, people are so well versed with the specs that they crack jokes about it in pubs. Again, this has to do with how keen people are to learn rather than being told what to do.
I agree. They are self-motivated.
I'm not really interested in the reasons. I just find that Indians in general do not like to take the initiative.
I agree. Its always, "Why do I care, why should I do it? Let him/her do it" attitude.
They're very good at doing what they're told to do as long as you don't tell them to think.
:)
So, to answer the question - people can't accept the fact that an Indian company is truly world class, because it isn't.
Indeed. Most of the IT hype is probably just to keep the share-holders happy?
One of my friends, Prof. Visweswaran, former Professor, Purdue University, West Lafayette campus, told me this:
"If you take the complexity of problem solving in a scale of 0.0 - 10.0, then:
< 1.0 = Service industry (majority in India) 3.0 = Simulation of an aeroplane projectile 5.0 = Embedded systems/VLSI 8.0 = Simulation of a nuclear fission reaction"
So, if you see what most people do in India, the complexity of problem solving is nothing and doesn't require much thinking.
India, it's far more likely to encounter a bad engineer than it is to encounter a good one.
I agree.
I always explain the "indifferent" attitude amongst students in India in all my presentations/workshops, to show them what real "education" is in other countries, and why we are not in par with anyone else, and how we can use FLOSS to change all this. I don't know if we can change this in India, but, my efforts will continue ...
SK
-- Shakthi Kannan http://www.shakthimaan.com
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