HCL (like Infosys, TCS Wipro etc) is a body shopper firm and has nothing much to do with "Computer Science" or the cool things you mention (multidimensional interval trees, POMDP etc). Mr Nayar is just saying that he thinks American Graduates don't have the kind of crap enterprise buzzword "skills" that he can sell to clueless managers at x $/hr. Mr Nayar and his firm wouldn't know what to do with someone who is really good at Computer Science or Math, because those are not the "markets" he addresses. I would imagine an American grad student would be happy to be unemployable (by Mr Nayar).

Really this is just a bodyshopper trying to justify why he isn't hiring costly Americans (vs cheap Indians). Of course he can't say "I am looking for cheap bodies to ship offshore and Americans are expensive", and still retian his job. These mumblings aren't worthy of being upset over.

Due Disclosure: I am Indian. I work in India (Bangalore to be precise), but I do work with POMDPs, MultiDimensional Interval Trees and so on ;-) (My latest project is in Robotic Vision and Navigation, for the Indian Defence Dept)

ITIL and Six Sigma? They're looking for the wrong skills.

If that's his complaint, he's right. I'm not going to waste my time memorizing a series of 'comprehensive checklists' in college. I doubt I know a single CS/Math student who has done more than peruse the Wikipedia article (or maybe read a book in their spare time if they're feeling particularly masochistic) on Six Sigma - and I like to think that I know many great students in the field (several who've worked for Google, Sun, NSA, Microsoft Research, etc).

There have been many times that I've said 'Damn, I wish I knew more about X.' In the last week alone X has included POMDPs, multi-dimensional interval trees, or functors. I have never, not once, wished I knew more about the management fad du jour.

In other words, universities are still not good at producing the code monkeys that Mr. Nayar requires to run his body shops. Now if someone could explain to me why that is a bad thing?

I call BS; and I live in Bangalore, and I run a software company.

Over the last 8 years I have worked with dozens of American programmers, and on an average they are better than their Indian counterparts. His own company (HCL) employs some of the people who I thought formed the bottom of the class. Yet another senior programmer in another IT major (TCS) who was a CS grad, thought he was writing code for a new 16 bit computer.

From the article itself, it is easy to see what he considers talent: following Six Sigma, CMM etc. Guess what, CMM itself is so ridiculously outdated that only Indian IT companies seek it. In a CMM review I was part of in 2007, they said 80% were Indian IT companies. Needless to say, there are more failed projects that successful ones.

Our website says "Made in India"; but sadly, thanks to these IT companies it could be mistaken as a 'Process-driven, cheap, intellect-independent way of building software'.

These massive "brick-in-the-wall", "Enterprise" Indian IT Companies compete exclusively on "hourly-billing-rate".

There is hope in sight, but they come from smaller, newer companies.

I have been managing a portion of my company's Indian outsourcing operations for the last two years. Speaking in generalities, I think that the system over there privileges "methodologies" and certifications over both core skills and core CS concepts.

I have talented Java engineers working for me who I have had to teach regular expressions to. Many American engineers with graduate degrees in CS from a good university would be able to predict that /ab+/ matched the string "abc". It would be unlikely in the extreme for them to have never heard of the word "regular expression" before. I am oh for five on this with my most recent five Indian engineers. Even after teaching them basic regular expressions I have not found them capable of using them to accomplish tasks without specific direction.

(For example, if someVariableName is used in the project, and the customer later informs us that our naming of it does not match their understanding, we might have to rewrite that variable name and associated variables and methods globally. It should be trivial to find all instances of that with a search by regexp, right? But they don't hear that in the instruction "X is now called Y, change all appropriate variables and methods" -- instead, two days later I'm told they're done with a job that I expected to take a few hours, and then I fire a regexp against the source tree and see that 40% of it is still not done.)

I have frequently had to explain bugs to our engineers which resulted not from chance or carelessness but from simple ignorance of core CS101 concepts, such as pass by reference. (Example: In our first code review, I noticed a lot of reuse of HashMaps to carry parameters to DAOs. I told folks to not reuse them, because that introduces the risk of somebody changing the HashMap in the DAO, thus causing later users of the map to have unexpected behavior. I was told, by our most talented Indian engineer, that this would not happen because the values in the HashMap would magically spring back after the DAO was done with it. This does not happen, and it is a CS101 misconception. Sure enough, we had bugs caused by reuse. So, after a remedial CS101 lecture to the team, I reiterated that maps were not to be reused, because they would cause bugs. What do I find in Code Review #2? More reuse of HashMaps, with "final" applied to all of them. Final does not magically turn pass-by-reference into pass-by-value. (The fact that this obviously did not fix the bugs and would have been caught by ANY testing of the code is another matter. We get that a lot.)

When I ask our engineers what they wanted to accomplish in terms of professional growth in their time in Japan, the answer was unanimous: study for certs, which they all already had several of. I'm not necessarily hostile to certs in theory, but I'm sure starting to cool to them in practice.

As for teaching "tools": I won't be too harsh on India because American universities fail at it, too, but if they're teaching fundamentals of source control or IDEs I have yet to see any evidence of it. We have been trying to change a corporate culture at our Indian partners away from having one "source control master" per twenty engineers. They're the only ones permitted to commit -- everyone else mails their code to the source control master, who integrates it. This is to "stop people from breaking the build".

Our Indian colleagues have their own requests for us. For example, they would prefer not to use source control, "since it adds overhead to our management processes".

I freely admit that I only have seen about three corporate cultures from over there and may just have terrible, terrible luck.

[Edited to add: Neither my company nor I are blameless for this state of affairs. Believe me, we have many, many areas we could improve upon collectively, and I have many, many individual weakpoints, including a longstanding cavalierness about how much testing needs to be done prior to shipping. I don't want it to sound just like I'm blaming our Indian colleagues.]

Oh...an economist, not The Economist :)

I designed and built a key electrical system to this plane during late-spring of 2007. I don't know whether I can say which one. Anyway, the company I worked for was at the end of the line as far as outsourcing goes. Boeing outsourced the design, development, and manufacturing to one the world's largest corporations (Company A), who outsourced it to another company of similar size (Company B), who then outsourced it to the much much smaller company that I worked for (Company C) some time in mid-Spring 07.

We knew in May 07 that there was a 0% chance that the 787 would actually fly on 7/8/07; a critical component was still in development. For that certain critical component, Company A dictated to Company B which one to use and who to buy it from (Company D). The problem is that the part was still in development by Company D. The electrical component specifications significantly stretched what actually existed on the market at that time. I didn't think Company D would be successful in designing the critical component. It was certainly a big leap forward. We knew that Company D would not have the part done by July 07. The hope was August of that year.

In June 07 my company successfully designed and built a few prototypes of the system we were tasked to build. They passed all specifications dictated by Boeing, Company A, and Company B. We dutifully delivered the prototypes to Company B in June 07. The only problem was critical component from Company D wasn't there, and therefore the 787 could not fly.

I don't know whether Company D ever delivered. But I do know that Company B (the company that outsourced to us) ordered a few more of the product I designed at the end of last year, and the critical component from Company D was not supplied to my company. I don't know whether the part existed. But it doesn't seem likely since Company B would have had us put it in. My guess is that Company D, or a replacement outsourcer, was able to deliver some time at the beginning of this year, maybe Spring. Hence the two year delay.

I no longer work at the company where I designed this system, so I no longer have any first hand knowledge of the goings on. But from what I read in the article, the root cause of the delays has not been fixed. I would put my money on further delays.

Actually, there should be no correlations between votes and agreement.

Upvotes should reward civil comments that feed the conversation constructively.

Aggressivity, and empty posts ("cheerleaders", etc.) should be downvoted.

Flags are for grossly offensive or illegal content.

That was the original intent IIRC: encouraging civil conversation. Tying votes with agreement leads to groupthink. We should encourage diversity unless we want to become a close-minded community, reinforcing it's own biases.

More details: http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/21/kindlegate-confusion-abo...

The bottom line:

* You are able to redownload your books an unlimited number of times to any specific device.

* Any one time the books can be on a finite number of devices, decided by the publisher for each book. For most books this is 5 or 6 devices.

* If you hit the limit, Amazon can reset it much like iTunes lets you deauthorize all computers when you hit your limit.

Suddenly Sudoku seems the most natural thing in the world.