So are we engineers anymore, really?
India’s leading Software Service Company M/s. TATA Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) recruited 1755 students of the 2012 batch from SASTRA University, during their campus recruitment drive conducted at SASTRA on September 16 & 17, 2011. This world record is for the largest recruitment by any company in the world from a single campus. TCS surpassed its earlier record that it set at SASTRA last year. (source)
1,755 students from my alma mater's class of 2012 were recruited by an IT sweatshop. My class - 2008 - only had a total batch strength of 1,667. Staggering numbers, and probably a world record, but it isn't really something to be proud of if you're calling your institution an "engineering college". Particularly if it is one that produces a vast number of "mechanical engineers", "civil engineers", "biotechnologists" and such - all of whom end up in the same assembly line anyway.
Sadly, this isn't an isolated case among engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu (and probably elsewhere).
Yes, a number of students are not motivated enough to go into their core engineering fields, and yes, a vast number of them only want to get a job and to support their families. But the fact remains that most of these students (from my personal experience with my own batchmates) only want a job - any job. Many of them are clear even when they start off their first year that they only want the IT jobs.
The result of having an overwhelming majority of people wanting to go into IT services jobs is that the non-IT programmes become a farce. I remember at least one lecturer going easy on my mechanical engineering class because "you are all going to only do IT jobs anyway". One lecturer with that attitude is one lecturer too many. Those of us with genuine non-IT interests suffer - and suffer badly. This inflated "demand" for non-IT courses [mostly from those who need an engineering degree for an IT job but don't have the grades to make the limited intake of a high-demand IT programme] also leads to a general deterioration in the quality of faculty hired by engineering institutions. In short, rubbish lecturers with neither the desire nor the ability to teach. Personally I know that this atmosphere destroyed the motivation I had as a naïve youngster out of high school with a fascination for how things work, and I needed to go through a whole year of graduate school before I started to find my love for engineering again.
So maybe it's about time that the IT services majors started their own institutions. Most of the non-IT/non-CSE engineers (and even some of the IT/CSE engineers) start from scratch when these employers do their intensive post-recruitment training for a few months, learning programming and communication skills. Perhaps these companies could establish their own degree programmes, recruiting people fresh out of high school and giving them a grounding in the technical and soft skills they need the most. If they genuinely need people with mechanical or civil or electrical or biotechnological or other skills, they can come by to engineering institutions and recruit only those they genuinely need with those skills. Alternatively, let the engineering institutions open up more seats in IT, computer science and related programmes, and allow only those with a genuine interest to take up mechanical, civil or other engineering branches.
Perhaps it is time to cease the farce and let our engineering programmes go back to being about engineering.
