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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.

 

Posted September 17, 2011
Sep 17, 2011
Ketan Panchal said...
Very well said! Apart from what you said, even from the field of IT, I feel most Indian academic programs don't really prepare the students for the jobs they'd be likely doing. And that's remained a problem with Indian education since long. So, either these courses should be shortened or industry people should've a greater role in course designing.
Sep 17, 2011
Ketan Panchal said...
field *outside of IT.
Sep 17, 2011
techrsr said...
In a sense this is what the industry-institute partnership cells aim to bypass. On the other hand we have colleges selecting candidates based on their ability to either be placed or reward the college with a handsome sum of money for selecting them (a.k.a. "management seats"). Education is about money, and nothing about the fields that engineering students study. Industry was all about business and money anyway and made no bones about the fact that regardless of what your skills were, if you managed to benefit the company, you became successful.

Mechanical engineering jobs in India are mostly a farce, unless you're working for a core design or manufacturing team in an organization, or if you've been fortunate enough to work with a core design/manufacturing company who is a client of your employer who happens to be a services company. In either case, you'll never earn as much as an IT professional or an MBA - most of who add very little value to their organization in comparison to how much most get paid. Naturally, everyone wants the low workload and the high salaries that come from here, and the job market and the industry seem to encourage this trend. I know many mechanical engineers who went into investment banking - with little to no idea of what to expect in it as an industry, and they hate their jobs, but they like the money - that great unguent of burnt out workers and messed up jobs.

There are social reasons - and not reasons related to India's technological or developmental progress - for the engineering degree becoming prominent and there will be social reasons were it to go out of fashion.

Sep 17, 2011
anantha said...
There are some other issues too. The way I see it, for non IT majors, getting through an IT company interview is possibly easier than getting into a engineering company. But If you are a Mechanical Engineer, you'll be grilled in an auto major's interview. In an IT major's interview, you'll probably be checked for aptitude and attitude, which a good percentage will have anyways.
And there's a good chance that you will hate the job afterward. The solution then? The US universities way? May be open up the degree programs in such a way that you will not know what you will major in till the end of your 2nd year (depending on what courses you've chosen apart from the basic math & science courses), by which time your interests SHOULD be set. At least this way, if you want an IT job, you will have the opportunity to brush up your programming skills a little more. And the genuinely interested will graduate with increased "employability" in the sectors of their choice.
But the bigger problem is the herd mentality. There's no solution to that cos the parents do play a huge role in that.
Sep 17, 2011
i.r.squared said...
@Ketan Panchal: Thank you. Yes, the problem does exist for most educational fields - but I am not aware of the details anywhere else. Maybe it's time for someone more familiar with the educational system to inspect this issue more generally?
@techrsr: I don't know how well the industry-institute interaction *really* works. My college has been in bed with TCS for at least five-six years now, and the hiring itself has been going on for far longer. If anything, the overall intake across branches has increased, as has TCS hiring across branches. There is no subject-specific adjustment at all. Also, I have an uncle who got his engineering degree in the 70s and has worked at BHEL ever since - he often laments about how the standards of mechanical engineering has come down on the whole, how they have to re-train everyone they hire and how the quality is so low that there's no motivation to pay the new recruits well anymore. And he swears this wasn't the case until the IT hiring boom. Sure, this is only anecdotal evidence but it agrees with my own comparison of my 2004-grad seniors and 2010-grad juniors. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any more scientific proof.

@anantha: I don't necessarily want *more* mechanical engineers, I just wish we were trained to be *better* ones. So the herd mentality isn't an issue. The American system is definitely better, and we should stop pretending that 17-18 year olds know what specific kind of engineer they want to be when they leave high school.

Sep 17, 2011
Injuneer said...
In India, we have had this mentality that science group implies being smarter than commerce group students, engineering implies one is smarter than pure sciences/ arts majors, etc for a long while. Now it's IT/CS > engineering. So, lecturers (and hiring managers) think 9/10 "core engineering" students are where they are because they weren't smart enough to get into an IT program. It all stems from the belief that people are generally apathetic to their profession and choose the most lucrative field they can get into. This mentality can't change until the Indian middle class becomes richer, at which point, we'll trade issues like this for first world problems.

The gap in initiative and curiosity between American BS students and MS (after a desi BE) students at any good US institution is usually large enough to demonstrate that while the former are engineers, most of the latter just have degrees in engineering. Same can be said of people in any major. All education in India is a farce. See - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826.html. Statistics that show Indians being more successful in the US than their American counterparts (to illustrate the superiority of the Indian educational system or just our "genes") cleverly ignore that only top 20% of our graduates (used to) move abroad, and so we're unfairly comparing one of our toppers with a median US grad.

Sep 18, 2011
anantha said...
I used the mechanical engineering example because of our common background. But that's what I am heading - the moment the non IT streams are "limited" to the genuinely interested, the chances of "better" engineers graduating improves. And the herd mentality is not about students. It is about the parents. My parents pushed me toward CS & also Instrumentation solely because of campus placements in college. I pushed back and went the mechanical way because I thought I want to work in a factory :) So your point about us not knowing what to do when we graduate from school is also true.
Sep 20, 2011
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