back to article India tweaks tech colleges to 'become real power in software'

India's decided its massive successes of the last 20 years aren't enough and will tweak its Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IITs) to create home-grown technology colossi. India's IITs are among the most sought-after educational institutions on Earth: about 1.1 million youngsters sit entrance exams to fight for 10, …

  1. SisterClamp
    Facepalm

    Does that mean...

    ...exam answers are set to cost more? Enquiring minds who have worked with Indian "developers" and "consultants" want to know.

    1. Taegukgi

      Re: Does that mean...

      Yes and No - I understand what you are saying about consultants in general but the people from these IITs are a different breed altogether.

      They are the cream out of the kids who pass high school every year and then groomed through a pretty good system to come out as some of the higly sought after Engineers in the whole world. There are estimates of more than 1.5 millon Engineers graduating every year from various collages in India and just a few thousand of them are from the IITs; of course there would be a difference.

      So whatever perception you have of "Indian developers and consultants", it would change for good if you work with these fellows.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Does that mean...

        I wonder why this golden boys (where's the girls, also - do Indian universities seek gender equality?) accept to be paid so little, even abroad. Maybe because if they asked for the same wages they would stop to be so "highly sought"? Are they skill really above average, or not? The system may be highly selective, bit it doesn't warrant to produce the best ones - it may only produce those who better adapt to the same system. While often outstanding IT people are those who are able to think outside the box. Systems that stifle creativity, lack of a very broad vision may produce good drones only... those who may find how hard is to swim when the water becomes high....

        1. Triggerfish

          Re: Does that mean...

          Average Wage India $302 per month. They might be just working to a different idea of a lot.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They're welcome - I wonder why they didn't it already

    Let's see how good they are to create products and companies from scratch, and sell worldwide something different than cheap developers and support people. Even climbing the ranks of someone else company may be easier....

    Did they need the government to tell them? Just, expect a lot of looting of open source projects to start from..

    1. SisterClamp

      Re: They're welcome - I wonder why they didn't it already

      "Just, expect a lot of looting of open source projects to start from.."

      This.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: They're welcome - I wonder why they didn't it already

      Zoho has slowly kept growing. There may be others.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: They're welcome - I wonder why they didn't it already

        Zoho is not a pure Indian company based in India.

  3. Taegukgi

    IIT or IIIT

    The article describes the IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) initially and then moves on to talk about IIIT (Indian Institutes of Information Technology), which are a seperate entity. The former focusses on a wide spectrum of Engineering trades while the latter focusses on teaching IT (they are quite unrelated - more than their similar names might suggest).

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'm all for it, but...

    ..please ask them to stop sending messages about free summer trips summer internships at your esteemed university. I can just tag those as spam, but it gives their institutions a bad name.

    See this and this for example.

  5. Denarius

    all stereotypes aside for once

    Want a unique market and product ? For Android, make a decent GUI that does not have WTF surprises, a lack of order and structure that makes some tasks harder than they need to be, application interference giving rise to expressions of why the hell does that stop this happening and they may have a winner.

    And for the next big show, a better replacement for java

    (a) is secure

    (b) really is portable without requiring a supercomputer to run

    (c) is fast

    If they can pull the above off, I will be impressed

  6. hattivat

    "The minister thinks that kind of success is India's next frontier, so has put the IITs on notice they need to get busy creating the kind of entrepreneurs capable of tapping global zeitgeist."

    No, mate, what you need is to become a place where such individuals want to stay. In my experience there are plenty of smart Indians, problem is very few of them live in India - virtually all of the intelligent ones I've met seem to have moved elsewhere as soon as someone offered them a visa. Take a look at how your country ranks for things like air pollution, healthcare, public education, personal safety, complexity of regulations, or corruption, and do something about it, because as long as the intelligent choice is NOT to stay in India, intelligent people will surprise surprise... tend to not stay in India.

    1. Packet

      This! A million times this - the man speaks the truth

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Additionally, it would be more convincing about the "smart" ones moving to the "West" if they weren't mostly simply on intra-company transfers working for 40% (or less) of the going rate and being "farmed" like caged rabbits in groups (i.e. without enough income to actually be genuinely "living" in the host country) or on various types of H1B type visas individually for exactly the same kind of reason except living individually on fairly poor wages.

      If they were actually getting good jobs with good pay on merit, and say, contributing to OSS things via GitHub or whatever, or showing their abilities and ideas otherwise, I am sure that would be welcome also.

      But, I have absolutely *no faith* whatsoever that the Western host countries will encourage *anything* like that.

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