Shorts
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State of Computer Science in India
This is mostly a reply to Shyam and Apoorv interspersed with some commentary about what I think the general state of computer science and programmers in the country is. I must admit that I was never really a part of the system while I was in India, but I do know some people who were and my opinions are based off what I heard from them, as well as conversations with my father about the topic. Then again, what opinion is not biased?
I read a couple of blog posts about the state of computer science and startups’ mentality regarding programmers in India. Nothing new in their conclusions; we all know what the problem is but do little to change things. Fortunately or unfortunately education is one of those sectors that are the most resistant to change. Fortunately, because a good education system benefits greatly where a bunch of retarded politicians cannot come in with a few policies and screw things up. Unfortunately, because a bad education sector is hard (if not impossible) to fix. I believe India falls under the latter.
Placing the blame squarely on the education sector will be unfair, for it is merely the supply to the demands of the industrial sector. I’m not a part of the industrial sector, so take whatever I say about it with a grain of salt, but the fundamental flaw lies in the people’s motivations. The people of India are driven by money, not excellence. We don’t do things for the sake of doing them. We do things because we’re getting something out of it—that something usually being money. Yes, there are exceptions to this. With a population as large as ours, of course a statement like that won’t apply to everyone. But a large part of the population is driven by money.
The reason that is wrong is because we essentially become a state of implementors, not designers. Think about that for a moment. I’ll come back to this a little later.
Indian Startups Don’t Need to Learn How to Program
They need to know what they want to accomplish with their product. This is the fundamental and most important thing.
Programming isn’t something that you can learn by reading through an O’Reilly book. Programming, like any other discipline, takes time and effort to learn. By telling startups to learn how to program, you’re effectively limiting the quality of their product. You cannot claim that the quality is important and then ask people to learn how to program before making it in the same passage. Will you tell them to go learn how to design as well? Is a few month’s learning a good substitute for years of experience?
See: Why Indian Startups Need To Get Off Their Asses and Learn to Program
Once you’ve realised what it is that you really want your product to be, start finding people who will do it for you. This can be one person (a consultant) or a team. Outsourcing is not a bad thing if the people you’re outsourcing to are good. The post by Abhinash reads more like a egotistical rant that can be summarised down to “I’m not here to implement your ideas, and my experience cannot be bought.” It’s a conflict designers face all the time, it’s why we hate working with some clients. But design studios still exist. The idea is to state and establish that you’re the expert, not them. Experience can be bought, but the problem in a country like India is that we don’t understand the value of that experience. Our main criteria is the cost of things, not the quality. And keeping those two in mind, we don’t pay our programmers and designers what they deserve1.
In that sense, yes, learning to program would be better—not for the startup—but the programmers the startup is hiring, since they’ll get paid what they deserve as the startup will understand the complexity of the undertaking. But that isn’t what Abinash’s point was.
What My Contribution to Fix the Situation Has Been
Very little. That’s because the problem has very little to do with the education sector itself, as I pointed out earlier. I did try and get some people involved in extra-curricular hacking, but that didn’t turn out so well because, and continuing the point I left dangling above, their motivations for joining a computer science course were misplaced. I don’t try and preach to people beyond a certain point (that point being very close to the starting line) and I decided to make the most of the time I had to learn and achieve something by myself rather than continue barking up the wrong tree.
Related: What’s Wrong With CS In India
Outside India, students join universities and courses with “job opportunity” as a very low priority. People stay on to become lecturers purely because for the love of the field and teaching (because let’s face it, the pay isn’t that great). Plus the way universities work in India is completely different from how they work outside. Research, publishing papers, all that stuff. That leads to an overall better student-lecturer relationship as well as a bump in the quality of the material students are taught.
Changing the system in India will take a lot more than trying to change the education sector. And I personally rather do something which has a higher chance of giving back than waste my life trying to fix something that may never be fixed. As we look towards the west at countries like the U.S. and try to emulate them, combined with new startups being started by people returning from abroad with a more progressive outlook and western companies showing a growing interest in India, I hope that the system will fix itself over time. But I personally am not going to concern myself with it.
People need to understand that money isn’t everything. That’s where our problems start, and that is where they will end.
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