Thursday, August 04, 2011

Are the software companies making young graduates unemployable?

The software industry in India has grown by leaps and bounds in last 10 years. IT/ITES sector has become the major job creator sector.
A few years back (even today in some parts) a Software job used to be a dream job of any fresh engineering graduate coming out of college.
Today software companies employs hundreds of thousands of young men and women.
But are the people working in these organizations really growing intellectually? Are they getting any sharper compared to when they passed out of college.
Are these engineers providing any solutions? Or are they simply getting turned to another coder, developer, tester or whatever they call it in the IT companies.
A fresh young graduate who has dreams of changing this world lands in a software company and 9 out of 10 times that's the end of his dreams.
He gets moulded and typecast into a code churning machine, where most of the time he is copying and pasting and hardly 2% of the times he is using his brains to find a 'real' solution.
The software innovations and solutions are being given by 1% of the whole software population in the world and out of that 1% too 99% sits in the US.
So at the end of the day there is no intellectual growth, there is no sharpening of skills (except for copy and paste) and there is no innovation at all.
In addition, companies come up with their own frameworks, their own tools which the employees have to get used to and after working for an year the employee becomes one of the robot in the army of robots.
If he switches job, that tool's knowledge is not worth anything in the market and with that knowledge and skill set he becomes unemployable in the market, he will need to again go back to the books to prepare for an interview and once again when he is recruited to another company a new tool, a new framework is there to learn. All the theoretical knowledge is for nothing.

The problem becomes acute when you consider that how many bright minds who could have innovated so much, could have been a solution provider, gets stuck in this system which renders them useless for any other task.
Just because of a good job in software company, thousands of people even change their stream to computers from civil, mechanical, electronics, etc.
If these people would have remained in their original streams they could have benefited that stream so much with their knowledge and expertise.
Also if there is proper platform provided in the software companies for these young employees to showcase their talent, encouraging and giving support for their innovation and work could be assigned as per their skill sets then we can have many good engineers and solution providers, who will change the entire game and will lead our country to the next millennium where we would be the solution providers and rest of the world would just copy and paste.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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