Engineers in U.S. vs. India

Jim Dixon jdd at dixons.org
Wed Jan 7 06:10:55 PST 2004


On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Sarad AV wrote:

> > "Today, Bangalore stands ahead of Bay Area, San
> > Francisco and California,
> > with a lead of 20,000 techies, while employing a
> > total number of 1.5 lakh
> > engineers."
>
> I live in bangalore,those figures are correct.

Meaning that 150,000 engineers are employed in Bangalore?  Does this
include software engineers, HTML coders, programmers, computer scientists?
Does it include say railway engineers, truck mechanics, the guy who fixes
your air conditioning?

The term 'engineer' is far from precise; in the UK most people who work
with tools can be called engineers but people who write software generally
are NOT called engineers. There are further complications: for example, in
certain parts of the United States (Texas comes to mind), you cannot
describe yourself as an engineer without being certified as such by the
state.  You can be a mechanical or civil engineer, but not a software
engineer, because there is no relevant test.  One of the consequences of
this is that Texas vastly undercounts its engineers.

The civil/mechanical/etc engineers have lobbied successfully for such
restrictions on the use of the job title in other states (and Canada?).
There are frequent articles in ACM journals complaining about this; people
who have been software engineers for decades are breaking the law if they
describe themselves as such in Texas.

In the same vein, what does 'techie' mean in the article quoted?  When the
article says that Bangalore has a lead of 20,000 techies over California,
exactly what is this supposed to mean?

For years Japan led the world in the use of robots because they counted as
robots devices that were not counted as such in the USA and Europe, simple
pick-and-place arms. I suspect that much the same thing is going on here.

--
Jim Dixon  jdd at dixons.org   tel +44 117 982 0786  mobile +44 797 373 7881
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