Engineers in U.S. vs. India

[Jim Dixon]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Steve Mynott wrote:

> > 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
>
> I have had jobs as a "software engineer" in the UK and since the dot com
> bubble this hasn't been an uncommon job title.

Go to Jobserve and count.  I did, about a year ago.  I found 612
references in a 5-day period, as compared with 1651 for Java and 1889
for C++.

My point is not that there are no software engineers in the world, but
that the term "engineer" is often used quite loosely and means vastly
different things in different places.

> The UK tends to follow US fashions very closely importing in titles like
> CEO and CTO and the term "software engineer" is no different.

The term 'software engineer' is becoming less common in the States these
days.  I have watched the job title wax and wane for more than twenty
five years.  I think that it was most fashionable in the early 1980s.

If it isn't clear, I usually describe myself as a software engineer. I
belong to the ACM (www.acm.org) and follow their articles discussing
software engineering as a profession with a mild interest.

> As for your comments that "my impression is that India has a few
> excellent institutions and a vast number of unbelievably bad schools" I
> suspect this is true but applies equally to the UK and USA and indeed
> any country with a university system.  Neither is graduating from a top
> engineering school such as Stanford any automatic guarantee of quality
> as anyone who has worked with these people knows.

You don't understand.  I have never ever heard of any school in the UK or
the United States, no matter how bad, where degrees are routinely and
rather openly sold, or where riots on campus, usually in response to
examinations, frequently involve lethal weapons and deaths.
"Unbelievably bad" means just that.

I have visited India many times and have spent at least two years there in
total.  I went there of my own free will, travelling.  And I spent enough
time in various places (at least several months each in Calcutta, Delhi,
Bombay, Madras, as well as many smaller and less well-known places) to
have a decent overall understanding of the country.

> India has an excellent tradition in mathematics and some of the best
> software engineers I have worked with in the UK have been Indian
> graduates, since it's the most enterprising and highly qualified ones
> which tend to emigrate.

India tends to stunning extremes.  Many amazingly good mathematicians have
come out of India; my experience is that this is strongly regional, with
the best coming from Bengal in the north and then the Bangalore/
Madras/north of there region in the southeast.

But you have to see those extremes. There is nothing like stepping out of
a Calcutta coffee house, after having a wonderfully intelligent
conversation, into the appalling streets.  I think that any attempt to
describe life in Calcutta as I knew it would be met with disbelief.  Go
there.  Don't stay in a tourist hotel. It takes at least a few weeks for
your eyes to adjust, for you to take in just how very very different the
subcontinent is.  Then you might go a little mad and run away, or you
might just decide that you like the place ;-)

> O Reilly Associates recognise the importance of the Indian market by
> suppplying special low priced editions of their books to the Indian
> market.  They are occasionally available as "grey imports" in the UK.

Yes.  This has been going on for a long long time.  Most major publishers
do it.  I used to buy cheap technical books myself in India, Hong Kong,
Japan, etc.  Although they tend to be out of date, there are often very
good buys.  I still have some on my shelves.

I am not India-bashing.  I just think that the people who are so concerned
about the threat of India wiping out the US software industry are uhm
let's say a bit unrealistic.  It might be a concern 30 years from now,
although I am skeptical even of that.

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