The Myth Of India's Information Technology Industry

Authored by Jayant Bhandari via Acting-Man.com,

A Shift in Perception – Indians in Silicon Valley

When I was studying in the UK in early 90s, I was often asked about cows, elephants and snake-charmers on the roads in India.  A shift in public perception - not in the associated reality - was however starting to happen. India would soon become known for its vibrant IT industry.

Friends and family are helping students taking university exams with cheating. 2.5 million candidates, many of them with PhDs or post-graduates, recently applied for 6,000 of the lowest level job positions (“grade D”) available in West Bengal, which require no more than an early-stage school education. While India produces the largest number of PhDs, engineers, etc. in the world, the educational system is in reality in a shambles and a complete joke. Most of these people are in fact unemployable. [The incredible scene above took place in Bihar and is explained in greater detail here. Relatives of students are scaling the walls of the examination center to pass on cheat sheets to their offspring. Policemen who were supposed to guard examination buildings were often bribed to look the other way. A total of 6 to 7 million people across India were estimated to provide  cheating assistance. [PT]]

 

A similar scene at another examination center in Bihar. In several locations parents and relatives even clashed with police who tried to keep them from scaling the walls (which is actually quite risky). Here is a You-tube video showing a TV report on the “massive family affair” the exam turned into, which is in parts quite funny. You will inter alia notice that students who get caught cheating by their teachers sometimes have to expect the kind of traditional instant punishment that would be frowned upon in politically correct Western societies, but which probably has the advantage of being memorable (here is another video of the collective cheating effort; and here is Mr. Bean taking an exam). [PT]

As more IT graduates from India moved to the US to work, they lobbied to change how India was viewed, not because India had actually changed or because they cared for India, but because from their tribal perspective, this reflected well on them. This process went hand in hand with the emerging trend toward political correctness in the West - people in the West became keen to exaggerate the successes of India and other “emerging markets” to prove their non-racist orientation.

Today, Silicon Valley has quite a visible Indian population and many of its members are very talented and in top positions. This helped change the perception of India. There are a total of one million Indian engineers and scientists in the US.  To put this number into perspective, the population of India increases by more than a million souls every month.

These were the best and the brightest of India, and while their number is not even noise in the grand scheme of things, the exception to the rule began to be seen as the rule. A completely faulty assumption was taking root, namely that India is a land of high-tech people. Neither Indians nor politically correct Westerners challenged this notion.

Indians were hired by Americans based on meritocratic principles, but as more Indians rose to the top, they tended to hire based on tribal affiliations. Again, this tribalism has nothing to do with trying to help their brethren.  Mostly  it is about the comfort tribal people feel working with their own kind, despite harboring concomitant feelings of disdain. An Indian boss finds it easier to get away with abusing his Indian staff.

Apart from visible high-caliber Indians in the IT industry in the US, most of these employees are actually C-level, sweatshop labor, who work for a lot less than what Americans would be prepared to accept. Many of those who did not learn programming in the US are known for writing error-prone code that cannot be maintained. Moreover, they have developed a reputation for being pompous. Americans find it difficult to complain, as they don’t want to risk looking racist.

An outsized number of Indians in the position of recruiters tend to favor Indians, once again not for reasons of empathy, but merely for the comfort they feel in managing expectations. The lottery system associated with H1B visa is riddled with manipulated multiple filings and fake resumes – stories about this abound.

The IT Industry in India

Even within India, the IT industry is not what many people believe it to be. The IT sector accounts for 9.3% of the country’s GDP, or about $150 billion. While the Indian IT industry looks big from an Indian perspective, it is miniscule even in comparison with China, let alone the US.

In total, a mere 3.7 million out of India’s population of 1,350 million people are employed in the IT industry. Again, most of them are working as better-paid sweat-labor, forever ready to jump to a slightly better job offer. Creative, innovative work is almost never sent to India.

As time has passed it has become increasingly difficult for political correctness to suppress the fact that much of the code written by Indian IT programmers is of inferior quality. Indian IT firms are losing business and sadly the one industry that led most of India’s growth over the last three decades is rapidly shedding employees.

An Indian friend who has worked for many years in the IT industry, in and outside of India told me:

“The Indian IT sector, excluding the work that gets done at Microsoft, Google, Intel and few research-based companies, is the biggest joke of the millennium. Service-based companies within India, including well-known Indian names, try to skim clients big-time and operate with meager productivity. It really doesn’t make surprise me when many Indians in IT are losing their jobs because of their irresponsibility and indecent behavior. They treat their offices as their own private place to hang around, chit-chatting with colleagues, talking about their private lives publicly. Managers, mostly incompetent at work have zero-tolerance towards their subordinates, are sexist, and lure their female subordinates.”

Will Indians one day sit back and reflect that their lack of reason, their tribalism and superstitions are the reason for the utter backwardness and wretchedness, which is letting the one small advantage Indians had slip by?

The flaws of Indian coders have made headlines before. The article from which the above exhortation was taken appeared in 2015 after “Snapdeal cheerfully declared that ‘right programmers are rare in India’” and inter alia notes that “India’s education system has failed its citizens”. The problems with many Indian coders are deemed to consist of “rote-learning, lack of research and Gestalt skills and an inability to be innovative even while they possess the talent”. Two years earlier, the Atlantic had already published a “behind the scenes” article on the topic as well, which also blames the Indian education system for the situation and includes a forecast that the amount of coding work outsourced to India is likely to drop – to the chagrin of many newly-minted, but apparently poorly trained Indian programmers. [PT]

Here is a comment by Vidyanshu Pandey, who in the past worked as a coder, in delivery management, as a software architect, and is currently in IT sales and management consulting:

“ The combination of all these factors creates IT services that are cheap, but unsustainable. Wage hikes and inflation will make Indian IT services non-competitive. Moreover, the Chinese have rapidly become quite good in English and programming. The quality of their work is high, they have excellent skills in cyber-security, data-science and AI, and they constantly win the International Programming Olympics, a recognition that has mostly eluded Indians. Chinese coders are also happy to put in long hours, without complaining. Also, I find Filipinos to be very good, as well as the Vietnamese. I see a decline coming in India’s IT industry soon. The easy money of the past several years has encouraged materialism, hedonism and decadence. As IT has spearheaded growth of the middle class, its coming downturn may well herald its decline.”

Quiet Changes

Inside the country, Indians have increased their gold hoarding. There is no way to know how much they are really buying, as a lot of gold comes into the country  through smuggling. Those who can are moving their gold and wealth abroad. They are increasing their purchases of properties outside the country, in the process contributing to property price increases in the US, in London, Thailand, and so forth.

A very large number of Directors of publicly-listed Indian companies are officially residents of Singapore, Hong Kong or Dubai. 30% of the people living in the UAE are from India. Of course, not much of this shows up in statistics.

Every Indian I know would emigrate today if he could. Most want to live under  institutions created by Europeans. Hypocritically, those who cannot emigrate, and particularly those who do manage to do so, vociferously claim that European colonization of the third world was somehow an unmitigated calamity. It wasn’t. Without the British running India, India is rapidly on its way to utter chaos, disintegration and what will likely end up becoming a major humanitarian crisis.

"Loyal" Venezuelan Soldiers Get Their Government-Sponsored 'Rewards'...

I live in South America.  South Americans, in general and including Venezuelans, are not "socialists" any more than Europeans are.  The problem here is that so many politicians on the national level are in the pockets of U.S., European, and now Chinese and Saudi financiers.  The people here have been burned by treasonous politicians so often, and the average voter distrust anyone who appears even moderately pro-U.S., or even pro-European or (recently) pro-Chinese.    Unfortunately, in most South American countries, the socialist parties are the only alternatives.

In Venezuela, you have a situation in which U.S. meddling in that nation"s politics resulted in a socialist counter coup, which has entrenched itself in power.  It was constant U.S. meddling that created this situation, and I assure you that outside of the ruling circle, no one in Venezuela is happy about it.  The U.S. media seems very indignant about supposed "Russian" meddling in the U.S. election in 2016.  Well.. I have news for everyone in the U.S., the U.S. meddles in every election, every year, all the time in South America, and the people here are pissed off about it.

"Shrinkflation" - How Food Companies Implement Massive Price Hikes Without You Ever Noticing

Do you ever get the sense that your favorite steak at that Quick Service Restaurant of your choice keeps getting thinner and thinner all while your check size at the end of the night continues getting larger and larger.  Well, it is.  How else are publicly traded chains going to continue to deliver margin growth to wall street in the midst of rising labor costs, rising commodity costs and shrinking customer traffic?

As a new study in the U.K. just revealed, shrinking portion sizes among food manufacturers is actually way more common than you might think and you probably never even noticed it.  In fact, according to data from the Office for National Statistics, over 2,500 consumer products in the U.K. shrunk in size over the past five years despite being sold for the same price.

But it"s not just food manufacturers that are shrinking portions while maintaining price as many consumers goods items from chocolate to coffee to toilet paper are all experiencing the same trends.  Known in grocery circles as "liar packs", shrinking portion sizes became an attractive alternative to simply raising prices back during the great recession when consumers became particularly sensitive to price.  Of course, the net effect is exactly the same but it"s much more difficult to notice that fine print on the bottom corner of the packaging than it is the price tag at check out.  Per The Telegraph:

Mark Jones, a food and drink solicitor at Gordons law firm, said: “Shrinkflation was borne out of the recession and has gathered staggering pace since 2009. The ONS’s report confirms this. Against the back drop of a weak economy, commodity prices have been rising over the last five years.

"The recession made people very price sensitive and you can see the evidence of that by looking at the impressive growth of discount retailers in the last five years, no retail sector has grown faster.

“Suppliers and retailers do not want to raise the ‘on the shelf’ price, but both have had to adapt to increasing commodity prices.

"Shrinking the size of the products being sold, whether that is toilet paper, chocolate or cleaning products, is just another way of pushing through a price increase, but in a more subtle way. How many of us noticed Andrex reduce the number of sheets on a toilet roll from 240 to 221?”

And here is the breakdown by month over the past 5 years:

But it"s not just British consumers getting duped by "shrinkflation" as all the same games are played in the U.S. markets as well.  For example, who is actually going to notice that 10 sheets of paper are missing from the Bounty rolls on the right versus those on the left?  Yet, assuming that both packages are sold at the same price this small reduction in size equates to a substantial 9% price hike on a per sheet basis.

Meanwhile, these containers are completely identical aside from some tiny print in the bottom right hand corner.

Conclusion: Caveat emptor...there is a whole army of Harvard MBAs working in consumer goods companies all around the world whose sole mission in life is to get you to pay more for less without ever noticing.

Thirteen Reasons Why: America’s High Schools Are Creating (Another) Lost Generation

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Written by Peter Diekmeyer (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

Netflix’s recent announcement that it would be producing a second season of Thirteen Reasons Why has raised new questions about the disastrous state of the US public school system and its effects on the economy.

“Hey, it’s Hannah Baker,” says the show’s protagonist, played by a stunning Katherine Langford in the opening episode. “Get settled in. Because I"m about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why my life ended.”

The Thirteen Reasons’ portrait of how a stifling, bureaucratic system progressively cuts this teenage girl to pieces, eventually driving her to death, provides a dramatized, insightful reflection on (another) emerging lost generation.

The statistics are grim: a third of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. live at home according to the US Census Bureau. Homeserve USA finds that nearly one in three Americans can’t come up with $500 to fund an emergency. As if that were not enough, according to the US Congressional Budget Office, governments have saddled today’s young with more than $100 trillion worth of pension and healthcare debts.

The harder truth depicted in Thirteen Reasons Why is that today’s high school graduates emerge with few skills, little education and a sanitized view of the world. In short, they are totally unprepared to take on the challenges they face.

Following are Thirteen Reasons Why:

1. Thirteen years in jail

In Thirteen Reasons, Hannah, the bullied protagonist has no way to escape a toxic environment. Her helpless position progressively worsens and eventually drives her to suicide.

Because education is compulsory in the United States, Hannah lives in a de facto prison. She cannot change schools or classes without parental approval and undergoing a humiliating bureaucratic process.

An education system that prioritized learning would put students at the center, leaving them free to choose their schools, classes, teachers and programs.

2. American kids can’t vote

The challenges facing American kids are exacerbated by the fact that they aren’t allowed to vote. They thus have little stake in the system, no sense of responsibility and adopt a de facto poise of helplessness.

3. Students come last

None of the dozen studies reviewed for this article assessed the US public education system based on students’ needs.

Governments prioritize public education based on its effects on national competitiveness. Businesses focus on getting skilled workers (whose training they don’t want to pay for). Teachers’ unions focus on salaries and working conditions.

The upshot is that students’ interests come last.

4. Bloated administrations

America spends more per student than any other country yet ranks 14th in terms of results, behind Russia. Must of this is due to legions of highly-paid administrators that clog the system with rules, regulations and forms, few of which prioritize education.

5. Kids taught to worship government; shun individual responsibility

The young have always been concerned with social causes. It’s thus hardly surprising that teachers would encourage students to prioritize government’s role in healthcare, welfare and environmental regulation.

However today’s public schools offer essentially no counter arguments about individual responsibility.

High school graduates thus emerge as easy prey for politicians who claim that near-unlimited government spending and borrowing are the cure for the nation’s problems. (See the Krugman con).

6. Public schools teach no marketable skills

The greatest indictment of the public school system’s actual performance relates to the fact that students graduate with no marketable skills.

If America’s kids emerged from schools able to read, write, do basic math, type, work as a team and use a half dozen common software packages, they would have something to show for their 13 years in the slammer.

7. Banning Ayn Rand and Huckleberry Finn

Socrates’ motto at the Agora was to “question everything.” However public schools prioritize politically correct doctrine that consciously excludes key ideas and concepts.

Ayn Rand, the most important philosopher of the 20th century, is essentially banned from the public system, as is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which Hemingway cited as the root of American literature. History teaching in America, as Niall Ferguson has noted, is sanitized to the point of rendering it almost counterproductive.

8. State-directed curricula: one size fits all

Students vary as do the communities they live in. However a disproportionate amount of teaching is dictated by bureaucrats. This leaves teachers little flexibility to adjust based on students’ needs.

These differ based on whether the school in located in poorer neighborhoods where many students come from single family homes, or in upper middle-class professional communities where traditional family structures are more common.

9. Kids graduate clueless about finances

Public schools teach essentially nothing about managing money, likely the single most important life skill a kid could have. Students graduate thus thinking that borrowing is fine.

This leaves them prey to America’s biggest predatory lenders: big universities, which have managed to saddle youth with $1.2 trillion worth of debts, many of whom have little to show for it.

10. “Hoop jumper” worship: drives out the talented and curious

One of the biggest weaknesses in public and private schools is their collective worship of “hoop jumpers,” - that universal collection of the obsequious sorts that clutter Dean’s lists and other “Top Students” awards.

This wouldn’t be a problem if schools were able to correctly identify top performers. However heavy state-defined curricula force teachers to “teach to the test.”

This leads to the advancement of drone-like students who are able to recite mindless data, massaged concepts and formulas, and more dangerously: with the need to guess and kow-tow to what teachers want them to say.

Worse, in two centuries of public schooling, teachers still fall for that old trap of giving the best marks to kids with nice hand-writing or to math students who get the wrong answer but manage to “show their work.” Students who challenge conventional thinking are smiled at and given a B.

The upshot is the students with drive, curiosity and creativity are quickly driven out.

The number one students - like John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern economics, who taught that the best way to get rich was to spend more than you earn - rocket through the system, and now run the nation’s central banks and university economics departments.

You get the picture.

11. Powerful unions

In a world in which students are stuck in de facto prisons, teachers, who spend more time with them than their parents do, ought to be their biggest backers. They aren’t.

Teachers thus need to accept the lion’s share of the blame for the disastrous state of American schools.

That blame starts with the fact that teachers’ first priority has been to band into powerful unions, which put salaries, benefits and vacation time first and students’ interests last.

12. Millionaire teachers

True, teachers perform one of society’s most useful functions. However during a time of strained public finances students’ needs must come first - not teachers’ salaries.

The teachers’ unions have been hugely successful. Median compensation for US workers is $28,900. Teachers earn $58,000, almost double that amount.

The gap between teachers and those communities they teach in is exacerbated by the fact that gold-plated, state-guaranteed pensions mean that public school teachers generally retire as millionaires.

If teachers were paid at market rates, there would be more money available to fund students’ needs such as smaller class sizes, libraries and computers.

13. Mediocre teachers that can’t be fired

Teachers begin their careers ranked among most socially-committed of any professionals. But as with any human beings, a change takes hold of teachers once they acquire tenure and can no longer be fired.

Office hours and volunteer activities shrink, emails from students and parents are returned slower, if at all. The upshot is that many of the best teachers decline towards mediocrity as their careers advance.

*****

The takeaway for the alternative investors, who wonder how the American public could so easily fall for politicians, economists and central bankers that are running US productivity into the ground, the answer is clear.

America’s public schools may be leaving their graduates incapable of assessing the stakes.

Questions or comments about this article? Leave your thoughts HERE.

Written by Peter Diekmeyer (CLICK HERE FOR ORIGINAL)

You Know The London Real Estate Market Is Out Of Control When...

For just $1000 per month, you too can live in Chiswick High Street, London - in a studio flat with a shower in the kitchen...

As The Standard reports, the flat has been “refurbished to a high standard” according to an advert on Gumtree, and has a price tag of £850 per month (around $1050 per month).

 The ad describes it as having its “own shower” and an “open plan kitchen" – however it fails to mention that the shower is situated right next to the kitchen work surfaces.

Pictures of the flat, located in Chiswick High Road, reveal the unusual quirk – showing the kitchen sink with a shower on one side and a stove on the other.

China Foils "Toilet Revolution" Bandits With Facial Recognition In Public Restrooms

As part of China’s efforts to spur tourism with a “toilet revolution,” Consumerist"s Mary Beth Quirk reports that bathrooms at tourist sites will now use facial recognition to keep them from grabbing too much toilet paper. Yes, this means your face could be scanned in the john.

The toilet paper thieves of the Temple of Heaven Park were an elusive bunch, writes The New York Times Javier Hernandez; they looked like most park visitors, practicing tai chi, dancing in the courtyards and stopping to take in the scent of ancient cypress and juniper trees. But hidden in their oversize shopping bags and backpacks was a secret: sheet upon sheet of crumpled toilet paper, plucked surreptitiously from public restrooms.

Now the authorities in Beijing are fighting back, going so far as to install high-tech toilet paper dispensers equipped with facial recognition software in several restrooms.

Before entering restrooms in the park, visitors must now stare into a computer mounted on the wall for three seconds before a machine dispenses a sheet of toilet paper, precisely two feet in length.

If visitors require more, they are out of luck. The machine will not dispense a second roll to the same person for nine minutes.

“The people who steal toilet paper are greedy,” said He Zhiqiang, 19, a customer service worker from the northwestern region of Ningxia.

“Toilet paper is a public resource. We need to prevent waste.”

Qin Gang, 63, taking a stroll through the park with his wife, said China’s history of crippling poverty had left some people eager to exploit public goods.

“It’s a very bad habit,” Mr. Qin said.

“Maybe we can use technology to change how people think.”

One wonders which department of Chinese natural resource protection was responsible for deciding that 24 inches of single-ply TP was "enough".. or for that matter, why a 9 minute break between wipes? Still, these are the wonders of "new" communism

UK Government Proposes "Fantastically Dangerous" University Reforms Pandering To 'Snowflake' Demands

With social justice warriors everywhere still sobbing across the globe after sexist, racist, bigoted, mysognist, anti-semite, satan-worshipping, Putin-puppet (did we miss one?) Donald Trump"s election victory, it appears the special safe-space-seekers may be about to get a win in Britain where universities will be forced to pander to the demands of "snowflake" students if controversial reforms placing student satisfaction at the heart of a new ranking system, are approved.

As "safe space" and "no platform" movements have swept across campuses, The Telegraph reports, the Government faces a cross-party revolt in the Lords this week over proposed reforms to higher education, which include placing student satisfaction at the heart of a new ranking system.

It is feared that this will lead to a "fantastically dangerous" culture where authorities will give in to student demands, however unreasonable they may be.

Baroness Wolf, a professor at King’s College London (KCL), warned:  “Universities are increasingly nervous about doing anything that will create overt dissatisfaction among students because they are being told that student satisfaction is key.

“It has had a real effect on the willingness of universities to stand up to student demands which in the past have been removing statues, safe spaces and no-platforming. This whole movement is a direct threat to academic standards and the ability of universities to stand up for freedom of speech.”

She added: “The student satisfaction measure is fantastically dangerous. The way to make students happy is not asking them to do any work and giving them a high grade.

“This will reduce standards and undermine quality.  I just think this is totally mad, and destructive of everything universities stand for.”

The Higher Education and Research Bill, championed by Universities Minister Jo Johnson (below), will reach committee stage in the Lords on Monday, where is expected to be subject to a barrage of criticism.

As a gentle reminder to all those moribund Millennials, The Only Safe Space Is Your Home

No matter where you go in life, someone will be there to offend you. Maybe it’s a joke you overheard on vacation, a spat at the office, or a difference of opinion with someone in line at the grocery store. Inevitably, someone will offend you and your values. If you cannot handle that without losing control of your emotions and reverting back to your “safe space” away from the harmful words of others, then you’re best to just stay put at home. Remember, though: if people in the outside world scare you, people on the internet will downright terrify you. It’s probably best to just accept these harsh realities of life and go out into the world prepared to confront them wherever they may be waiting.