Indians in Computer Science

Factual Questions
1

In going along with the recent straight dope lists of “why does [insert race/gender/country] like or do [action],” I thought I would ask this question here.

Why are there so many Indians involved with computers or studying computer science?

In the computer science graduate school at my university (which is decently sized, about 100+), foreigners outnumber Americans. This is not completely abnormal for many graduate programs. However, almost all of the non-Americans are Indians (and when I say “almost” I mean 95%). This seems a little strange to me. Other graduate schools and majors tend to have a more eclectic group of foreigners, but not computer science.* Every time I walk in the building I feel like I have been transported to India.

On top of this, anyone who is interested in computers is always hearing about coding jobs being outsourced to India.

Why is this? I don’t have a problem with it, I am just wondering why this interest seems so heavily weighted to one country. Was there some kind of government program there years ago that really pushed interest in computers?

*Except chemistry. Just in case anyone feels like killing two birds with one stone, there are also a ton of Chinese in our chemistry dept. Any ideas?

2

Indian culture, like many Asian cultures, has always placed a premium on education. Lately this has been supplemented by a sort of virtuous circle of IT jobs moved to India, since most Indians also speak English quite well, owing to the long history of involvement with Great Britain. The demand has continued for IT workers, and IT professionals in India with a respected foreign degree will get the jobs as managers of these companies. The salaries, will relatively low by US or European standards are still quite good compared to the average Indian, although real estate prices have apparently been climbing steadily. So the more IT jobs that go to Indian, the more IT jobs will follow (as long as the output is decent quality and the wages remain relatively low), and the more demand for degrees in Computer Science, Information Systems, MIS, etc. Also expect to see lots of Indian MBA students as the Indian IT conglomerates seek out IT pros with business credentials that allow them to communicate efficiently with their American customers.

3

I lived in India last year and have a number of friends and colleagues there, and I definitely agree with you that India is very computer-intensive. I’m not sure, though, that it’s really disproportional to their percentage of global population. Remember that India has about one-sixth of the total number of people in the world! (As does China.)

Add to that the fact that, although the majority of Indians are very poor, that still leaves an Indian middle and upper class greater than the population of France. And that their universities have stressed math and engineering education for quite a while. And that a large proportion of the middle and upper classes speak English, a holdover from their former British colonial status. And that the middle-class work culture is very entrepreneurial, especially since economic and trade liberalization began around 1990. And that the price of labor and the cost of living in India, except among the wealthiest, are still much lower than in the developed world.

Put it all together and you get a massive number of intelligent, educated, technically minded, English-literate people with close ties to the English-speaking world, who are generally much cheaper to employ than their Western counterparts. It’s no surprise that there are a lot of them in the Western high-tech world.

If you want more specific causes, like the research and curricular programmes of the Indian Institutes of Technology and the “Silicon Valley development” of Chennai and Bangalore, you’ll have to wait for somebody better informed about the details of Indian IT. But that IMO is the big picture.

4

It is also my understanding from a friend with ties to that industry that turn-over of employees in Indian companies is many times lowers (3-5%) versus here in the states where there is so much job shopping that turn-over rates are well above 50%…that’s a lot of training dollars to be saved by outsourcing to India.

Those numbers are from memory, and from a conversation, so take them with a grain of salt.

5

I am skirting the border of Stereorype, here, folks, so please forgive me if I have small navigational errors and stray a bit along the way.

I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering, am a white French Canadian, and married an Indo-Canadian Lady. (Our son is going to have a rather heavy cultural background: cabane-a-suc *and * curry :slight_smile: )

So here are my own personal thoughts, opinions and observations: I think the quantitative sciences, in high-school and university, imho, require the most “tough slogging” and *constant * hard-work, because all that math stuff is not so much absorbing information as learning a “skill”, like learning a martial art or a musical instrument. You just gotta practice and practice, and last-minute cramming doesn’t help as much (although God knows, I tried it often enough).

So how hard you worked, and how consistently you worked, was a big factor in determining success. From what I know now of the Indian cultural attitudes towards education, studying, and work, I find that these kids have hard work drilled into them from a very young age. There seems to be an attitude common in Indian parents that I could paraphrase as: "don’t give me that PC nonsense about self-estime, calculators and creative thinking, you are going to memorise your multiplication table untill you can recite it in your sleep…" Indian parents seem to be extremely involved in their children’s education, and the academic work ethic is very high.

I suspect, but have less direct personal knowledge to support it, that the same attitudes are common in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures.

If one were to accept the hypothesis that there is a spectrum of “math-hardness” denoting the extent and level sophistication of the math involved in undergraduate (bachelor’s) degrees in various engineering diciplines, roughly along the following gradient:

Chemical eng. → Lowest
Civil Eng
Mech Eng
Computer Eng
Electrical & Electronic Eng → highest

then I can say that accoding to my observation at the time of my undergrad (87-91) the south-asian and asiatic proportion of students in each dicipline was directly proportional to the dicipline’s position on the above spectrum.

I can also personally attest that the level of math required in the Mech eng degree was just about the extend of my ability, by the grace of God and the bell-curve, and that the math involved in Elect. Eng was beyond me. (Complex variables and Maxwell’s equations come to mind :o )

So bottom line, I suspect that it’s the work-ethic surrounding studying particular to Indian and Asian cultures that make these kids so successful in these diciplines.

6

In addition to what others have posted. I have asked my Indian students this, as we have a large number of Indians who study Engineering and IT, as oposed to other degrees. They say that status wise, engineering is pretty much at the top and even comes before medicine. Hence parents push children to study these subjects and they have more say in their children’s life, than perhaps western parents do. I have Indian students who will have arranged marriages.

7

One of my co-workers is from India. One day at lunch we asked him why he came here to study (he graduated last winter with a master’s degree in CS). He said that schools over in india are very good until you get to the upper level. Engineering and CS programs in India are not as good as the US, which is why he chose to come here.

Before anyone flames me for the quality of Indian schools, I have absolutely no knowledge or opinion on the subject, just passing on what he said.

8

If thet’s the case why aren’t we seeing any spectacular hardware items or software originating out of India?

9

I think the reason for going overseas for degrees is that an overseas qualification has more prestige and therefore allows greater job opportunity.

10

astro: If thet’s the case why aren’t we seeing any spectacular hardware items or software originating out of India?

I think we soon will, if we aren’t already. It’s only recently that major firms like IBM have set up cutting-edge research centers in India.

And what about the primes test discovered in 2002 by the three Indian students at IIT Kanpur? It’s not hardware or software, but it was arguably a pretty significant development in IT.

11

Wow! Pretty much spot on! I actually don’t have anything to add here! I’ll follow this thread though, so if anyone has any questions, ask away…

12

This is a bit of a non-sequitur. My family is middle-class, educated and about half of them have found their own spouses. Amongst those who had arranged marriages, those I know personally all chose that option – not because of the “say” that their parents have in their lives. And “arranged marriage” for educated, cosmopolitan Indians often amounts to little more than an introduction through relatives. The decisions are left up to the individuals.

13

Most Indians don’t speak English at all. Educated Indians usually have some degree of facility with English.

14

Sorry, second hand data, but the Indians I worked with overseas (I’ve not personally been to India, although I came this close :: holds finger and thumb about a cm apart :: to taking a 3 year assignment there) all told me that all Indians speak English. I assumed this was a bit of hyperbole on their point, the assumption being all University educated Indians speak English. Often heavily accented, but well spoken nonetheless.

15

Hermitian, I think you’re looking at too small a sample when you say that it’s only in computer science that there are a lot of Indian grad students. I remember from my grad school that there were a lot in math also. I suspect that there a lot of Indian grad students in many American science and engineering departments, but just by luck your university happens to have most of them in computer science. Perhaps your university has a particularly good reputation in computer science.

There are several reasons why a lot of Indian grad students come to the U.S. for grad school, particularly in science and engineering.

  1. India is a big country, so even if the grad students coming to the U.S. for their education were evenly divided among the people of the world there would be a fair amount.

  2. You should get out of your head the notion that all Indians are poor. Yes, it’s still a third-world country with a lot of poor people, but there’s a huge middle class.

  3. While Indian education may be as good as (if not better than) American education at primary through college levels, the grad schools here are better than in India. The top students in many countries around the world go to grad school in the U.S. (and to a lesser extent in the U.K., France, and Germany).

  4. Most educated Indians speak English. Going to grad school in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, etc. is a more obvious choice than going to grad school in France or Germany.

  5. As others have pointed out, science and engineering are more prestigious in India than law or medicine.

16

Didn’t mean to imply that all Indians have arranged marriages (in the modern sense of the word) or that all Indians have parents tell them what to study. I have plenty of Indian students who do as they wish in both areas, just on average, Indian students have stronger parental influence than Western students. I was using the term ‘arranged marriage’ as you described it - the Japanese modern arranged marriage is exactly the same and I shouldn’t have assumed that everyone thinks of arranged marriages as this.

17

Not entirely true. Even among educated, cosmopolitan Indians, for some communities (Jains, Marwaris and Sindhis, esp.), the final say still rests with the parents and grandparents of the individuals getting married - especially true among the very wealthy. Marriages will only be allowed within the community, and inter-community weddings are rare. While kids will not normally be forced into marrying someone they don’t want to, the opposite does not necessarily happen either. Once the individual reaches a marriageable age, as defined by the community, he or she is is ‘put on the market’, irrespective of whether or not the individual is ready to get married.

In rural India - especially in the northern states - the situation worsens, even among the educated. The individual getting married is rarely, if ever, given a choice. Sons are educated mainly because it gets them a larger dowry - engineers and doctors are sought after more than other professions.

18

I dont think its anything particular to Indians per se, as it is to the environment India is in right now. As one poster pointed out, trade has liberalized; this, combined with a need for infrastructure, pretty much answers your question: there are so many Indians studying the engineering sciences because there is a need. Computer science is just the reflection of the type of infrastructure a modern nation needs.

In the 60s and 70s there were tons of Japanese learning ME and EE, in the 80s S. Koreans and now many Chinese and Indians are doing the same. Its got nothing to do with a particular culture in the long run, so much as it does with the loosening of trade barriers and the material needs of the particular country.

As an aside, get used to it. If youre going to be working in the IT industry, youre going to be working with a lot of Indians, as well as Russians (maybe I should say people from the former USSR; I am lumping Georgians, Ukranians etc all unfairly under the Russian label). Some people seem to have a problem with it, but myself I consider Indians, Russians and Mexicans my favorite immigrants and the US can do nothing but benefit from all of them.

19

I’m on a CS programme at a British university: it’s not just Indians here, there’s a large percentage of students from all of Asia, Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians etc.

20

+MDI writes:

> I’m on a CS programme at a British university: it’s not just Indians here, there’s
> a large percentage of students from all of Asia, Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians
> etc.

I suspect that the “Indians” that the OP describes as being in his university’s computer science department are actually a mixture of Indians, Pakastanis, etc., since he presumably didn’t go around asking people their nationality but just relied on looks. Most Americans make only two distinctions between most of the people of Asia when going strictly by looks. There are “Indians,” who are actually from any of the countries of South Asia. In looks this group merges gradually with the peoples of Central Asia and the Middle East (in the eyes of a superficial American), so an American might be throwing some Middle Easterners into the people they’re counting for this informal census. (I’m not saying that Hermitian did this. I’m saying that some Americans would.) Then there are the people that an American would call “Asians,” who could come from any of the countries of East Asia. These people would not be lumped in with the group called “Indians” by an American, even in a superficial survey. Note that in the U.K. these terms are switched. In the U.K. it’s assumed that the term “Asian” means someone from South Asia, while the people of East Asia are distinguished by being called “East Asians” or some such.