February 18, 2007

Cyber Coolies

Sometime back, during a brain storming session in my company, one of my colleagues quipped that Indians are mere cyber coolies, which I felt is more or less true. Long back when I joined the IT industry I used to be proud to say that I'm a software Engineer. I guess I no longer have that kinda feeling.

This TOI article has summarized, quite well, the myth called the Indian programmer.

Two interesting paragraphs are
  1. Last year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10 students out of the 574 who passed out.
  2. A software engineer sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don't know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep climbing. They don't know that they can eventually fly. He cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life.

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