>>I have heard that years ago it was prestigious to work for the likes of Infosys
It is, even now. Walk in to any engineering college, and ask where most people want to work. Another dark untold truth of Engineering in India is, Electronics/Electrical branches have a lot better quality students, than CSE/InfoScience. Sometimes it's like night-day. This is because a degree in EE/ECE gives you a diverse range of career options once you pass out. So in the ascending order of ranks in entrance exams, first EE/ECE seats are full. In many cases there are situations where EE/ECE candidates even in tier 2/3 colleges are better than CS students in top colleges.
Outsourcing companies discovered this long back. There is no logic in paying 5x market salaries to CS candidates, when you get 2x better candidates at 1/5th the price.
Secondly, Indian product companies aren't exactly engineering intensive companies. If you get a job in something like FB or Google straight out of college, you are good. For any body else who has to go into Indian product companies, you work on ancient dinosaur era tech. When compared to this, many a times in outsourcing firms you are likely to find better quality of work. This happens all the time. Many times FAANG companies hire these CS top college people, and make them work as sysadmins/SDETs. While some EE/ECE whom they look down upon is working in a code intensive project in a outsourcing firm.
So as a safe bet, playing your cards well. And keeping a good outlook for a large section of crowd, outsourcing companies still work well. Also look at this, if you are optimizing for money straight out of college, and not skills. Then within a decade you will be beaten by those whom you look down upon.
Of course none of this applies if you get into management.
i'd say most managers from india are pretty worthless if i talk from a purely experience based domain knowledge perspective, it's four years of college education they don't pay attention to followed by 2 years of a job they don't pay attention to and then ka-ching MBA PROGRAM followed by doing whatever the company that hires them wants them to do.
lots of wasted education and experience is basically pointless.
Please extend it to the world: most managers are pretty worthless or worse, a damage. Managerial culture is a damage to the entire society.
When it spread we cease to innovate, to really research, we only popularize and improve (a bit) per-existing techs being unable to really evolve them and create anything new. And the more we advance the worse situation became.
We start to have car's that exhibit astonishing absurd issue like top-line Audi's that lock their driver inside due to an unknown fault (banal things like classic internal door little rod, mechanically connected to the lock mechanism are not there anymore in many models or became a different beast), normally always-working machines that start to exhibit random behaviors and no one can really understand why, not counting big projects that nearly ALWAYS fails from fighter jets to ships to space industry project.
Education itself in terms of formal diplomas became meaningless: personally I "discovered" ancient books (lecture notes) that contains more information, more clearly explained and open a world of possible "evolution paths" that far bigger and expensive modern textbook fail completely to provide only at a fraction.
>>i'd say most managers from india are pretty worthless
Bureaucracy is one of the most desired jobs in India. People spend their prime years in 20s, in coaching institutes to crack UPSC- India's equivalent of entrance exams for government civil services. The reason is you get infinite scope to take bribes once you are placed. Like imagine having a blank cheque all life. On top of it you get premium accommodation, cars, drivers, and an army of servants.
MBA, and managerial jobs are the remainder population's way of enjoying the above perks. And they resemble the same levels of inefficiency, waste and corruption.
I can bet nothing will change in India, even decades from now. Once you create such incentives at a social level, people just follow it for generations.
Before software, there was similar craze for Bank manager jobs and CA's. And for the same reasons. You do little to no work, and pretty much splurge in luxury.
Strongly dispute this ECE vs CS characterization. CS is preferred over ECE in India. Source: ECE graduate from India. There is some wierd kind of projection going on with parent post.
My point is about outsourcing firms. Service companies prefer EE/ECE above CS. Of course product companies prefer CS candidates, and often pay well too.
Albeit a good chunk of CS people get into service companies too.
When I was a Placement Coordinator at my college, a representative from TCS told me that a good thing about non-CS candidates is that you don't have to make them "unlearn" things.
It is, even now. Walk in to any engineering college, and ask where most people want to work. Another dark untold truth of Engineering in India is, Electronics/Electrical branches have a lot better quality students, than CSE/InfoScience. Sometimes it's like night-day. This is because a degree in EE/ECE gives you a diverse range of career options once you pass out. So in the ascending order of ranks in entrance exams, first EE/ECE seats are full. In many cases there are situations where EE/ECE candidates even in tier 2/3 colleges are better than CS students in top colleges.
Outsourcing companies discovered this long back. There is no logic in paying 5x market salaries to CS candidates, when you get 2x better candidates at 1/5th the price.
Secondly, Indian product companies aren't exactly engineering intensive companies. If you get a job in something like FB or Google straight out of college, you are good. For any body else who has to go into Indian product companies, you work on ancient dinosaur era tech. When compared to this, many a times in outsourcing firms you are likely to find better quality of work. This happens all the time. Many times FAANG companies hire these CS top college people, and make them work as sysadmins/SDETs. While some EE/ECE whom they look down upon is working in a code intensive project in a outsourcing firm.
So as a safe bet, playing your cards well. And keeping a good outlook for a large section of crowd, outsourcing companies still work well. Also look at this, if you are optimizing for money straight out of college, and not skills. Then within a decade you will be beaten by those whom you look down upon.
Of course none of this applies if you get into management.