Friday 23 September 2016

The Myth of the Indian IT Supremacy

Indians are not techy at all.

They suck at it. I am working in tech for closer to 2 years now and all I see is few guys are really into it and the rest..not so much. In fact the reason we have a huge population in IT appears to be an outcome of the Indian culture of anxiety, shyness and shame. The country seems to be doing well in tech or the IT field only because a lot of non-tech techies are riding on the backs of the few tech techies.

The Anxiety Connection


The education systems has no focus on the soft skills of the child, and doesn’t focus on reading skills and by extension English either. Neither are students given any self-study assignments where they can apply themselves and come up with any output. It’s literally another brick in the wall all the way here.

The result is at the crossroads of choosing a career somewhere when most Indians are 16-17, the natural inclination is towards stuff where “you sit and work silently” without having to express yourself or "make a fool of yourself" (as their upbringing has thought them) in any form or way. 

Add to this a huge number of vernacular language students who by the time they hit adulthood have really high amounts of anxiety about using English, and shame for not being good at it. When these apply for jobs you have to ask yourself whether the application is for JAVA programming or MTV roadies.

The prolonged abstaining from the English language takes away the self-confidence of most by early adulthood when they find themselves unable to respond in fluent english to their NRI relatives on the phone and realize what soft skills mean and then understandably sales/marketing etc. seem like a bad idea. Staring at a computer AND getting paid for it? Not so much, multiply this by the societal collective thought pattern of that instant and media's reports about INFOSYS and TCS and it looks like damn IT pays well too, boom.

Then on the job


We covered how education isn’t really big on reading. By the time the IT boys have turned men(seniors), reading blogs and documentation is a nuisance to them at best and a waste of time otherwise. In fact most of them make fun of you for not already knowing what you are now trying to learn by reading about it(if this doesn't make sense now, wait till it happens to you, you'll know then).

The amount of agony someone like me must go through because my cybersecurity team members around me don’t really believe in documentation, blogs or googling for the most part. When your backs are against the wall(or you have ransomware on your network), even the usually blind do a lil reading of google… or not even then.

These pseudo techies first call the managed services provider(MSP)/consultants to fix even the slightest problem on their security gear, they think of them(MSPs) as experts but remember, think back to the time when everyone was choosing a career, the managed services techies are from that lot too, and they too decided sales wasn’t all that cracked up, the rest is history. 

These MSP guys then open support tickets with the OEM TAC the Symantecs, Ciscos, Intels. I think of this as the circle closing, we’re back to western civilization for the answers, HAHA.

Indians are as good at tech as the western tech support they rely on.

And the conversation they have the with european fella from the TAC is total fucking cringeworthy. Reeks of fear, anxiety, shame and probably slight regret of not knowing to frame proper english sentences. 

I am not a snob about English, I am proud of modi’s broken “may the phorce bee bith you”, that guy’s only got to sound nice and make people like him when he’s out and most already do, because a good 70% of people on the planet are all feels anyway, so an old man from a poor third-world country talking about unity, peace, progress, well everybody loves that, fuck his English language skills. 

More so when he visits America, the Americans feel so guilty about their wealth, power and status in the world they go extra hard at sucking a poor country's PM's dick with multiple standing ovations for throwing age old platitudes at them for hours.

But you my friends and those I spend 10 hours/day with, you got to sit and read Symantec’s documentation and be able to explain the issue to them and to stack-exchange when the time comes. Nobody loves you by default like they love modi, you see. You got to bring fucking value to the table and clear, concise communication is the start of it.

A note about the TAC calls, a few weeks back I witnessed my CISO trying to browbeat a TAC guy into providing immediate virus definitions and even threatened to speak to their CEO. It doesn’t stop there, pretty close to that are my senior colleagues having a conversation about how powerful the W97M.Downloader virus was to be able to pass through the email gateway and antivirus, totally absolving themselves all responsibility about running their network much like the indian government runs low income localities in India’s cities.

Ransomware compromised some of our systems and it was only because our security sucked. Period. Plain and simple.

The Loyalty and Age Connection


Eli the Computer Guy from YouTube and many others always remind us how success in the IT field is seldom related to the technical talents one possesses. Just like getting laid has so less to do with looks? I digress. Most senior IT personnel in India, positions like CISO, IT-Head etc. go to those who have been around for a looongg time with the company.

Indians have this notion of "age and experience matters" in all aspects of life, I have covered that in automatic respect before. The basic belief is that with age comes some sort of magical wisdom about life(and probably business and technology in this case) which no matter how smart/brilliant/passionate a younger person simply lacks and cannot attain.

And hence never given a chance to prove himself, that should answer why our politicians are mostly old men who seem like one good masturbation session away from their fucking grave. 

These old men have egos bigger and harder than their cocks too at their stage in life, any move or suggestion by a younger person to do things in a better way is an immediate threat to their livelihood and a question on their credibility of "years of experience". This is where they career block you harder than the worst cock blocking fat chicks in the nightclubs. 

And we wonder why every young guy who moves to US for his masters does so well in life. This is where most Indians bring out the "USA owes everything to Indians" or "Indians are so smart" card.. .#FML.

All this is deeply intertwined with the Hinduism philosophy and religion which is dominant in India, which is a good 80% of the population. You always see grown Indian men(mostly belonging to hindu families) completely ruin their life by making huge decisions like marriage, finance and career as per their elders, and this mostly under emotional pressure and a lot of times threats of violence.

But in a world where a (once?) technology star like Yahoo gets pwned to the tune of 500 million accounts, Indian businesses must really ask themselves if a sixty year old once upon a time MBA grad can better protect their network than a 30 year old CISSP holder just by the virtue of being old and wise.

I am seeing one situation where the IT-Head was hired later, his sal is in the 5lacs/pm range and all and he has no fucking IT qualifications at all, what he probably has though is some business acumen about the industry which I bet a few videos and certifications cover already, I don’t get it why he still has that job. 

The culture of mediocrity, nepotism is not just in the Indian government, it's in the Indian psyche.