JOB culture in India

I find an interesting comment while reading this post on Texas start-up blog.This comment not only reflect poor "job " oriented attitude of Indina graduates but also tells us how it affects entrepreneurial ecosystem of India.

Comment goes like this:


" I started a small outsourced projects development business in early 2005 but it got burst after 9 months of operation because it’s really hard to find developers who code in open source .. if you make a visit to Tata, Infosys, Wipro and others you’ll find that these giants work on Microsoft, IBM based product lines .. not open source products. Most of the developers working in these companies don’t even know what PHP is .. RubyonRails (such a hype) but if you catch someone from infosys and ask them what it is .. ummm .. “No idea”.

The basic job culture in India is just to get a job after graduation and work for some big company. Entrepreneurship doesn’t exist in IT here (I don’t deny that only people who can’t get a damn good job in IT giants OR are totally focused on their own ideas and stuff .. they start their own small business). My parents have been always bullying me to get a job .. I am 27+ and successfully provide independent consulting (one man show and earning good living) but still in my parents eyes I am not settled because I don’t work for some big IT giant.

Even if you see Silicon Valley in CA you’ll see thousands of technopreneur there (small to big) .. in India you see only big .. and these big ones have their backbone in Silicon Valley, CA. Only giants such as Infosys, Tata, Wipro others have their own standing.

Anyways, let’s come back to topic .. a lot of businesses fail in India because of

1. Power cuts (don’t even know how long electricity will be off for)

2. Lack of good locations to setup a business (the one that exist are either too expensive to rent a space OR rent a space in local market which is always noisy and doesn’t even give a feel that you work something different than the local grocers).

3. Lack of people resources (small company can’t afford to pay like giants .. thus parents don’t allow their kids to work for smaller companies).

4. There is a stupid mentality that smaller companies working on open source products are just bunch of idiots trying to run them. Even today morning I had a talk with my dad .. and he was just pushing on one point that smaller companies never tend to exist in the market.

"

Well I already discussed location issue in my previous posts.What I find most worrying is the "job attitude" of Indian graduates.Its not very difficult to understand why they make such decisions..Curriculum are outdated and discourage creativity and initiative leading to a system dependent graduate, college and faculty hardly provide career counselling and are more focus on improving " placement record" of college, risk averse parents put pressure to take a job in MNC no matter what is the quality of that job is,peers joining MNC create an very unmotivating environment for a graduate to join start-up.

But I guess they miss the bigger picture.They forget that we are living in different times compare to our parents and siblings.With world getting smaller and smaller everyday, India growing at 9 % growth rate,and reforms and opening of other sector give unique and unparalleled opportunity for this generation graduates.This is time to focus on careers rather then looking for jobs.